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The pandemic is slowly retreating here and normal life has taken a few big summer-weekend bounces that give the city the sensation that the old days have returned.  On June 2, a national holiday, there were 50,000 tourists in the city (21,000 from the Veneto, 19,000 from other Regions, 10,000 foreigners, half of which were German).  However, it’s becoming clear that the old days could have used a lot of improvement.

All those months during lockdown, etc., when so many people hoped that the city could somehow benefit from the forced suspension of so many activities in order to reassess and resolve the problems of the mass tourism monoculture, was time blown away like so many soap bubbles.  We’re pretty much right back to where we were in February, 2019.

For example, outdoor tables and chairs were permitted to occupy more space than strictly allowed during the Old Regime in order to accommodate the necessary social distancing; now they might just stay that way, filling up streets and campos, because now we’re used to it (though the owners won’t feel like paying an adjusted tax for occupying more public space).   The aforementioned bars and restaurants and other touristic enterprises have been discovering, to their surprise, that manpower is missing.  Bluntly, one out of five former employees isn’t coming back.  A year and a half has passed, and waiters and chambermaids and many other toilers in the touristic fields have found other jobs.  So let’s nab all the foreign workers we can for temporary (low-paid) summer work, even though they haven’t been vaccinated.

As for daily life, naturally I’m glad that people are working again, but this means we’re picking back up with motondoso and sometimes overcrowded vaporettos and cloddish tourists and pickpockets and seagulls ripping the food out of people’s hands in the Piazza San Marco and so forth, with more of the same coming up, no doubt, as restrictions continue to ease.  The great forerunner is the Biennale of Architecture; it opened on May 22 and will run until November 21, B.T.U.  (Barring The Unforeseen, not British thermal units.)  The unforeseen has become a major player now in any undertaking, psychologically if not logistically.

So now that Venice Inc. is trying to get back underway, I paraphrase the famous remark of American President Calvin Coolidge and say that obviously the business of Venice is business.  Or, as I put it, thisisvenicewheremoneyisking.  And now that we can talk about business in the present tense again, I see the economic landscape, as illustrated by the shops, as divided into two basic categories.  And both show the ways in which the Venetian economy has changed over the past two generations or so.

Category 1:  Shops that have changed over the years.  Category 2:  Shops that have closed forever.

Category 1:  Walking around the city, I can add my own version of what I call the Venetian litany: “I remember when that was…..”.  When Lino would walk along Calle Larga San Barnaba and tell me, door by door, who used to be there, the coal seller or the fish fryer, it seemed exotic, as if change was so long ago.  But now I too have seen it as it is happening.

It used to be, some 25 years ago, that when useful shops succumbed they were most often replaced by ones selling “Murano glass” or Carnival masks.  Lately, though, when you see yet another useful shop disappear you can assume it will be replaced — well, certainly by supermarkets, they’re everywhere now — by bars/cafes/restaurants, or by hotels.  Evidently people come to Venice to eat and sleep, as if it were a convalescent hospital.

Examples are everywhere.  The best nursing home in the city is being converted to a hotel (and the worst nursing home appears to be on the same trajectory).

When the skeletons of the two former gas holders near San Francesco de la Vigna were up for renovation not too long ago, scores of families formed a committee to implore the city to convert them to an urgently needed multi-purpose sports center for the students of the nearby high schools.  For a while it seemed as if the city had yet to decide, and then the surprise.  Renovation has continued, but the citizens are out of luck because this treasure of industrial archaeology is going to be a hotel.  Those are only two examples of how a facility useful to Venetians is removed to make room for something that makes money.

So much for hotels.  Let there be restaurants!

