Strange how one can miss the most obvious things, but it does show me, yet again, that I mustn’t be writing at midnight.

The winners were the Vignottini (canarin/yellow).

Second place: Bertoldini/Vianello (viola/purple).  Third place: Luca Quintavalle/Gaetano Bregantin (rosso/red).  Fourth place: Franco dei Rossi “Strigheta”/Luca Ballarin (arancio/orange).

These are the “bandierati,” or winners of their respective bandiere, or pennants, and glory and praise, and money. If you finish from fifth to ninth place, you get a manly shake of the hand, and money.  If you’re the reserve, or last-minute-substitute boat, you just get money.

More details will be forthcoming about the deeper nature of the skirmish between Tezzat-d’Este and the Vignottini.  The more I think about it, though, the more these races resemble high-stakes horse racing.  In some ways it’s not what you do or don’t do, it’s mainly what you can manage to get away with.  If I have misinterpreted anything about horses, I apologize.

Based on past races, I have no doubt that the Vignottini were not, nor have ever been, what they call “farina da far ostie,” or “flour for making Communion wafers.” I’m not taking sides, I’m just pointing it out.  But why the hammer fell on Tezzat this time is indeed a convoluted tale, which I will try to relate as soon as I can manage to organize the particulars, the context, and the history.  And understand it enough to explain it.

The "bissone," the large decorative boats brought out for serious ceremony, are the centerpiece of the boat procession, and look just the way you want fancy boats to look in Venice.

Day before yesterday (Sunday, September 5, for the record) was the day of what is arguably the most important — certainly most spectacular — race of the Venetian rowing season: the Regata Storica, or “historic regatta.”  Or, as I also think of it, the Race that Launched a Thousand Postcards — which depict, not the race(s) themselves, but the decorated boats loaded with rowers in costume.  If you skrinch your eyes and don’t think, you could imagine you were seeing something from centuries ago.  Sort of.

The commandant of the Morosini Naval School, Enrico Pacioni, and his wife are carried to the reviewing stand aboard an exact replica of the 18th-century gondola seen in paintings by Canaletto.

We were there, as usual: Lino in a boat (one of the red launches used by the judges, though which one depended on which race he drew), and me also in a boat (this year in the six-oar balotina, “Katia,” of the Remiera Casteo).  Lino’s role was to administer justice; my role was to participate in the corteo, or boat procession, preceding the races, then to tie up somewhere convenient in a spot where we could get a good view of the races, then to scream our lungs out, if and when the spirit moved us.  (It did.)

The balotina is essentially a largish gondola, but looks very fine from any angle.

Every year, obviously, is different, though there are equally obvious similarities.  Boats of all types and persuasions, from tiny one-person s’ciopons to honking big motorized barges carrying entire clans and enough food and drink to support them till Christmas.

And of course there were the spectators — official estimates said 90,000 — massed together at certain key points: sitting on the steps in front of the church of the Salute, in temporary bleachers just beyond San Toma’, and in rows of chairs at the Rialto market.  Maybe somewhere else further on that I didn’t discover.  I’m not very clear on how 90,000 people fit into those very limited spaces, but I imagine the estimate includes all of us in the boats lining the Grand Canal, and the relatively few, those happy few, partying on the balconies of the palaces.  In any case, there we all were. however many thousand we might have been.

I like the less grandiose boats better, like this mascareta belonging to the firemen.

I suppose it’s exciting to watch from the shore, wherever you find a space, but if you were ever to be in Venice on the first Sunday in September, I’d strongly urge you to smash the old piggybank and hire a gondola for two or three hours and watch it from the water.  Don’t suppose you can just imagine how it would be.  It’s not just the fact that you’re floating, it’s the fact that being in a boat makes you a participant in a way you can’t be if you’re merely pasted along the sidelines, waving.

Two things distinguished this year’s edition.  One was the unexpected anarchy (I think it was unexpected, though murmurings a few days earlier may have been a sort of warning) that overwhelmed the corteo near the Rialto Bridge.

Or this pair, who I presume are father and son.

The Master Plan, as devised by tradition and the Comune (not always the same thing), was for the corteo to splash along all the way up to the train station, then return to the vicinity of the finish line at the “volta de Canal,” or “bend of the canal,” by Ca’ Foscari.

The first few years I engaged in the corteo, that’s what we did.  Then the Comune, responding to the pressing programming needs of the RAI television wallahs, and who knows what other dark urges, decreed that we all stop on the return leg at the entrance to the Cannaregio canal to let the first one and a half races pass by.  It was like shuffling a deck of cards, to get the corteo and the races organized in such a way as to leave not a second of the dreaded dead-air time in which people could, God forbid, get bored or something.

This was the mob in front of the church of the Salute. I'd have taken more pictures, but I had to pay attention to my rowing responsibilities.

So we did this for a few years, then increasing numbers of boats began to turn around and head back downstream before they got to the station.  Then they began turning around even earlier, and so on, till we reached last Sunday, when suddenly it seemed as if some animal instinct urged the migrating boats to virtually all begin turning around just after the Rialto Bridge (which is where the last serious group of spectators are clustered, after which it’s just scattered random boats and who really cares who’s hanging around in front of the train station?).  Or turning, as in our case, before the bridge, because the mass of confused retreating boats made forging ahead difficult, as well as pointless.  The general atmosphere amid the boats could be summed up in the rude Venetian phrase, “Si ciava” (see CHA-vah, or “screw this/them/it”).

So that was entertaining.  I’ve spent years here listening to rants from certain elements among the organizers about how it’s the Venetians’ festival and we should do it the way we want to, not how They tell us to, but this was the first time I’ve ever seen what “Take Back the Night” would look like in real life.  It was kind of cool, actually.  For anybody, of whatever race or clime, who is annoyed by being treated as a spear-carrier in somebody else’s drama, it was highly invigorating.

Not sure what the Comune has to say about it, though, because the Gazzettino was awash yesterday in the floods of rancor and glee from the four men contending for first place in the race of the gondolinos.  Which brings me to the second thing that distinguished this year’s edition.

These “four men” would be cousins Igor and Rudi Vignotto, on the yellow (canarin) gondolino, and Ivo Redolfi-Tezzat and Giampaolo d’Este on the blue (celeste). To give you some perspective on this rivalry, the “Vignottini” have been rowing against d’Este and Tezzat since 2002, and against d’Este with other partners since 1995.  And that’s just the big races; they all started this as kids. Speaking of  being able to imagine things, I myself can’t imagine what fifteen years of battling in seven races each year adds up to when the crunch is on in the Grand Canal.  But it could not, as the saying goes, be pretty.

Thirst, hunger, or loneliness were not problems facing the extended family on the barge behind us, who color-coded their loyalties.

