Events | Venice: I am not making this up

Giro d’Italia takes Lido hostage, part one

I don’t follow bicycle racing that much (polite way of saying “at all”) but I do know that there is a hugely important annual Italian event which corresponds roughly to the Tour de France: The Giro d’Italia. It has to start somewhere, and this year, its centennial, it will start on the Lido of Venice.

The oddness of that fact may not strike you immediately, but I have no doubt that it was a major PR coup for Venice, even though I’m not clear on exactly what the benefits might be. But never mind. Perhaps the TV stations covering it are paying for the privilege.

(The view from Venice: The long dark strip on the horizon is the Lido.)

Why is it odd? Because you can’t get anywhere from the Lido. Your choices are to go forward till you hit water, then turn around and go forward till you hit water. However, it does have the advantage of being very flat. Also, to be fair, one could hardly be expected to race around Venice itself, and Mestre would be just as weird. And Venice, as the Most Beautiful Stage Set in the World, inevitably lends itself to big events which want to benefit in some way from the backdrop.

So how is this supposed to work? The racers will be divided into squads, and they will do a team time trial by the chronometer. Then they’ll eat and drink and get their vitamin injections and take the ferry and leave the Lido and pick up the race the next day on the mainland, where the terrain has some verticality and they can really get their teeth into each other.

(The Lido is the long narrow island on the right. Detail from the EuroCart map LAGUNA VENETA, Studio F.M.B. Bologna.)

The city has been working dangerously hard to get the island spruced up and ready for the onslaught. The positive side: Banks of flowers have been installed (usually when plants are put out to beautify a public event, such as the film festival, people begin to liberate them. We’ll see how long these last). Even better, every bump, pothole, crack, fissure, bubble, or other anomaly in the road pavement for the 20.8 km (12.7 miles) course has been filled, smoothed, buffed. The residents are thrilled about that.

The downside: The Lido is being taken hostage by this event. Residents have long since been notified that they are forbidden to use their cars tomorrow. Period. (This would be obvious, but it needs to be stated because there aren’t so many roads on the Lido which would offer other options to residents wanting to drive half a mile to do something.) Not being able to drive anywhere means that life will have completely stopped. Forced to take the bus? There will be no bus service. No taxis. No vehicles. This is officially from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, with some inconvenience tacked on at each end. For the Lido People it will suddenly be like they’re living in Brigadoon, for the 99 years and 364 days it’s invisible.

Anyone who needs to go somewhere on the Lido (Lino and me, say, if we were to want to go rowing that afternoon) tomorrow will have the option of once-hourly boat service which will make several stops along the lagoon shoreline. At which point you debark and walk inland — presuming they let you cross the road.

Well, it won’t kill me not to go to the Lido one day. Au contraire. But it’s the drama of the logistics that has overwhelmed the world- and life-view of the Lido People. Whereas citizens of other towns experiencing world-class events (Monaco comes to mind) might feel a kind of excitement and even pride, people on the Lido are thinking only of how hard life is going to be tomorrow. They are among the most provincial, isolated people I’ve ever known, and about the only thing that has any reality for them is their own little island life. (I exclude shopkeepers, who I imagine are hoping for some kind of windfall from the tornado passing through.)

I would love to have the chance to announce that Jesus is coming back tomorrow and He’s starting on the Lido, just to hear what the Lido People would say. It would either be “Will Billa [the supermarket] still stay open till 8:00?” or “So, does that mean that the vaporetto will follow the Sunday timetable?”

I’ll let you know how it goes.

May Day in Venice: What they do

There’s so much to say about tourism in Venice I’ll have to go in easy stages, filling many pages and posts. Let’s start with last weekend, which demonstrated the rough outlines of what the term “tourism” can mean here.

The first of May is a holiday in much of Europe, its version of Labor Day in which we celebrate workers and excoriate employers.

Piazza San Marco. People having a good time. I think.

Nothing quite so simple anymore as sending armies and tanks marching across Red Square; this year saw mass demonstrations of angry workers (and ex-workers) in Greece, France, Turkey, Spain, and Germany, and even Russia, which once reveled more in its military parades than rallies of irate trade unions.

Here in Venice, it was just another day in the march of money, and in fact there are plenty of days you could label “mayday mayday,” when holidaying legions of tourists from all over Europe march across the city. So far this year the Horde-Meter has registered Carnival, followed by Easter weekend, then by April 25 (which fell on a weekend this year), and finally May 1.

There were roughly 60,000 tourists per day, instantly doubling the city’s population, shuffling along the narrow streets, overwhelming the Piazza San Marco, and turning the vaporettos (when and if you finally managed to get on one) into something from the Pushkar Camel Fair. Hundreds of tourist coaches unleashed their day-tripping multitudes onto a city whose only public space, the Piazza San Marco, is 320 times smaller than Red Square. Let’s put it another way: The Piazza covers 255 square meters, and crowd-density experts estimate that one square meter can reasonably (we’ll leave some latitude for what that means) hold 3-4 people. That means that ideally there would be no more than 1,000 people in the Piazza at any given time. Let’s say that the crowds peak at noon, and let’s say that that amounts to 40,000 people. Or even 30,000, half the daily total. Or even 20,000, one-third the daily total. Numbers aren’t my strongest point but I think I could already have guessed that there might be as much as 20 times more people in the Piazza than would be pleasant.

The ACTV added three runs per hour to its already heavy Grand Canal vaporetto schedule (reaching a total of 37 extra runs), as well as nine extra runs to Murano and Burano and 13 extra back to Venice. But it’s never enough, in the sense that “enough” would mean no waiting, no crushing, no delays. It would be an impressive spiritual exercise for anyone wanting to determine how much compassion they can feel toward their fellow humans to board the #1 local vaporetto line at Piazzale Roma on any Mayday (which amounts to virtually any day from May 1 to September 1) with their soul full of love for humankind, and then measure what’s left by the time they reach San Marco.

If you look at tourism in Venice in strictly logistical terms, you can see that it’s a fascinating little problem, which so far has defeated solution. There are approximations of functionality (more vaporettos), but essentially there is no way in which a city which covers only three square miles can prevent or neutralize the stress caused by this particular kind of mass demonstration. It can only be minimized, sort of.

I spent an hour in the Piazza and I came away with one unexpected insight: It’s entirely possible that the gondoliers at the two “stations” (stazi) there were not born crazy. I’ve always wondered about that. I believe it’s likely that they have been made to go crazy by too many days like this. And don’t think all these tourists represent wallets on the hoof. An inverse ratio between quantity and quality has been noticed by almost everyone, something I’ll go into on another occasion.

Me, I have no idea how much money you would have to pay me — in cash, even — to go to San Marco on a holiday weekend, at least any later than 7:00 AM. I need to protect what little sanity I have left.