Venice, Italy – The director nods, lifts her arms and the choir begins to sing.

At first, the only sounds are vowels. Two groups of singers, alternating, sing “oooh” and “eeeh” in a low-pitched, call-and-response rhythm. The director, an emphatic, auburn-haired woman named Giuseppina Casarin, eggs them on, moving her arms in wide circles, and they sing louder and louder. They start to sway, and their voices become brawny with confidence.

Quietly, a young Black man, Prince Damilare Alakija, the soloist, steps forward, humming. He is dressed in a faux Dolce and Gabbana T-shirt and gold chains. “You’ll be doing it right,” he begins to croon over and over. Responding to the building energy from the rest of the group, he begins to sing louder until his voice is raspy, and then he tails off, vocalising with “hey-y-ehs” and taking steps back until he returns to stand in the semicircle formed by the group.

The choir, called “Voci dal Mondo” (Voices of the World), has brought their rehearsal outside on a warm summer evening from a nondescript classroom inside a community centre to an adjoining plaza where locals passing by stop to listen.

They are in a neighbourhood of mainland Venice called Via Piave in Mestre, whose residents primarily belong to immigrant communities – Bangladeshi, West African and Chinese – as well as Venetian families who are part of an exodus from the historic island city, fleeing high rents and its Disneyfication in the service of tourists. Although Venice typically refers to the island city checkered with canals and ornate palaces, its metropolitan area includes dozens of other islands dotting the lagoon and a stretch of mainland Italy that includes the borough of Mestre and an industrial zone called Marghera, both of which are large enough to be their own cities. Mestre was largely built in the post-World War II economic boom and filled with modern apartment blocks on tree-lined streets to house industrial workers.

The steady drip of people leaving the island became a stream in the 1950s as families and young couples became more likely to build a life outside the medieval labyrinth, trading enchantment for affordability far from the crowds of tourists.

In Via Piave, bubble tea stores, Chinese restaurants and Indian eateries mix with barbers, sari shops and laundromats.

Many residents catch the bus each morning and travel 10 minutes along a long bridge that spans part of the lagoon to power the tourism economy in the city or work in nearby Marghera, building cruise ships in an enormous shipyard. The choir members all live in this neighbourhood, except for a woman who commutes from the city and a few others who travel from nearby towns. When it began more than 15 years ago, the choir was composed of 10 people and has since grown to 40 members from all over the world who meet once a week to rehearse.

Giuseppina, who is in her late 60s, has led multiple choirs across the region and is well-known for her teaching and work promoting Venetian singing traditions. She was first approached by the city’s social services group to create a choir that would specifically bring together Italians and foreigners to help promote integration and combat racism.

Mestre was changing demographically, and some locals, Giuseppina says, were struggling to accept the new landscape as storefronts, bars and restaurants began to change.

The population of immigrants in the Venice region has steadily grown, and according to official figures, non-Italians make up more than 15 percent, or 42,000 people, in a population of more than 250,000. This figure doesn’t include refugees or undocumented migrants. This boom is most apparent in mainland areas such as Mestre, where the immigrant population has increased tenfold in the past 20 years.

The choir started at a time when the government under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was cracking down on undocumented immigration, including declaring a state of emergency in 2011 when thousands of people from North Africa arrived on the tiny island of Lampedusa, stoking anti-immigrant sentiment. The rise of right-wing political parties led by current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her deputy, Matteo Salvini, has further entrenched anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric and expanded policies of deterrence.

The choir’s composition reflects the changing patterns in immigration. Whereas a decade ago the recently arrived immigrants in the chorus were women from Balkan countries, such as Moldova and Albania, now the newcomers are men from Tunisia, Nigeria and Mali who crossed the Mediterranean by boat. The choir is divided almost evenly between immigrants and locals. There is a large portion of middle-aged and older Venetian women, and most of the choir is female. The youngest singer is 18 and the oldest is in her 80s.

On this warm evening in June 2022, the choir is singing something called battipali, a traditional work song as old as the city of Venice itself, first developed to coordinate the labour of workers as they built the city’s foundations beginning in the fifth century.

For Giuseppina, the song serves multiple functions. As a work song, it is structured to help people move in sync and in that way connects people. But it also becomes a vehicle for self-expression because the songs are traditionally improvised. Over the monosyllabic chants of the workers, the work leader would spin stories about the travails of the Venetian Republic or its enemy throughout the Middle Ages, the Ottoman Turks, to entertain and motivate the group. A handful of these lyrics were preserved by ethnomusicologists and academics beginning in the 1900s, which is what Giuseppina has drawn from. Reincorporating the element of improvisation helps the songs live in the present. “Music lives inside you,” she explains. “You are brought within the story of the song.”