So what happened was that the eternal triad (including the purple, or viola, gondolino of Andrea Bertoldini and Martino Vianello), entered the Grand Canal in a virtual dead heat, and remained so until the Rialto Bridge: celeste, canarin, and viola.  And it’s not merely that they accomplished this feat, it’s that they did it for two miles (3.2 km).  At top speed, or about 7 mph (12 km/h).

“When I saw those three entering the Grand Canal side by side like that,” Lino told me later, “I got a lump in my throat.  It gave me goose bumps.”  He and the judges in the other boats following the race literally could not hear each other through their walkie-talkies, even yelling, because however many thousands there were who could see the boats were all screaming their brains out.  It was thrilling.

The three first gondolinos pass -- any ordinary mortals would long since have begun to fade, but not these titans.

This is a view of the race course. It's further than it looks, and all that twisting and turning means you've got all sorts of different tidal conditions to deal with, going and coming back.

Then, as usual, Something Happened. Last year it was Tezzat falling overboard and taking d’Este with him as their boat (celeste, as it happens — coincidence???) capsized.  This year it was Something up toward the temporary piling in front of the station which marks the turnaround point.

The details are still coming out, and of course they’re as dissonant as a quartet by Charles Ives.  The judges warned Tezzat more than once to alter something he was doing to the detriment of the “Vignottini,” which Tezzat evidently ignored.  (I’m not taking sides here, I’m just trying to give the outline.)

There are palazzo parties....

When a racer does not obey the judge, after a certain number of calls the racer is disqualified.  And that’s what happened.  Three-quarters of the way through the race, suddenly one of its biggest stars was off the field, never to be seen again.  At least not that day.

While down at the waterline, folks are chilling in their own special way.

The next day the Rage of Tezzat reverberated through the pages of the Gazzettino; if this matter isn’t resolved (the “matter” being the injustice and infamy of the judge’s action), he says he’s going to hang up his oar, as they say, and quit racing.  He won’t even show up to try for the final race of the year at Burano in two weeks.

To which one might reasonably reply, “Knock yourself out.”  (”Fa di manco,” would be the closest Venetian equivalent, or “So don’t bother.”)

If there are any developments worth wasting electrons to report, I will do so.

Otherwise, I want to leave you with the joy of the bellowing, shrieking, hysterical crowds who got to see, if only briefly, one of the most dazzling moments in big-time racing anyone has witnessed for quite some time. That’s what I’m going to remember.

Mid-afternoon in the lagoon. It feels as if it's going to be 3:00 forever.

Yes, there is still heat, sometimes too much of it, but the heat doesn’t quite match that hellish torridity of July.  For us city-dwellers (as opposed to farmers, or families on beach vacations), the occasional thunder- or hailstorm serves mainly as entertainment, a little break in the estival monotony.  I love watching the hail crashing into the canal outside, cosmic handfuls of ice hurled earthward making the water jump and bounce and froth.  I wish it would happen more often.  And then, after the storm passes, the limitless space of sky over the lagoon can be covered with enormous, dense clouds that look as if they must have been squeezed out of some colossal can of Cloud-Whip.

Fine — I hear you thinking — but what about All Those Tourists?  No need to ask; tourists, like the poor, shall never cease from the earth.  Of course there are tourists.  And while there are always more visitors than residents, most Venetians, few as there may be anymore, are even fewer now. They’re on vacation, and that means they’ve mostly gone to the mountains.  If you want to see some Venetians, you’re going to have to head for Baselga di Pine’ or San Martino di Castrozza.

But what’s different in August is that the tourists seem to fade, in a curious way, and crowded onto the vaporettos, many of them look as if they’ve been thwacked by a two by four.  In fact, the whole city seems as if it has faded. Shops shut.  Restaurants close.  Pharmacies are reduced to a skeleton supply, thoughtfully displaying a sign on their barred doors with the name and address of the nearest open drugstore, which will not be near. The market at Rialto retains only a few, seemingly symbolic, vendors.  The sea may be teeming with fish, but the fishmongers don’t care. Pastry-makers go hiking in the Alps, I guess, because they’re not interested in making delicacies containing cream and butter in this heat, nor are there any customers interested in buying them.  The only dairy product anybody cares about is ice cream.

Even this houseboat seems slightly stupefied.

So a sensation of scarcity and torpor suffuses the city.  If you need some object or service (the lab report on your biopsy, a replacement door to your front-loading washing machine) you can just make up your mind to wait, because factories or warehouses will close.  Delivery people will disappear, and that includes letter-carriers.  (Not made up.)  The post office hardly even hires substitutes.  Everything just gets left where you dropped it until September.

I was wrong -- something seems to be moving. A little girl, looking at or for or because of something. She'll never last till sundown if she doesn't slow down.

Tourists will continue to find what they need. Ice-cream shops (I did mention ice cream, didn’t I?), souvenir vendors, and museums will all be lolling in the shade, waiting for you. But many places that you would assume would be panting for floods of customers just pull the grate across the door and a tape hand-lettered sign to it. There.

There are only two events that make the smallest indentation in the rich layer of silence that has been smoothed over the city.  The first is August 15, or Ferragosto.  It dates from antiquity to mark, among other things, the end of the harvest, and was recognized officially by the emperor Augustus in the year 18 A.D.  Many Catholic countries, since Pope Pius XII’s edict of November 1, 1950, observe it as a religious festival as well as a picnic-at-the-beach festival.  (It’s especially beloved in the years when it falls outside a weekend, thereby requiring you to extend your vacation.)

Even after all this time, Ferragosto still doesn’t make much of an impression on me.  It’s kind of like observing your second cousin’s mother-in-law’s wedding anniversary.  But once you’ve experienced the desolation of most big cities on this day, you can really get how funny the moment is in a little movie whose name escapes me, in which the only son’s elderly mother, living in the center of Rome, begs him to get her fresh fish for lunch on Ferragosto. It would be like asking someone to go out and bring you a fresh piece of moon rock on New Year’s Day.

The tide seems not to have found the strength to come in. It's doing what it can, but don't rush it.

The only other noticeable August event — for me, at least — are the time trials to winnow out the racers for the Regata Storica (Historic Regatta), which is always held on the first Sunday in September. Not that anybody notices or cares about the eliminations except for the 126 aspiring racers, who have to stay here to continue training up to and, if they pass, after.  And of course the judges, such as Lino, care, because they have to organize their hanging-out time around eliminatorie duty, spending endless hours out on the lagoon by Malamocco watching the boats go by at two-minute intervals for what feels like five forevers.

You wouldn’t think anybody had the energy to be strange, but still I’ve noticed little slivers of slightly puzzling behavior.  Such as the man sitting on the bench at Malamocco one meaningless afternoon, looking out at the water.  Well, the bench itself is odd enough, even without the man, because someone decided to place a lamppost right in front of it, so close that it seems to be a direct challenge to you to decide which is really more important, rest or light.  But this man had decided he wanted rest and shade, of all things, and even though there were ample dark patches under the trees where he could have been slightly cooler, he had sat down in the center of the bench in such a way as to benefit from the one narrow strip of shadow it cast.  He was sprawled there, straddling the shadow, sun baking him on each side, with a strip of shade going straight up his middle.

