Over the last 50 years, the city of Venice has observed a significant increase in the frequency of flooding, In November of 1966, one of such events flooded the city for a period of 15 hours with a record tidal level of nearly 2 m. Since then, numerous engineering solutions have been proposed, including the use of movable gates located at the three Lagoon inlets. A key element in the prediction of performance is the estimation of settlements of the foundation system. The soils of the Venice Lagoon are characterized by very erratic depositional patterns of silty clays resulting in an extremely heterogeneous stratigraphy with discontinuous layering. On the other hand, the mineralogical composition of these soils is quite uniform. Since these soils are characterized by varying contents of coarse and fine-grained particles, it is possible to separate the influence of mineralogy from that of grain size and examine what factors affect the transition from one material type to another. The compressibility of these natural silty clayey soils appears to be described by a single set of constitutive laws that accounts for the relative fraction of granular to cohesive material and follows the same framework proposed for cohesionless soils. The proposed model introduces a simple way of describing the compression of these soils and thus account for the variability in the strati-graphic units.
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