In this way, Prince brings his story to the choir. When he improvises and sings, “You’ll be doing it right,” he is referring to his desire for a “good life” in Venice. He pursues this by making time for his music and showing up for choir practice although it can require up to an hour commute and he has to leave early to go to work. Despite racist intimidation, bullying and persistent nagging comments he says he experiences from employers and police officers at the visa office, he just tries to keep his head down. He says they just want him to give up, to stop seeking legal status and a permanent work contract but he won’t. “Life is a gift, so make good of it,” he says.

The city of Venice began as water.

A dense marshland, the largest wetland in the Mediterranean, was dotted with grassy islands. Finding them a haven from the “barbarian invasions” by various tribes from mainland Europe, such as the Visigoths and the Huns, that destabilised and eventually defeated the Roman Empire, fishermen and farmers began to settle these islands about 400 AD. They came from nearby cities and eventually created their own government separate from the popes, emperors and kings vying for control of the mainland. The noble class was born out of merchants who became wealthy through trade with the Mamluks, Ottomans and Persians and leveraged the city’s strategic position in the Mediterranean.

As their population grew, so did their need for dry land. To build their city, they adapted a common Palaeolithic technique used to build stilt houses on an enormous scale: They created a foundation from millions of wooden poles stacked vertically and packed tightly together. The wood, felled from mainland forests, would be pounded by workers into the mud and sand of the silty marsh. The work was exhausting, done by groups of men for many hours a day, no matter the weather, according to geologist and historian Fulvio Baraldi. The trees – which could be oak, elm, beech, pine, larch or alder – needed to be stripped and their ends sharpened. Then these 3-, 3.7- or 4.3-metre (10-, 12- or 14ft) poles were pounded into the marsh using a handheld bat until they reached the most solid layer of compact clay called “caranto”. And as these groups of men worked, they sang.

The ends of the Rialto Bridge, which was built entirely out of Istrian stone and marble, rest on about 12,000 alder trunks while the church of Santa Maria della Salute lies atop more than a million poles.

The work would have likely been done by people from the lowest classes of society – and eventually, given the Venetian Republic’s penchant for slavery – enslaved people.

In Venice, people were captured and enslaved through trade and war from Eastern Europe (the term slaves comes from Slavs), Crimea and eventually, although to a lesser degree, parts of Africa through the trans-Saharan trade. The city’s growth and astounding wealth, which earned it a reputation as the birthplace of capitalism, was largely fuelled by the Venetian slave trade. This trade began to grow in the 13th and 14th centuries and was eventually surpassed by that of the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century when the Venetian Republic started losing its monopoly on trade routes and began its steady decline.

On the vowel sound “oooh”, two workers raised the bat together, and on the “eeeh”, the tool was brought down, creating a simple rhythm that synchronised a large group. Battipali comes from “battere”, Italian for “to hit”, and pali, or “poles”. The land mass of Venice had quadrupled by 1400 as islands were expanded and parts of the lagoon filled in to ultimately create a city of bridges and palaces. “At one point, the lagoon must have echoed with these hymns,” one Venetian writer remarked in 1844.

The work leader would begin his song as a kind of yell.

“Bandiera bianca”, meaning “white flag”, a section of the choir chants, and then “segno di pace”, or “sign of peace”. The “eeeh” and “oooh” continues. “Bandiera rossa” (“red flag”), “segno di sangue” (“sign of blood”), “bandiera nera” (“black flag”), “segno di morte” (“sign of death”).

These verses have been traced to the 15th century when the republic was waging wars against the Ottoman Turks, fighting in the Crusades and embarking on constant expeditions to protect and expand its empire. Giuseppina has chosen this version of the song on purpose, the lyrics evoking fear and hope, which resonates with a choir formed in large part due to displacement and dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean in search of a better life.

This version was also recorded by American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax on his visit to Venice in 1954, likely during the final years they were being sung in situ. Sophisticated machines were being developed, ultimately paving the way for the hydraulic pile driver currently in use to replace wooden poles either in the lagoon or under foundations.

Giuseppina has been studying music for about 50 years, focusing specifically on Venetian songs passed down through oral tradition and with “layers of beauty and complexity”. Most, however, have already been lost to time.

“They’re being submerged,” she says, intentionally evoking the rising sea levels that threaten the sinking city. The folk songs have been preserved more in the historic city than on the mainland – much like the dialect, architecture and traditions, such as glass-making, rowing and lace-weaving – because of the city’s geographic isolation.

Giuseppina was born in 1958 in a town on the mainland close to Venice.