Or there was another man (sorry, so far I’ve only noticed the XY chromosome category) who was sitting on the vaporetto in front of us one morning, heading toward the Lido.  He looked like a local, well into retirement age, with a hefty little paunch.  It was a rare cool morning with little spits of rain and breeze.  I was wearing a sweater.

He, on the other hand, was wearing beach flipflops, denim shorts, and a tank top — three-quarters of him was skin.  But the rain hadn’t caught him by surprise, because he was wearing a rain hat, a neat little classic made of some form of plastic, and it looked very new.  Almost as if he had just bought it.

I sat there looking at him, trying to grasp what instinct could have prompted him to protect his head when the rest of him was destined to be drenched. Let’s assume he was taken by surprise by the sudden turn of meteorological events.  Wouldn’t a cheap umbrella have made slightly more sense?

I can’t explain how I find the strength to dwell on these things.  Me, I’ve been trying for four days now to decide if I want to polish my toenails and I still can’t make up my mind.  It’s just too much to think about.

Not only does this little guy have enough energy to play peekaboo with his grandmother, the Band-Aids on his legs tell you the rest about his approach to life.

We’ve been having temperatures up around 100 degrees F. (39 degrees C) during the day, slightly less at night, for at least a week.  Yesterday the weather report indicated that it was hotter here than in New York.  I can tell you without consulting anybody but myself that it’s hotter than the hinges of hell.

Looking toward Murano at 8:30 this morning.

In addition to simple heat, there is the element called “afa,” which means sweltering, sultry, breathless heat, the kind of mugginess that makes you feel like an old sponge that has been left in a dark damp corner next to things that smell.

There are only two places I can think of where this weather would be even more intolerable. One would be anywhere along the Po River plain, where the fields stretch for long, desperate distances with no shade.  Where there is shade, among the poplar plantations lining the river, there is no oxygen.  Whatever is taking the place of oxygen does not move, because the world has stopped.

Looking toward the Lido at the lagoon inlet of San Nicolo'. The egret is happy, but egrets don't sweat.

The other place where the heat is torment is the mountains.  Mountains are made to be cool, at least at night.  If I had to endure this kind of heat at  4,000 feet, I’d have to think long and carefully about my revenge.

Clamming takes your mind off the fact that you're suffocating.

We’ve gotten through it so far by going out in the lagoon in a small mascareta, to a place where there is virtually always a breeze.  And enough water to immerse myself for ten hours or so.  Other people go to the beach on the Lido.  Other people go shopping at the small supermarket off Campo Ruga, where the air-conditioning is set to cryogenic depths.  We go clamming.  More fun, for us.  Probably not so much for the clams.

I’m off to bed now, planning to dream of the freezers at the Tyson chicken-processing plant.  Do not wake me.

Murano is just ten minutes from Venice, but it's a whole other world. And not just because of all the glass, either.

If you’ve ever been to Murano, one of the world’s great glass-making centers, you will know that it’s impossible to race through it.  You will be exhausted, but not because you’ve been going so fast; au contraire, you will have been plodding along at the pace of those debilitated galley slaves in Ben-Hur, going in and out of so many shops you’ll think they’ve been breeding in dark corners when you’re not looking.  The five islands that make up Murano, of which you will probably only visit two, cover barely one square mile, and the Yellow Pages list 61 shops.  I think there must be more.

Anyway, you will not have been racing.  Unless it’s the first Sunday in July, in which you can come to Murano to watch other people race, and believe me, they’re going to be more tired in less time than you and your whole family after an entire day.

A glimpse of the leaders last year, heading from out in the lagoon into the Grand Canal of Murano and the home stretch.

The regata of Murano is really three regatas, each involving solo rowers, which calls not only for stamina but for skill.  The races are for young men on pupparinos, women on pupparinos, and grown men on gondolas.  It’s always hot, and there is always wind, and sometimes, like a few years ago, there can be sudden thunderstorms with pouring rain.  But the race must go on.

Only about ten more minutes to go, and unless something extraordinary happens, at this point the positions aren't likely to change much. But they don't slack off, all the same.

The city of Venice organizes nine regatas a year, plus the Regata Storica.  Each race is designed for a particular type of boat and number of rowers, and each is held in a different part of the lagoon, which means that the conditions and course present their own particular quirks.  These changing venues also means that some are easier to watch from the shore than others, and the one at Murano is especially exciting not only because you can see both the start and the finish, but because there are good vantage-points along the fondamentas, and even a big cast-iron bridge from which to get a spectacular view of the finish.

The women on pupparinos are about 60 seconds from the finish line and it looks like the pink boat may still have a chance to overtake the white (2009).

Regatas (a Venetian word, by the way), have been an important feature of Venetian festivities since the Venetians crawled out of the primordial ooze;  sometimes they were part of a religious celebration, or part of the myriad spectacles staged for the amusement of visiting potentates, but they were one-time events.

Luisella Schiavon -- from Murano, as it happens -- has a clear shot at first place at this point. She won last year, and this year, too. Being tall, as well as talented, makes a difference.

But in 1869, the regata at Murano was established as a regular annual event and not for any prince or pope but to entertain — yes — tourists.  And whether or not tourists can look up for a few minutes from the heaps of glass necklaces and picture frames and flower vases, this race is arguably the most important occasion for a Venetian racer to show what he, or she, has really got.  I can tell you that the man who wins the gondola race is universally regarded as having won something akin to Wimbledon, or maybe the Ironman Triathlon, or the Tour de France.  Maybe all of them.

Here’s what it takes to win: Strength, stamina, skill, luck, and extreme and ruthless cunning.  It also helps if you’re tall.  It’s a physics thing; short rowers have a hard time keeping up with taller ones, though sometimes a short person has pulled it off, especially if he or she (I’m thinking of a she) is lavishly gifted with the aforementioned luck and cunning.  Or just cunning.

My two most vivid memories of this race are from one of the earliest ones I ever attended, and the one from last Sunday.  Both, oddly, involve a certain racer named Roberto Busetto.

Roberto Busetto last Sunday, crossing the finish line in third place just ahead of the yellow gondola. Victory is sweet, at least until you black out.

Mr. Busetto is strong — he looks like Mr. Clean, and he has biceps that make you think of whole prosciuttos.  He is also experienced, and very determined (I’m not sure that he’s made it up to “ruthless”), but if anything ever upsets him during the race — even if it may not have prevented him from finishing really well — he can be counted on to show up for his prize yelling about it.  In fact, there will always be something that’s wrong, and he goes all Raging Bull at the judges, at some fellow racer, at some onlooker, at anyone or anything that might have created even the tinest problem for him.  Or who looks like they don’t care.  It’s never easy to understand, in the midst of his tirade, what actually went wrong.  But you know he’s mad.

