When I mentioned that then-mayor Riccardo Selvatico was the guiding spirit behind the huge undertaking of building (and paying for) healthier housing in Venice, I left it at that. It sounds important, but kind of lame.
Until you consider the conditions that many (not all, of course) Venetians were living in at the end of the nineteenth century.
So even though the clean, foursquare handiwork of these reformers may not look picturesque or romantic (whatever that may be), I hope you will look with deeper respect at these more modern tracts around the city when you consider how they changed the lives (starting by saving them) of many families. I am sure that nobody living in one of those picturesque houses missed it at all when something dramatically better presented itself. A few of Lino’s friends in early childhood lived in circumstances which weren’t of the best; one of his clearest memories about a friend’s house summarizes their family’s situation: “The smell of cold ashes.”
To Selvatico, this is the sort of place that cried for improvement. Does this scene inspire a twinge of nostalgie de la boue? Selvatico wouldn’t have felt it. He somehow thought that people shouldn’t be compelled to live in small, dark, cramped, damp, malodorous, vermin-infested dwellings.At least the streets were paved, to one degree or another. For many centuries most of the streets were still beaten earth.These long and admittedly undistinguished blocks of houses in Castello (Calle Corera) didn’t used to look like this. Credit for this transformation goes to the mayor and his collaborators.The new houses always got a plaque. This one says: “This house in which healthiness and economy were desired to be joined The Comune and the Savings Bank built 1898.”And the project continued; this house in furthest Castello (Quintavalle) was wholesomely resurrected eight years after Selvatico’s death. The official phraseology remains the same, incised on plaques in various places around the city. If you ever happen to see one, give a thought to Riccardo Selvatico, who made at least some things better.
Mayors past and mayors present… I sense a slight difference in priorities…
It would be kind of nice having a local government in Venice that actually cared more for the Venetians than tourists like myself nowadays.
I would add that it would be nice to have an administration that ALSO cared about the tourists. There is no objective reason why there can’t be more bathrooms, and MANY more benches, and MANY MANY more garbage cans for those tourists who walk three kilometers to find somewhere to throw away their ice-cream cup. If someone says there isn’t enough money for it, may I observe that there always seems to be enough money for the things that somebody in the administration really wants to do.
Yes, of course it would be nice if we could have both, but as I sometimes say “you can’t have it all, then you’d need a larger magazzeno” 🙂 A lot of small things, like garbage cans and proper places to sit for a while without paying would naturally make life easier for tourists and at the same time possilby reduce behaviours that’s annoying Venetians. Given the choise between a mayour that provided housing, sanitation and work for the residents of Venice and one that would rather see Venice’s cultural heritaget turned into “un grande polo del lusso” or whatever the phrasing was I know what I’d choose. 🙂
The problems with politicians that never have enough money for the ordingary, mundane tasks like helthcare, schools and other boring day-to-day tasks but always seem to find plenty when it comes to various more or less useless but spectacular projects seem to be the same everywhere.
3 Comments
Mayors past and mayors present… I sense a slight difference in priorities…
It would be kind of nice having a local government in Venice that actually cared more for the Venetians than tourists like myself nowadays.
I would add that it would be nice to have an administration that ALSO cared about the tourists. There is no objective reason why there can’t be more bathrooms, and MANY more benches, and MANY MANY more garbage cans for those tourists who walk three kilometers to find somewhere to throw away their ice-cream cup. If someone says there isn’t enough money for it, may I observe that there always seems to be enough money for the things that somebody in the administration really wants to do.
Yes, of course it would be nice if we could have both, but as I sometimes say “you can’t have it all, then you’d need a larger magazzeno” 🙂 A lot of small things, like garbage cans and proper places to sit for a while without paying would naturally make life easier for tourists and at the same time possilby reduce behaviours that’s annoying Venetians. Given the choise between a mayour that provided housing, sanitation and work for the residents of Venice and one that would rather see Venice’s cultural heritaget turned into “un grande polo del lusso” or whatever the phrasing was I know what I’d choose. 🙂
The problems with politicians that never have enough money for the ordingary, mundane tasks like helthcare, schools and other boring day-to-day tasks but always seem to find plenty when it comes to various more or less useless but spectacular projects seem to be the same everywhere.