She remembers singing nursery rhymes when she was little with her mother and then with her friends when she was an adolescent. “We would sit together, laugh and sing,” she says. “It was our way of being.”

But the awareness that music “could become her whole world”, as she puts it, came later.

In the 1970s, when she was 18, she worked as a secretary in a factory. While helping her town organise its annual carnival, she met one of the leaders of a vibrant folk revival scene, singer-songwriter Gualtiero Bertelli, and then eventually singer Luisa Ronchini, who lived in Venice. They would become her mentors. Musicians and composers, much like ethnomusicologists, would go around with equipment to record the city’s work and folk songs, preserving culture they knew was at risk of disappearing and then adapting it in their own music at a time of protests.

The 1970s saw a continuation of the political momentum that was sparked in 1968 as students, feminists and workers held marches and sit-ins to protest for better pay, denounce religious conservatism by pushing for abortion and divorce rights, and advocate for affordable housing. Giuseppina started taking the train with her friends to Venice to participate.

“When you were together in a group, you would sing,” she explains. They would sing as soon as they gathered at the train station, during the short ride to the island and then as protesters filled piazzas and the narrow medieval streets, which were still occupied by artisans and taverns. “It was a way for me to enter into the life of the city, for the first time, to learn about its history as well as its problems,” she says.

Meanwhile, Giuseppina joined the folk revival scene, practising and performing with Bertelli and Ronchini, the biggest names at the time. They were reinterpreting musica popolare, or traditional folk songs, to amplify the struggles of workers occupying factories to demand better working conditions or the plight of bead-stringers, the women threading glass beads to sell. The work song “semo tutte impiraresse,” or “we are all bead-stringers,” was collected by Ronchini from the women. “We work all day like machines,” the women would sing, “for just enough coins to buy food.”

Giuseppina identified the most with the oldest songs, she says. “I let myself go. I lose myself in these songs,” she says. “These are songs of workers and farmers. I hear the voice of my mother and aunts.” She came from a working-class background. Her father was a farmer and then a hospital worker while her mother worked as a cleaner. Protest songs brought her closer to her roots, she felt, and also taught her about the power in collective expression.

In creating the choir, Giuseppina drew from this music. For her, these songs are powerful because they are about giving marginalised people a voice.

“We are drawing from this deep well of oral tradition that tells the stories of men and women who, despite not being trained artists, had an incredible capacity to narrate their own experience.”

In the choir, everyone has a voice that is unique and beautiful, she says. “The work is to let the beauty express itself along with an awareness of the context.”

Giuseppina has blue hawk eyes she uses to scan the group, reprimanding choir members who aren’t paying attention. She pumps her arms like wings to tell the choir to gather energy, lowers her hands and body to get them to quiet down.

She and Prince have an unspoken bond. They met when he joined the choir eight years ago, and she has seen him grow in confidence although she chides him for still not speaking Italian. He is quiet while she can be domineering. He listens carefully, offers feedback to the group and is never one of the troublemakers she has to keep her eye on who talk during rehearsal or fail to follow her instructions

“Prince is a true artist,” Giuseppina explains during a car ride in March to a new rehearsal space in the industrial district.

“He is shy, but when he speaks, he says things that are very personal,” she says. “I would like him to find inner peace. I want his happiness.”

Prince, also known by his recording name Dellyswagz, heard about the choir through a friend who was a member when he first moved to Venice in 2017. He was a singer in Nigeria, and his friend told him it was a good community, that they could help him get settled. When he first arrived, they gave him clothes, helped him find work and provided him with legal assistance to begin the process of getting a visa.

He is now 38, soft-spoken, but when he sings, he sways with feeling, and belting the lyrics, his voice strains and nearly breaks. He dresses in blue-tinted sunglasses, a black leather newsboy cap and a full denim outfit. “Like a king,” he says, smiling.

Shortly after he was born, his parents split up, and his primary caregiver was his mother’s father, who he was very close to. When his grandfather died in 2011, Prince no longer had ties to the Lagos suburb where he grew up and in 2015 decided to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean in search of a better life.

“Growing up a boy, your mom have to really pray a lot for you,” he explains. “Either you become a thug or a mafia.”

He lives in a shared apartment in Padua, 40km (25 miles) outside Venice, where he moved after losing his job in a factory and being evicted because he didn’t have his papers yet. His bedroom doubles as his recording studio, where on a cluttered desk with a large monitor, he is recording and producing Afrobeats songs for his first album.