Okay, Mr. Clean, let's just check those vital signs again.

The first time I saw Busetto at full throttle, he had barely crossed the finish line when he started ranting.  It had something to do with what he claimed was some sneaky, illegal thing that another racer, Franco Dei Rossi, had inflicted on him, thereby preventing him from finishing better.

The confusion of boats immediately following the race doesn't usually include the ambulance. Last year it was just the usual suspects.

But it wasn’t his tantrum that stunned me, though I didn’t know at that point that tantrums are his normal means of expression, the way some people can’t help starting every sentence with “Well” or “You know.”  It was the fact that under this deluge of outrage, Dei Rossi was sobbing as he mounted the judges’ stand to be awarded his prize.  A grown man, one of the greatest (in my view) racers of his generation, son of one of the greatest racers in history, was standing there weeping uncontrollably.  It was so astonishing and distressing that I know I didn’t imagine it, and I’m not exaggerating, either.  I’m glad I didn’t have a camera with me, I wouldn’t be able to bear looking at the pictures.  It really left a mark on me.

So we come to last Sunday.  It’s Busetto again.  He has been racing for at least 20 years, maybe more, but he had only a very brief peak, and that was quite some while ago.  In fact, I’d have to stop and do some research to determine when was the last time he won a pennant.  I think the Beatles may still have been together.  (Just kidding;  it was in 2000.)

But this year, he finished third.  Which means he won the green pennant, which means that after a ten-year drought he had managed to pull himself back into the ranks of the demi-gods. Pennants are awarded to the first four finishers, and they really matter to the racers, almost as much as the cash prize.

This is what normal collapsing looks like -- here, Sebastiano Della Toffola has just finished his first race with the big guys. Franco Dei Rossi, a certified, gold-plated Big Guy, looks on with something that looks like comprehension.

Finishing third is pretty great, but about two seconds after crossing the finish line, he collapsed.  First he sort of let himself fall down backwards on the stern of the boat, which isn’t so strange except that it’s usually the younger men who want to show how completely wrung out they are.  It’s like when they throw their oar in the water (rage, joy, some other intense emotion — looks very dramatic, till you realize how dumb it is).

An excellent example of what incredible-victory collapsing looks like. Last year, like this year, first place went to Igor Vignotto. On the orange gondola both times. You may laugh, but this is how superstitions are born.

But then my friend Anzhelika said, “He’s too white.”  Then I noticed that his boat had drifted slaunchwise across the canal, blocking the arrival of the last gondolas.  Then there was some commotion, then the sound of the water ambulance arriving at full speed.

Much pouring of cool water on his head, much checking of his blood pressure.  He tore himself away long enough to come pick up his pennant, annoyed (of course), though not yelling, because everybody was fussing over him.  He likes attention, but nobody with arms like prosciuttos wants it to be because he fell apart.

But some things in life are bigger than prosciuttos, and rowing under the searing sun for 40 minutes at full blast if you’re not in astronaut-type physical condition is asking for it.  “It” being an ambulance and a blood-pressure cuff, and lots of people suddenly looking at you like you’re some kind of invalid.

You know it’s serious when Roberto Busetto isn’t yelling.

Franco Dei Rossi (2009) in a more typical post-race moment: Smiling because he's won another pennant. In this case, a blue one for fourth place. Not at all bad in a field of nine, for a man who's drifting up on 60 years old.

This year's first and second-place finishers. Igor Vignotto on the left (red pennant) and Rudi Vignotto (white pennant). They were adversaries, but only sort of; not only are they cousins, but they have rowed together their entire lives.

The fourth-place pennant, clutched by a sweat-soaked Ivo Redolfi Tezzat. This is an especially nice design, with the rooster, the emblem of Murano, in the upper corner. If you've won this, though, you really don't care if it's a rooster or a wall-eyed vireo.

Then we all followed the scent of the scorching sausage and ribs to the local festa. This little girl out with her grandmother has the most astonishing pre-Raphaelite face. I just can't stand the thought of her growing up and walking around with a cell phone and tattoos and mutilated hair. Must be getting old.

Interested in the races? The ribs? The music? The thunderstorm about to shatter the sky into a billion sharp wet pieces? Not really. Here is an excellent demonstration of what these parties are for. The food and music are just ruses.

The boat procession, having passed the Naval College, moves along the Lido shoreline toward the church of San Nicolo' and the ceremony of the blessing of the ring.

Up until the year 1000 A.D., if you’ll cast your minds back, the fortieth day after Easter had been primarily known as the commemoration of Christ’s ascension  to heaven.  It still is, but at the turn of the millennium the day took on large quantities of extra importance for Venice. 

The day also became just as famous for the “Sposalizio del mare,” or wedding of the sea, a ceremony performed by the doge and Senate in the company of many boats of all sorts which all proceeded toward the inlet to the sea at San Nicolo’ on the Lido.  At the culminating moment,  the doge tossed a golden ring into the lagoon waters and intoned, “Desponsamus te, Mare, in signum veri perpetique dominii.“  (”I wed thee, O Sea, in sign of perpetual dominion.”)

The "Serenissima" pulls up to the judges' stand to put the doge -- I mean mayor -- and retinue ashore.

This statement had nothing to do with religion, even though it does sound impressive in Latin, right up there with “till death us do part.”  It had much more to do with politics, because on Ascension Day in the year 1000 (May 9, if you’re interested), doge Pietro I Orseolo finally quashed the Slavic pirates who, from their eastern Adriatic lairs, had been harassing Venetian shipping and seriously inconveniencing Venetian progress.

This was a pivotal moment in Venetian history; it opened the way to centuries of expansion, wealth and power, and the Venetians wanted to make sure that all their assorted neighbors and trading partners and possibly also trading competitors remembered what they had done and could do again, if necessary.

For another thing, beginning in 1180 one of the largest commercial fairs of the entire year was held during the Ascension Day period.  Merchants and traders from all over the Mediterranean and beyond set up booths in the Piazza San Marco to sell ivory, incense, ebony, oils of jasmine and sandalwood and bergamot,  pomegranate soap, tortoiseshell  back-scratchers, bath salts, mirrors inlaid with mother-of-pearl, dried figs and apricots, plant-based hair dyes, luxurious textiles, and even Abyssinian and Circassian and sub-Saharan slaves.  All this was traded in languages and dialects from Venetian to Armenian, Hebrew, Uzbek, Greek, Turkish, German, Georgian, Iberian, Arabic, French and Persian.  I’m sure I’ve left something out.   This fair was such a big deal that soon it was extended from eight days to two weeks.  Yes, even back then the city was just one big emporium, though incense strikes me as being cooler than the bargain Carnival masks made in China bestrewing the shops today.