I don’t want to bore you to oblivion, but here’s a quick review of the transformation of via Garibaldi, still proudly promoted (not by us) as one of the few places where you can still find real Venetians.  Yet many shops that were used every day by the aforementioned Venetians have gradually been removed, one by one.  The excellent clothing store has undergone really ambitious renovation to become a restaurant (work appears to be stalled, but there are cartons of wine on the floor); the small deli/supermarket where Claudio reigned behind the case of cheese and butter is now a restaurant; a pork butcher shop dedicated to salame and other such products is a restaurant; the furniture and upholstery store became a bar and gaming salon (closed since the acqua alta of November 11, 2019); the fresh pasta and exotic ingredients shop is now Nevodi Pizzalab for takeaway pizza; a fruit and vegetable stand is now a restaurant.

On the non-comestible side, other stores have also been through various reincarnations that moved successively farther away from ordinary life.  The bank became a hardware store (could have been useful except that somehow whatever you needed on Friday was expected to be delivered next Wednesday.  This went on for at least two years until it folded) and now it’s a real estate agency.  We miss the bank.

Actually, there are plenty of places that change that don’t turn into restaurants.

Apartments for rent:  Of course this is a business too, and by now a very big one.  The pandemic across Europe pretty much obliterated last year’s crop of tourists, but they are coming back.  Collectively calumniated in the popular mind as “Airbnb,” apartments for tourists are offered by scores of other companies.

The continuing depopulation of Venice has left ever-more apartments empty, so of course they’ve become another commodity.  Venice is far from unique in this, as we all know, but the sheer quantity has distorted (or is the result of the distortion) of Venetian life.  Now that the apartments are being registered and regulated, virtually all of Venice’s some 3,000 streets (calle, calesela, ruga, salizada, ramo, etc.) has at least one door with an official tag indicating a touristic apartment within.  We knew there were lots, but now that we can see them it’s a bit unnerving.  Still, all those people who rail against Airbnb as the destroyer of Venetian life need to recognize that nobody has forced the apartment owner to do this, and otherwise the apartment would most likely sit empty, which isn’t a positive thing at all.

I could add a thousand more of these images, but you get the idea.

So much for Category 1, shops (and apartments) changing. Before I go to Category 2 (shops disappearing), here are some thoughts on the economics of bread.

Every morning at 6:30 a ponderous barge briskly backs up along the rio de Sant’Ana, with huge roaring, till it reaches an open space to park.  One of the two men aboard jumps ashore, loads a few plastic boxes containing variously shaped bread onto his handtruck, and rolls it rapidly toward the Coop supermarket on via Garibaldi.

Exactly five minutes later he has returned with the empty boxes and the barge is roaring its way forward (there is no space to turn around) out of the canal.

This phenomenon interests me because the barge is enormous, yet by the time it gets to us it is carrying a load that would qualify as almost nothing.  Seems like a heck of a boat to use for that small a cargo, but let’s say that this is the last stop, and that the run started at 4:00 AM with ten stops and eight tons of bread.  That’s not exactly my point.  It seems like a huge expenditure for a small return, but clearly the formula is working fine.

My point, however clumsily expressed, is that this is a proverbial coal-to-Newcastle situation.  Within the area of about two city blocks, there are three full-time bakeries turning out bread every morning as the handtruck from who knows where rolls by.  So in my primitive lizard brain, anybody who’s in favor of keeping local businesses alive ought to consider the possibility of the local bakeries supplying the supermarket, though I realize that’s slightly nuts because people could just go buy the bread straight from the baker.

So why do people buy bread at the Coop when they could buy it up the street at Crosara?  Because it’s cheaper, of course.  But it isn’t as good.  So at the intersection of price, quality and convenience (bakeries close in the middle of the day), we see the bread on the truck at dawn a mere half hour before the first bakery opens.

Hence the eternal decision is ever-present on via Garibaldi: Save 5 cents per kilo on my daily bread even though it tastes like styrofoam, or spend the 5 cents more on something divine just out of the oven.  Venice will be making money somehow in any case, because that’s the way it is.

Speaking of little shops, we come to Category 2, the most poignant witness to how Venice has changed: Shops that have closed forever.  In your wanderings around the city you may have seen, but not observed, them.  They are everywhere, mute witnesses to crafts and businesses and livelihoods and families that made Venice a place where life was vivid and intimate and dense.