In Nigeria, he was a professional dance teacher, by most accounts successful, yet he felt there was no future there. Friends and family had already left, including his father, who lived in the United Kingdom, yet he didn’t consider leaving until his uncle, who was living in Austria, called and suggested he make the trip with his uncle’s wife and three cousins. Prince gave away his speakers, clothes and sneakers to his students. Along with his family, he saved up thousands of dollars. He brought nothing with him and told his parents he’d already made up his mind.

“The journey was deadly,” he says with a serious expression. “My story comes with a lot of pain and loss.”

The first three weeks were spent on a large open-backed truck packed with dozens of people. They drove across the Sahara and slept on the sand each night. Some had to drink their own urine, he recounts, because they hadn’t brought enough water, and along the way, he saw bodies left in the sand. “I can’t count how many we buried,” he says without emotion, referring to the people who died on the journey. “We used sand to cover them up. There’s no details of a name or family to call.”

From Libya, he and his family members tried to cross the Mediterranean by boat eight times. The entire journey to Italy took him two years. Once, they were kidnapped by pirates when they were on a boat and released two months later after paying a ransom. Another time, he was held in a Libyan prison for four months. At one point, they ran out of money, and he worked as a security guard for seven months in a compound holding refugees and migrants.

Then, in October 2016, he and his family members tried to cross the Mediterranean again. They crowded onto a wooden boat with more than 200 passengers on board. In the middle of the night, water began to enter the boat, and it started to sink. As it capsized, people fell into the water. Prince jumped in to save his cousins. The sea was freezing, and everyone was shouting and screaming around him, and he remembers the dark water lit by stars. By the time he located his 14-year-old cousin Sandra, it was too late. She had drowned because she didn’t know how to swim.

He held her lifeless body floating on his chest with a life vest propped behind his neck for what he estimates was 25 hours before he and other survivors, including the rest of his family, were rescued by fishermen and brought back to Libya.

“I didn’t even know I was rescued because I was so tired,” he says. “My eyes were just seeing white. I wasn’t seeing any more because of the sea, the salt. I was so tired.” Prince and his family were never able to bury Sandra because he says her body was stolen by people smugglers.

In Libya, a fisherman from The Gambia taught him how to use a compass, and on his final voyage, he was the navigator, telling the boat captain in which direction to steer. Their boat was intercepted by a rescue boat off the coast of Lampedusa. “The journey is not something I would wish upon my worst enemy,” he says, shaking his head. The rest of his family, who had gone ahead separately, went to different parts of Italy and Austria.

Prince tried to live with his sister-in-law in Austria, but when the authorities threatened to deport him, he was brought back to Italy, where his asylum case was pending. His flight landed him in Venice. He doesn’t know why.

Life in Italy has been hard, he says. His father had warned him about living as an immigrant, telling him before he left, “It’s better to be a free man in your own country than a slave abroad.” Prince is starting to agree with him. When he was evicted from his apartment, he was homeless for seven months, sleeping on friends’ couches and in a garage.

For him, there’s nothing special to Venice. “All I do is go to work and come home, go to work, come home,” he says. If he could do it all again, he says, he would have stayed in Nigeria.

These days, he has a new job, but it is an exhausting night shift with a long commute that cuts into the time he has to make music. To save money, he has learned to subsist on one meal a day and has stopped painting, another favourite hobby. The choir is the only time he enjoys himself. “When I’m singing with them, I’m always smiling,” he says, “because that’s the only time I can be myself.”

Prince looks at his watch. It is 9pm, and he has to go work a night shift in a factory 50km (31 miles) away. He works for eight hours, standing in a large refrigerated space so cold he brings a coat in his backpack. He packs pasta, cheese and whatever else the supermarkets have in their prepared food aisles. As he works, he listens to music, often his own songs, and tries to meditate. “No sleep, no breaks,” he says. “You have to find ways to create breaks for yourself.”

When he comes home, he goes to sleep for the first part of the day and then spends the second half in his room, working at the computer. His phone is constantly buzzing with calls from friends, which make him light up. His otherwise sombre expression turns boyish and carefree.

Soon night falls, and it’s time to go back to work. He bought a collapsible bike he uses to get to and from the bus stops. As the bus drives through the urban sprawl, he listens to music through his headphones. One of his favourite songs is Water No Get Enemy by a fellow Nigerian musician, the late Fela Kuti. It opens with a five-minute jazz riff with horns, percussion and piano before Kuti begins to sing. Water is what you use to cook, to cool down when it’s hot and to clean your body, he sings in both Yoruba and English. Kuti – outspoken about politics, a supporter of the Black Power movement and one-time presidential candidate – saw water as both the creator and the destroyer, one of the ultimate universal forces of life. “If water kill your child, na water you go use. Nothing without water.”