A flea market by the church of San Nicolo' is the best we can do at evoking the fabulous market of yore.

I don’t suppose that the average Venetian on the street would have told you much of the above if you’d stopped to ask what the big deal was about the Sensa.  But a smallish contingent of people have applied themselves, since the early Nineties, to bringing back at least some ceremonial in order to acknowledge the moment .

Need a lampshade with a portrait of Audrey Hepburn or Charlie Chaplin? Now's your chance.

I wonder if any merchants from the old days would have been tempted by these.

So yesterday morning there was a boat procession, more or less following the “Serenissima,” the  biggest and fanciest of the city’s ceremonial barges which was carrying the mayor (best we could do, seeing as we’re dogeless these days) and costumed trumpeters and a batch of military and civilian dignitaries and also a priest. 

At the Morosini naval college at Sant’ Elena, all the cadets were ready and waiting, lined up along the embankment.   Standing crisply at attention with their hats in their right hand, on command they raised their hat-holding arm straight out at a sharp 45-degree angle, and shouted with one voice “OO-rah.”  They did this three times in succession, then there was a pause.  Then they did it again.   They do this at intervals till the boats have all passed. 

For my money, this is the best part of the event, much better than the ring-and-sea business.  In fact, I’m convinced that if the cadets were not to do this, it would ruin the entire day.

The boats surround the "Serenissima" as the declamation(s) proceed.

The boats then proceed to the area in front of the church of San Nicolo’ on the Lido, where they clump together, the priest blesses the ring, and the mayor throws it into the water.  One year our boat was close enough that I took somebody’s dare and actually managed to snag it before it sank (all the ribbons tied to it momentarily helped it to float).   Then I had a heavy surge of superstitious guilt.  Even if it wasn’t gold — it was kind of like what you’d use to hang a heavy curtain — it was a symbolic object fraught with meaning.  I wondered if I’d just blighted Venice’s mojo for another year.  But I didn’t throw it back — that seemed even stupider than grabbing it in the first place.  So, you know, my disrespect just left another ding on the chrome trim of my conscience.

The first three gondolas, battling it out in the back stretch.

Then there is a boat race — in this case, a race for gondolas rowed by four men each.  In Venice the celebration of really important events always involved a regata, and when this festival began to take form, Lino created this one.  Yesterday the competition was somewhat more dramatic than usual in that a strong garbin, or southwest wind, was blowing, and it was also really cold.  Lots of big irritated waves.  Strong incoming tide.  All elements that do not conduce to easy victory or friendly handshakes afterward, not that these guys are ever inclined to that sort of thing.  But it made for a very exciting 40 minutes — better than usual, if you could stand the cold. 

Heading into the home stretch, they held onto third place, well ahead of their closest competitors.

So much for the festivities, so much for the wedding of the sea.  No honeymoon, though.  We just move on to another 12 months of trying to dominate the sea.  Not with galleys anymore; Venice seems to be doing a pretty good job with the ever-increasing flotilla of cruise ships.

Buildings are what people care about — logical, since no buildings, no Venice.  Some Venetians have told me that they don’t believe anything will be done to resolve motondoso till an entire building collapses, a notion that once seemed idiotic until I came to realize that it could happen.  A building collapsing, I mean, not that it would lead to any meaningful action, though one can always dream.

So perhaps some structure really will have to be sacrificed, like an unblemished white heifer,  for the benefit of the tribe.  The idea has a romantic, mythic quality to it that’s almost appealing.

You could also say “People,” about which I haven’t said much, if anything, and you’d be right again.  The most obvious hazard that waves present is the risk of capsizing; every so often you read about some tourists in gondolas who have gone into the drink.  There was even a traghetto (gondola ferry that crosses the Grand Canal) that got blindsided by an anomalous wave and the whole cargo of passengers went overboard.  I seem to recall that a small child got caught beneath the overturned boat, but one of the gondoliers pulled him out in time.  Some years ago an American woman drowned. Fun.

Erosion caused by the waves continually sucking soil out from under and between stones means the stones collapse, but sometimes a person collapses with them. It happened to a woman walking along near the Giardini one day — she put her foot on a stone, it gave way, and faster than you can say “Doge Obelerio Antenoreo” she fell into a hole higher than she was. Nobody in the neighborhood was surprised; they’d been sending complaints to the city for months to no avail.

Then there was the child playing on a stretch of greensward at Sacca Fisola facing the Giudecca Canal when a hole suddenly opened up  beneath him.  If a man with quick reflexes hadn’t grabbed him, the child would long since have gone out to sea.  Events such as these — and may they be few –  no longer inspire surprise.

This satellite view of the Venetian lagoon gives a general hint of the variations in depth. These variations are part of what make it a lagoon and not, say, Baffin Bay.

But what if you weren’t a human?  This question may not often cross your mind, but Venice looks radically different to its other fauna, and not a few flora, as well.  And waves are not their friend.

What really makes Venice so special is its lagoon, which covers 212 square miles.  Without the lagoon and its concomitant canals, Venice would merely be a batch of really old buildings — beautiful or not, depending on your taste —  which could just as well be sitting on the outskirts of Enid, Oklahoma.

I will be expatiating on the lagoon on another occasion. (A Venetian word, by the way: laguna).  The witness (that would be me) is instructed (by me) to stick to the topic at hand, which is waves.

A more detailed view of the lagoon immediately surrounding Venice gives a better idea of how the area is shaped. These shallows, though, are not barene. (Photo: oceana.org)

The Venetian lagoon is a silent but intimate partner in Venice’s fate.  Not only are the waves undermining the foundations of the city, they are scouring away the foundations of the lagoon.  And while damage to buildings is certainly important, there is arguably even more damage being done to its waters.  And they’re going to be a lot harder to fix than a palace.

So if you  haven’t got time to watch what waves can do to buildings, you should take a look at what they do to the lagoon — specifically to the barene (bah-RAY-neh), the marshy, squidgy islets strewn about out there.  Venice was built on 118 of them.

These are barene. Looks like lots, but 60 years ago there were half again as many. That was a real lagoon.

Barene are the building blocks of the lagoon.  They form 20 percent of its total area, and are crucial to everything in it: microorganisms, plants, animals, birds, fish and, till not so long ago, also people.

Let’s say you have less than no interest in ecosystems and their inhabitants, at least the inhabitants smaller than humans.  Barene, along with their myriad meandering capillary channels, are perfect for slowing down the speed and force of the incoming tide.  They act as a built-in assortment of natural barriers which, if they could remain where they were, would already be limiting the force and the quantity of acqua alta in good old Venice.

