January, 2018 | Venice: I am not making this up

MOSE: It’s just money

January 14, 2018 1 Comment

By this point, the mechanics and components of MOSE could only be interesting to engineers, and maybe not even to them. So here are some pictures of the lagoon which do not show it at as the monstrous adversary against which Venice must be defended at all costs (“all costs” will be broken down below).

It’s not that I want to talk about MOSE any more than I want to gnaw off a hangnail, but it’s not my fault if wondrous developments continue to pop up in the endless saga of this undertaking. And even if you are not a connoisseur of wondrousness (wondrosity?) in bloated public works, there may be a few people left who still are interested in how this thing is getting along. By which I mean those people who used to ask me about it with such eagerness and curiosity and goodwill and hopefulness, seeing that until just a few years ago the Destiny of Venice was trumpeted by the press to be hand- and leg-cuffed to the success or failure of this … thing.

One recalls that the most recent date projected for finishing its construction (and beginning the TWO-YEAR TESTING) was the end of 2018. But brace yourselves: It’s going to be later. They say that the conclusion will be January 1, 2019. Or when the cassowaries return to Capistrano. Or when Jesus comes back. Everything depends on everything else, which is a fancy way of saying “money.”

“Creation of the animals,” by Tintoretto (c. 1550). It could be my imagination, but I detect a resemblance to the teeming Venetian lagoon here, which I suspect was not accidental.

Here is a rundown of the situation as outlined by Roberto Linetti (Interregional Superintendent of Public Works) to the city councilors a few days ago:

The job needs more money. (I can’t comment on that anymore; it’s like saying the sun needs to come up tomorrow.) It needs 221 million euros — as do we all — to finance the completion of 60 remaining aspects of the project, 40 of which must be finished this year. Only 40 million euros have been released from the total allotment so far, and the rapport between work done and payments made is not encouraging.

“The construction sites are not going well,” Mr. Linetti admitted. Everything is slowing down because the private companies have slowed down, which they’ve done because of the financial and legal Gordianosities of the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the former governing consortium, and its collapse under the weight of its financial skulduggery. The companies have slowed down on working because payments due them are arriving even more slowly. “If the private companies aren’t motivated to go ahead,” said Linetti, “it’s hard to make them go ahead, even by kicking them.”

But every day that the construction is stalled, the underwater parts are deteriorating, which will only require more expenditure down the line. It’s a situation that brings to mind the notion that “We can’t stop fighting because otherwise our boys would have died for nothing.”

The MOSE annual budget also earmarks 15 million euros for caring for the lagoon (in unspecified ways). Considering how much damage to the lagoon the whole project is causing, that seems fair. Sort of. Nice they remember there is a lagoon.

Projected cost of administration and maintenance. This is a big one, which few people paid much attention to in the giddy days of selling contracts and all.

“We think that the administration of MOSE will cost about 80 million euros a year,” Linetti told the city councilors. “And that’s not much for a work of this importance and complexity in an area like Venice, considering that between 20-30 million are solely the cost of the utilities for the system’s functioning. Between 15-20 million euros a year will be for personnel, at least 100 of them. Then there are 30-40 million for the maintenance itself,” including the undefined work in the lagoon. Let me repeat that: The maintenance work itself will cost 30-40 million euros a year. “The State surely won’t fail to maintain its support.”

The maintenance work will be undertaken in the Arsenal, where the gates will periodically be brought to be cleaned, stripped and revarnished. Naturally a new hangar will have to be constructed for this work, which will cost 18 million. There are more zero’s swarming around the MOSE accounts than there are mosquitoes on Sant’ Erasmo at sunset in July.

Let the swans go live somewhere else, we’re busy operating big machinery and big bookkeeping programs.

And the use of the gates? The news is now that to protect Venice from exceptional high tide, it will probably be necessary to raise only the gates at the inlet at San Nicolo on the Lido, leaving the gates at Malamocco and Chioggia peacefully reposing underwater.

“The experts have verified,” said Linetti, “that closing only the inlet at the Lido will result in a significant lowering of the level of the tide in the historic center, without the necessity of closing the entire system.” So all that work and expense to build gates at all three inlets was…….pointless?

In fact, knowing that the Lido gates would be used the most frequently was the reason, according to Linetti, why more “materials” were dedicated to the construction there. And therefore, he says, “There will be a saving on the costs of maintenance.”

He has now totally lost me. Where do these savings on maintenance come from? On the gates that will be used more often (theoretically), or those which therefore will be used less? I could take high-powered binoculars and I still don’t see savings anywhere. At this point I’m not even sure what savings look like.

(I am indebted to the excellent reporting of Enrico Tantucci in La Nuova Venezia of 10 January 2018.)

Events

Lugash on the lagoon

January 9, 2018 2 Comments

The exhibition poster: “Treasures of the Mughals and the Maharajahs.” This piece alone gives a glimpse of the insane gorgeousness of the collection belonging to Sheik Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani of the royal family of Qatar.