Water No Get Enemy is ultimately a political song about perseverance, written in response to government oppression, and the lyrics call out to Prince as he glides through the darkness towards the factory.

At one point, Venice was filled with song as workers of all types harmonised with each other to synchronise their movements, as in the case of the battipali, to make the work pass quicker or simply because of pleasure.

In doing her own research, Giuseppina is often amazed by how many different economies there were, each with their own songs. The fishermen, the gondoliers and the women packing tobacco all sang their unique songs.

These oral traditions were already being lost at the turn of the 19th century as certain trades disappeared or changed permanently. When pile driver machines began to be used in the 18th century, for example, workers no longer needed to sing. As the old methods were gradually phased out, so were the songs.

Russian composer and ethnomusicologist Ella Adayevskaya, who transcribed the first battipali in Venice in 1909, interviewed one local who lamented, “Once people sang with love,” and now “they just sing for amusement,” likely referring to the opera performances popular at the time.

It is not just the songs that are being lost – the entire city is slipping into the sea. Venice is sinking at a rate of 1mm to 2mm (0.04 to 0.08 inches) per year, and the sea level is rising. It floods about 40 times per year, and recently, a remarkably low tide made it impossible for boats to navigate certain canals. The city spent more than $6bn to create floodgates, which, although they are currently working, will likely become useless within the century due to rising sea levels.

The proverbial “death of the city” always has haunted Venice ever since the Black Death of 1348 killed an estimated two-thirds of the population and subsequent pandemics repeatedly ravaged the city. Celebrating the city’s survival has become a public holiday. Every July, the city celebrates Festa del Redentore, which commemorates the end of the plague of 1576.

Venice was also continually threatened by pirates throughout the centuries – Slavic, Turkish, Genoese and others – who weakened its naval power and who some scholars believe contributed to the republic’s decline. They would have flown a black flag because they were stateless, which became a warning for violence. The republic finally fell in 1797 when it was invaded by Napoleon, and the city traded hands again multiple times before Italy became one unified country.

The city now faces a different sort of slow death caused by the loss of traditional culture, the exodus of its residents, climate change and being overrun by tourism.

The population of the island has sunk to fewer than 50,000 people – 70 years ago the number of residents was three times this number – because the city has become so expensive and caters to tourists. It averages 50,000 visitors per day.

Venice has begun charging a fee to visit as locals complain, “The city is not for sale.” The narrow streets are hard to walk down because of the sheer number of visitors, grocery stores are swapped out for tourist shops and lines for ferries, which are the only form of public transportation on the island, can be so long that multiple boats pass before there is space. This month, billionaire Jeff Bezos has rented out five of the largest hotels and the city’s entire fleet of water taxis to host his wedding.

Everywhere, the city seems to be under construction. Men in orange suits dredge parts of the lagoon to replace the massive tubes that bring water into the city. Streets are being repaved and crumbling facades restored. On a barge not far from St Mark’s Square, half a dozen men are manoeuvring two mechanical cranes and a massive hydraulic pile driver, the modern battipali. They shout directions to each other, yelling above the steady hum of engines, but there is no singing. The city sounds of loud machines, honking boats, the chatter of tourists sitting in the sun at canal-facing tables and seagulls screeching. And below it all, softly but incessantly, is the steady lapping of waves.

Walking down a “rio terra”, or filled-in canal, in the neighbourhood near the train station, Prince lingers outside a storefront with bright plastic souvenirs. He explains that he hasn’t been back to Nigeria in 10 years and when he returns he wants to buy a bunch of gifts for his family and friends, pointing at a snowglobe with a gondolier inside. He is expecting to receive his residence permit any day now, which will give him the legal right to work and live in Italy for two years as well as freedom to travel.

Parts of Venice make him homesick. The city of Lagos is also built on a lagoon, is composed of islands and the beach at home is a barrier island just like the beaches in Venice.

For now the choir is his home. In March, a performance in front of a museum near where the choir practises was choreographed like a flash mob. Giuseppina scuttled around excitedly, coaxing singers with her hands to sing louder or softer as Prince watched attentively before singing in turn.

“Let yourself be carried by the sound,” she shouts.

Afterwards, during a debrief, she talks about a unifying force, a shared mental state. “Let’s call it wind,” she says. “It’s beautiful to see how the wind shakes the leaves, and then they all move together.”

It is common for rehearsals and performances to end with a dance party filled with ecstatic, joyful whirling. After the performance, the singers and attendees form a large circle. The drumming picks up, and Prince steps into the ring to dance. He crouches low as he twirls, and his arms are bent and raised to his shoulders. The large crowd claps and cheers. Giuseppina, standing along the perimeter, looks on quietly, beaming.