But over the past 60 years, half of the lagoon’s barene have been lopped away by waves.  The World Wildlife Fund estimated, several years ago, that at the current rate of erosion (erosion caused by motondoso), in 50 years there would be no more barene left.

A cross-section of a barena near Burano. If you were an endangered bird, or even just a really tired one, this patch of mud would be more beautiful to you than twenty Titians.

Why do we care?  Even if all we’re really interested in is buildings, we care because as the barene diminish, the tide can reach the city faster and ever more aggressively.  The natural brakes, so to speak, are being taken out.

And we also care because, as I have probably said before, whatever a wave can do to a batch of mud it can and will eventually do to bricks and marble.

Part 5: Solutions?

Waves are as destructive to wetlands as they are to buildings, but the wetlands can’t even put up a fight.

The large pilings were put in ages ago, to mark the line between the channel and the barena. As you see, the waves have shrunk the barena, so the large pilings are only sort of symbolic. As a bonus, we see the remnants of the wall of smaller pilings which was installed to prevent any further erosion of the barena.

The distance between pilings and barena here is just another of many examples of the very simple effect of waves.

I remember when this channel was only half this wide. Most of these boats belong to people from the mainland who come all this way so they can just sit. Lovely, admittedly, but they bring waves and take away part of the lagoon when they go home.

Tourist launches of all sizes offer day trips around the lagoon.

Taxis are always in a hurry, especially on airport runs. (Photo: Italia Nostra)

Ordinary working barges at Sant' Erasmo on a Sunday afternoon. Their owners are almost certainly out in smaller motorboats, but tomorrow it will be back to work with all of these.

In the case of motorboats in Venice, this fact is exacerbated by:

If it floats, it has to have a motor. This appears to be the only rule that is universally obeyed. Here is an increasingly common scene in the Grand Canal. (Photo: Venice Project Center)

The number of boats:  There are thousands of registered boats in the city of Venice. There are also many which are unregistered. This number spikes every year in the summer when trippers from the hinterland come into the lagoon to spend their weekends roaming around, often at high speed but always with many horsepower, in motorboats of every shape and tonnage. Teenage boys, particularly from the islands (by which we mean Sant’ Erasmo, Burano, Murano, are especially addicted to roaming at high speed at all hours with their girlfriends and boomboxes.

On a Sunday in July  a few years ago, a squad of volunteers from the Venice Project Center spread out at observation posts across the lagoon, from Chioggia to Burano. Their mission was to count the number and type of boats that passed their station. Whether it was a million boats passing once or one boat a million times, it didn’t matter. They came home with quite a list: every kind of small-to-smallish boat with motors ranging from 15 to 150 hp, hulking great Zodiacs, large cabin cruisers, ferries, vaporettos, tourist mega-launches, hydrofoils from Croatia, taxis, and more. After 11 hours, from 8:30 AM to 7:30 PM, they  analyzed their data. Result: A motorboat had passed somewhere, on the average, every one and a half seconds.

And if weekday traffic is heavy, weekend traffic is three times greater.

The types of boats: In the last 20 years, motor-powered traffic has doubled; at last count 30,000 trips are made in the city every day; 97 percent of these trips are in boats with motors. (There are currently 12 projects in the works for marinas which will add 8,000 more berths.) Of these 30,000 trips, a little over half are made by some sort of working boat. 

More than 10,000 daily trips are by taxis or mega-launches, and more than 8,000 are by barges carrying some kind of goods (bricks, plumbing supplies, cream puffs, etc.).  Studies have shown that if there is one category that over time causes the most damage, it’s not the taxi (I would have bet money on that).  It’s barges.  And they are everywhere.  It’s all barges, all the time.

This is the milk truck.

Appliances and furniture.

There have always been large heavy boats moving materials in Venice, but when they were propelled by oars, the backing-and-forthing needed to negotiate spaces and corners didn't involve creating heavy vortexes of water.

When a heavy boat runs into a wall, it can leave quite a calling card. Here is a popular place to tie up your barge while unloading cargo. Who did this? Everybody and nobody.

Toilet paper, detergent, and other household supplies come ashore with the flick of a few buttons. Life is good, unless you're an old and fragile city.

I know they’re heavy, but all this boat to carry a few watermelons?

This is a peata, the mega-barge that built and maintained Venice well into the 20th century. It was usually rowed by two people, with one of them also at the tiller. Now we require motors to do the same thing because we have to have speed.

These men knew and understood the lagoon, its tides and currents and winds, as no one ever will again, and they exploited them rather than fighting against them.

Traffic patterns: The problem isn’t merely the number and type of boats, but where they are.  Obviously, the more boats you have, the more waves they will create, and where space is limited (most canals in Venice) these waves quickly accumulate into a roiling mass that dissipates with extreme difficulty.  They are forced to go back and forth, hitting anything they come into contact with, until they finally wear themselves out and die. 

There are canals where the waves don’t expire for hours: the Grand Canal (unfortunately), the Rio Novo, the Rio di Noale, the Canale di Tessera toward the airport, the Canale delle Fondamente Nuove, and above all, the Canale della Giudecca.

This map makes it clear why the Giudecca Canal is fated to carry virtually every boat that wants the shortest route from the Maritime Zone/Tronchetto to and from San Marco.

This broad, deep channel has become Venice’s Cape Horn. It is a stretch of water 1.5 miles long [2 km] and 1,581 feet [482 m] wide, and is the shortest and fastest way to get from the Maritime Zone (cruise ship passengers, tourist groups from buses at Tronchetto, barges delivering goods of every sort) to the Bacino of San Marco. One study revealed that the biggest waves in the Lagoon are here; an even more recent survey, conducted with a new telecamera system installed by the Capitaneria di Porto, provided some specific numbers: 1,000 boats an hour transit here, or 10,000 in an ordinary workday.  In the summer, there are undoubtedly more, seeing that an “ordinary workday” includes masses of tourists.

One reason there are so many boats is due to the large number of barges, rendered necessary by an exotic system for distributing goods. If you are a restaurant and need paper products, they come on a barge. If you need tomato paste, it comes on another barge. If you need wine, it comes on another barge. In one especially busy internal canal, the amount of cargo and number of barges was analyzed, and it turns out that the stuff on 96 barges could have fit onto three.  But never forget the fundamental philosophy: “Io devo lavorare” (I have to work).

The types of boats: Their weight and length. The shape of their hulls. Their motors (horsepower and propeller shape). All these factors influence the waves that they create.

A number of intelligent and effective changes have been proposed over time, most of which that would not be particularly complicated, but which would cost money.  So far no one has shown that they consider these changes to be a worthwhile investment.

Example: The original motor taxis (c. 1930), apart from being smaller than those of today, positioned their motors in the center of the boat. When the hulls (and motors) became larger, everyone moved the motor to the stern, which immediately creates bigger waves.  But subsequent improvement in motors and their fuels means that today it would be feasible to maintain the current size of the taxi while moving the motor to the center once again, thereby immediately minimizing its waves. Feasible, but no one is interested.