Imagine a large room in a world-famous palace/museum, in which a lavish assortment of five centuries of dazzling Indian jewelry has been on display for months. This palace is in a famous, small, cramped, waterbound tourist city, a place not especially conducive to rapid escape. Imagine also that on the last day of the exhibition two men stroll in at 10:00 AM, deftly open a case, and mere seconds later just wander off, out of sight, with a pair of earrings and a brooch valued at 3 million dollars.

You can stop imagining. It happened on January 3 in the Doge’s Palace, and the jewels were not called the Pink Panther, but they might as well have been. The thieves are two men, caught on surveillance video, who didn’t even use a picklock, crowbar, bobby pin, small explosive; it appears that the case had already been slightly opened to facilitate the theft. It also appears that they had an electronic device that delayed the sounding of the alarm. Certainly it went off. Just too late to do any good; by then, the two thieves were lost in the crowd and gone.

The Sala dello Scrutinio doesn’t need any help in looking fabulous, but the dressing of this set, if we want to call it that, was worthy of the 270 pieces dating from the 16th to the 20th centuries displayed for the first time in Italy. It was as if Faberge’ had gone to India and came back to Venice. (Photo: Mattinopadova)

The city is agog, as you might suppose, and none more so than the parties directly involved in ensuring that this kind of thing doesn’t happen. Did the thieves have inside help? And how clever they were to plan this exploit for the last day, when the atmosphere was certainly that of the party being over.

There have already been pages and pages written in the press about this most unpleasant start to the New Year. Sparing you every speculation so far, may I merely note that the display cases were made by the Al Thani Foundation, as was the security system used. That certainly complicates the directions in which fingers might be pointing.

The items now at large. Most articles have pointed out that they were not among the most valuable, either historically or monetarily, of the items in the collection. If that makes anybody feel any better. (Photo: Corriere del Veneto).

Transport

Full steam ahead?

January 8, 2018 No Comments

Venice in the fog: my favorite! Unless I have to go somewhere on the vaporetto, and then there is inconvenience. A few mornings ago, walking was more efficient than public transport; vaporettos were running, but they were (as is customary in these cases) all going up the Grand Canal. Those that were running, that is, which is to say not all of them.

The year evidently began with a crunch for some unlucky person, as we discovered as our peregrination continued.

The fog could not conceal this boneyard on the Riva degli Schiavoni. The riva appears to have been dramatically riven.

The helpful stanchions indicate that somebody else had also noticed. Somebody official.

Holy God! I’m used to seeing the fondamentas gradually deteriorating, but this is like discovering the extinction of the dinosaurs.

We deduce that the destroying angel was one of the “foranei” vaporettos that roam the lagoon where there are no bridges to be concerned with. However, one is certainly to be concerned about stopping the boat when it comes back to the dock. (The vessel shown was certainly the companion to the one that ought to have been moored to the other side of the dock in front of the catastrophized riva.) And I’m sure the captain was concerned, right up to the moment when the boat’s bow clove the stone in twain. Curiously, no mention of this was to be found in the newspaper. The editors must have considered it to be just another one of “those things” that could happen anywhere. Besides, one needs to give space to more pressing concerns, such as the residents protesting dog poop on the streets.

Uncategorized

Everybody is somebody

January 1, 2018 11 Comments

No deep significance to this image — at least I don’t think there is. I do admire the anonymous person’s perseverance in training this branch. I don’t know if anybody in this branch’s family ever behaved like this.

So there we were, standing around waiting for a friend on the Strada Nuova; you may know (or I will tell you now) that this street is almost always teeming with people surging toward San Marco from the train station and vice versa, with small tributaries feeding into the main flow. The crowds are usually quite a mix of locals and non.

I hadn’t paid any attention to a little old grey-haired man who had just walked past us; all I saw when Lino said “Oh look” was his back. He was chunky, sort of like a short Jackie Gleason, and walking at a slow but steady pace, his steps separated by less than the length of his foot. Not shuffling, exactly, but certainly not striding.

“He was a garbage man in my old neighborhood,” Lino reported, and was known far and wide as a collector-of-things-people-throw-out. “I gave him a Singer sewing machine once and he gave me a huge jug of wine.” Lino recognizes now that a few liters of cheap plonk were not exactly a fair trade for something which today might be worth a tiny fortune. And why did Lino have a sewing machine anyway?

It was booty from another of those famous enterprises undertaken by Lino’s brother-in-law, the angelic Sergio who never says no. One of Lino’s sisters worked in the office of a dentist; the dentist had a father who had worked all his life in the Arsenal. The father was moving and so Lino and Sergio were recruited to clear out all his stuff.

“So I got the Singer,” Lino went on, “and the old man also gave me a Venetian passo, and some crucibles for melting gold, and a little anvil, and some other things.” The passo was a treasure; it was folding metal measuring stick calibrated to the system of measurements used by the shipbuilders of the Venetian Republic. One Venetian passo corresponded to about five feet. The late Nedis Tramontin built 1000 gondolas using the Venetian passo, and when he died in 2005 it was buried with him, as he requested. Or at least that’s what they said at his funeral.

Of course Lino could see plenty of value in keeping the passo, but no point at all in keeping the Singer, so away it went. As, by now, had the retired garbage collector. That’s all there is to say about him?

“He was also the coach of the Italian national women’s volleyball team.”