Boats this large made of metal may be necessary for certain kinds of heavy labor, but they are hazardous to the city's foundations. Although they don't create noticeable waves in the smaller canals because they are going slowly, they contribute to the wave damage in several ways. One is by the chunks they take out of walls if they mistake a maneuver, thereby opening the pathway to waves from smaller boats. Another is the force of their motors during maneuvers, especially at low tide, which can suck the earth out from under the sidewalks. Or the force can push the canal sediment up against the underwater walls of buildings where they plug up sewer outflows. Blocked sewers cause accumulations of corrosive chemicals inside the building walls, which eventually also damage the structure.

Speed: This is utterly fundamental. Speed limits were introduced in 2002 to confront the already serious problem of the waves; the average legal range, depending on what canal you’re in, is between 5-7 km/h. But tourist mega-launches, barges, taxis — almost every motorized boat in Venice has the same need: To get where they’re going as quickly as possible. 

This need has been imposed by the demands of mass tourism, which involves moving the maximum amount of cargo (people, laundry, bottled water, etc.) often many times during the day. Everyone makes up a timetable which suits them and then makes it work.

Studies by the Venice Project Center have revealed several speedy facts in crisp detail.

1. The height of the waves increases exponentially as speed increases. A small barge traveling at 5 km/h would produce a wake about 2 cm high. The same boat going at 10 km/h produces a wake of nearly 15 cm. (Multiply the speed by 2, multiply the wake by 7.)
2. Virtually all boats exceed the speed limit. The average speed on all boats in all canals was 12 km/h, which is more than 7 km/h over the maximum speed limit.
3. Therefore, reducing the speed of the boats would drastically decrease the size of their wakes.

Speed limits would have a positive effect (if they were obeyed) but only if certain laws of hydrodynamics were taken into account, such as the one governing the wake produced relative to the weight of the boat. Here the speed limits have been adjusted to permit the vaporettos (waterbuses), among the heaviest daily craft, to go — not slower, which would be correct — but as fast as the timetable requires.

You can change the laws on speed limits all you want – you’ll never change the laws of physics. 

Oh yes: there will be waves.

Next: Part Four: The lagoon experience

If civilization has reached the stage where most people generally agree that it’s wrong to strike a woman, a child, even a dog, it’s not easy to explain, much less excuse, why an entire city should have to submit to this kind of abuse, a city which depends as much (or more) on its people than the people depend on it.

But then again, it is easy to explain. Sloth, egotism, and a resistance to contradiction tougher than corrugated iron induce almost all the people with motorboats of whatever size or purpose either to deny that they are creating waves, or say that other perpetrators are far more guilty, or accept it with Zen-like resignation.

All of these put together foster a situation in which a recent newspaper article could make a serious reference to the “numerous reports (to the police, of excessive traffic/waves) by Venetians who when they go out in their motorboats have to work miracles to avoid ending up in the water because the waves are so strong.”

People in motorboats complaining about waves. Let me stop and think about that for a minute.

You'll find virtually any kind of boat with a motor in the Giudecca Canal, usually in a huge hurry. Here we have taxis, a tourist launch, one of countless barges, the Alilaguna airport waterbus, and a hotel launch. What's missing here at the moment, strictly by chance, are (among others) the garbage scows, innumerable private motorboats of all sizes, as well as the vehicles of public transport: vaporettos, motoscafos, and the ferryboat carrying cars to and from the Lido.

Waves don’t really care who causes them or why, but each one acts as a hammer hitting anything it reaches. A study more than 10 years ago revealed, via sensors in the Grand Canal, that a wave hit a wall every 1 1/2 seconds. One pauses to imagine what the public response might be in a city — say, Rome — in which a heavily loaded truck ran into a building, especially a monument, every 1 1/2 seconds.  Zen-like resignation doesn’t come to my mind.

For some reason, waves just don’t sound that bad. But they are. And even though they’re right out there in plain view, solutions — and many have been proposed, and re-proposed — have the doomed allure of the classic New Year’s diet: feasible, yet somehow impossible.

One reason is a lethargy at City Hall of spectacular dimensions caused, among several factors, by the lack of ability or desire on the part of the city’s administrators to resist the inevitable shrieking and ranting from any sector which feels threatened by any suggestion of limits. Example: The recent succumbing to pressure by the taxi drivers, and the awarding of 25 new taxi licenses. These will not be taxis which do not create waves, but they will be taxis traveling the same routes which already are suffering the most devastation.

These licenses were granted by the same officials who in other situations solemnly invoke the “battle against motondoso.” Hard to get anywhere with a battle when most of your officers are collaborating with the other side.

One of many signs in the lagoon notifying boaters of the speed limit, here in the Canale delle Scoasse along the Lido. Note that the speed is given in kilometers (not knots) per hour. If anyone is going this slowly it's either because he's just spotted a policeman up ahead, or his motor has died and he's being towed.

Of course there are laws — plenty of them. But they are only sluggishly enforced, especially those concerning speed limits. There are sporadic police “blitzes” which snag a certain number of offenders (it’s like shooting fish in a barrel), but these blitzes change nothing, not even for the people who have been handed fines. Taking your chances is part of the Mediterranean worldview, and laws are meant to be ignored.  Fines are part of the annual budget for many waterborne enterprises. Confiscate your taxi? We’ve got more. One taxi owner invited some city politicians to the launching of his new one.

Down here at the waterline, I can tell you that one of the biggest obstacles to reducing waves is contained in three words: “Io devo lavorare” (Literally, “I have to work.”  Figuratively, “Get off my back, do you want my wife and children to be thrown out onto the street to beg?”)

This phrase is lavishly used, on the assumption that it’s a free pass to whatever the person speaking it feels like doing. And when gondoliers stage one of their periodic protests, which are always dramatic because gondolas are inherently harmless, the little red “Danger: Irony” light starts to flash. Gondoliers spend all day carrying people around through waves that range from “unpleasant” to “dangerous” to “life-threatening” (not an exaggeration; occasional passengers have risked drowning, and some have succeeded). But several gondolier cooperatives do a very lucrative business owning and operating a fleet of mega-tourist launches. 

My favorite little moment was when two gondoliers went to a meeting of Pax in Aqua, the citizens’ group committed to combating motondoso. They went in a motorboat.

It’s not that they should have swum there. I’m just saying.

The gondola race at Murano is one of the most important Venetian-rowing races ever. Here is a small part of the motor-driven horde, lovers of the oar, which turns out to cheer on their friends and relatives. Some of these fans will also be gondoliers.

I’ll tell you when I gave up. It wasn’t the Sunday afternoon we barely made it back alive rowing our little Venetian topetta from Bacan’, one of the most popular lagoon summer spots to hang out in boats, which means motorboats. The waves were heavy, frantic, aggressive; they came from every direction as boat wakes smashed into each other. So: No more Bacan’ for us. We can just stay home and take up paper-making.  Problem solved.

No, I could hear the air seep out of my capacity to hope on another Sunday afternoon in 2002, I think it was, when we were walking along the rio di San Trovaso — a very narrow canal which is always busy because it’s one of the shortest cuts between the Giudecca Canal and the Grand Canal.

For weeks, maybe months, long warning strips of red and white tape had been strung along parts of the fondamenta bordering the canal because it had become so unsafe to walk on. The waves from the constant traffic had done their inevitable work weakening the sidewalks’ foundations, in which you could easily see cracks, cracks that were widening thanks to the waves rushing in and out, pulling the soil from beneath the paving stones.  The whole walkway was ready to cave in.

In that period, the then-mayor Paolo Costa had tried a novel approach to the problem: He had appointed himself Special Commissioner against Motondoso, which gave him extraordinary powers to deal with the deteriorating situation and also — well, why not? — get an extra paycheck.

His idea was that the bureaucracy had proved incapable of dealing with the waterborne anarchy which is obviously destroying the city, and the police hadn’t been noticeably effective in enforcing the laws (which you could understand, seeing that there are so few police and so rarely are any dedicated to monitoring speed limits). Therefore a sort of instant dictator would have to step in to impose order.

Even classic Venetian boats, such as this Burano-type sandolo, almost always have a motor clamped onto them. It might be only 15 hp, but that's irrelevant. A motor there must be.

The resulting special decree (Ordinanza n.09/2002, prot. 38/2002, February 21, 2002) outlines speed limits, and boat specifications, and canals name by name, to a degree which makes it clear that if every regulation were to be obeyed wars would cease, hunger would disappear, and illness and poverty would become but an ancestral bad dream. I’m sorry it’s only in Italian, it makes genuinely inspiring reading.

Suddenly we saw a motorboat come screaming down the canal, faster than any boat I’d ever seen here, hurling walls of white water against the trembling embankments. We stopped, stunned. Everybody walking along had stopped. Then the boat stopped. We heard voices. A few people on the sidewalk were talking to the people in the boat. And then it became clear.

They were filming “The Italian Job,” and this was just one of many sequences the city was to witness over the next few days or weeks (I can’t remember). Boats were racing up and down canals in a way that not even taxi-drivers could have dreamed of. Of course, if a taxi driver were to go this fast, he’d have to go to jail, or hell. For a movie, though — that’s something else entirely.

And who gave the permission for this film and these high-speed chases, and these walls of white water? The mayor. Excuse me, I meant the Special Commissioner against Motondoso.

I wish I could say I made that up, but I didn’t.

Just one of the countless waves (here, the Giudecca Canal lands a left hook on the Zattere) which are reducing Venice to rubble.

Slapping. Punching. Thudding. This is the sound of what things have come to. For 1,795 years, Venice celebrated Ascension Day with a ceremony in which the doge threw a golden ring into the sea and intoned the words: “Desponsamus te, O Mare, in signum veri perpetique dominii.”  (”I wed thee, O Sea, in sign of true and perpetual dominion.”)  In this case he was referring to the Adriatic, and possibly even the Mediterranean, and the Venetians did an excellent job of this for a long time.  But the Venetian lagoon is a body of water which resists domination.  It is not a happy marriage.

The gondoliers at the Molo, on the Bacino of San Marco in front of the Doge's Palace, finally installed a breakwater at their own expense. It's not the perfect solution, but it's better than nothing.

Over the past 50 years, the complex rapport between land and liquid, hitherto marred by only occasional bickering — an engineering misunderstanding, say, or some meteorological outburst — has now reached the stage of open battle.

But contrary to the general impression the world has of Venice’s rapport with its waters, the most serious problem does not involve acqua alta, or high tide. It is motondoso (sometimes moto ondoso), or the waves caused by motorboats, which is literally killing the lagoon’s erstwhile spouse.  And unlike other forms of pollution or pressure, waves are a little hard to keep secret.  The sight and sound of crashing water has become nearly constant.

Venetians routinely refer to motondoso as “the cancer of Venice.”

If you’re not impressed by the roiling high seas surrounding the city (try stepping between the leaping and plunging dock and vaporetto after the motonave — or better yet, the Alilaguna, the yellow airport “bus” — has just passed), give a glance at any canal at low tide.

You’ll see walls with chunks of stone and brick gone, stone steps fallen askew, cracks and fissures snaking up building walls from the foundation to the second floor, and even higher. It doesn’t take many canals before you begin to wonder how the city manages to stay on its feet. There are palaces on virtually every canal which have holes in their foundations bigger than hula hoops – dank caverns stretching back into the darkness. I have seen them with these very eyes. And if I’ve seen them, so has everybody else. But it just keeps getting worse.

Several years ago the fondamenta on the Giudecca facing the eponymous canal was finally completely repaired.  Years of pounding waves were causing it to literally fall into the canal.  But the waves continue as before — on the contrary, they’re increasing.  The force, the height, the frequency, pick what you will.  It’s all bad.  (One study has stated that the highest waves in the entire lagoon are in the Giudecca Canal.)

Therefore the fondamenta is beginning to weaken again in the same way, which you can check by looking at the point at which a building is attached to the fondamenta.  Cracks are opening up.  Again. 

So fixing — or saying you’ve fixed — a problem doesn’t count for much if you haven’t, you know, actually fixed it.

The constant spray from the waves creates the ideal environment for a type of algae which is spectacularly slippery. And in the winter, spray turns to ice. You're on your own.

Low tide here is an appalling revelation. One of the primary causes of this damage are enormous iron workboats. If one bumps into a wall even slightly, it opens a crack (or hole) which the waves keep eroding. Hey, it's not their wall. (Photo: Italia Nostra)

This is one version of the intermediate stage, here on the Riva dei Sette Martiri facing the Bacino of San Marco. The waves have been pushing and pulling underneath and gravity has begun to take over. Just imagine if this were happening under your house. And yet, this is normal by now. There are no warning signs or barriers, no indication whatever that anything is happening here. This silent catastrophe is just sitting here peacefully in broad daylight as people wander by.

Waves working night and day will eventually produce a result like this ruined fondamenta facing the Canale di Santa Chiara just behind Piazzale Roma. The former walkway looks like a dead parking lot because it’s undergoing renovation, work almost certainly necessary because the pavement was giving way due to the pounding waves in the canal. The fondamenta will eventually be new, but the waves will continue – not only is the canal narrow, it is a major route for vaporetto and barge traffic.

Next: Part 2: The Why

Part 3:  The How

Suck It Up

Part 4: The lagoon’s eye view