Nature | Venice: I am not making this up

Sensing Venice: Taste

June 17, 2010 1 Comment

A rare sighting of the trio of great spring vegetables together: asparagus, peas lurking behind them, and artichokes lurking to the lower right. The jury is instructed to disregard the figs, which are obviously from some hothouse somewhere, as the local ones don't appear till August, as God intended.

The gustatory sense is next on my list of attributes of the sensual Venice because this time of year is swamped, decks awash, in great things to eat. If one is inclined (“one” meaning “me”) to focus on seasonal comestibles, then this is a period that verges on the orgiastic. Naturally I try to conceal this. Sort of.

From October to April we eat in a sensible-shoes sort of way –plenty of local food, warm, sustaining, totally good for you but not very exciting, if you don’t count the castradina in November or the roast eel on Christmas Eve, and several forms of pastry. But this somewhat restrained diet means that by spring I’m watching for the first asparagus with an intensity most people give to watching the Powerball drawing.

At the annual patron saint's festa on Sant' Erasmo in early June, the farmers sell their produce practically in job lots. — At the annual patron saint's festa on Sant' Erasmo in early June, the farmers sell their produce essentially in job lots. It all looks so good I think they must call in makeup artists.

When I finally see that first green stalk, it’s like the starter’s gun on a new season of — how can I put this delicately? I can’t — glorious glut.

First comes the asparagus, which is steamed or boiled and often eaten with hard-boiled eggs cut in half. Sprinkle this assortment with salt, pepper, and extravirgin olive oil, and you’ve had dinner.

IMG_2076 ven taste comp — These are definitely my favorite flower to eat.

Shortly thereafter the artichokes arrive. Not just any artichoke, but the carciofo violetto from Sant’ Erasmo. This is a purple variety that thrives around the lagoon — we’ve had them from the Vignole, and from Malamocco, though apartment buildings now cover the artichoke fields that Lino remembers. The encyclopedia says they are also to be had from Chioggia, but I’ve never knowingly eaten anything from Chioggia except a type of radicchio. In any case, the saline environment evidently does something important to the old Cynara scolymus, if my taste buds are not lying to me.

This spring we rowed over to Sant’ Erasmo many times, which meant that we’ve eaten more artichokes in the past five weeks than ever before, I think. We’d come home with bags of these little creatures, often cut off the plant just for us, paying about two-thirds less than the price at the Rialto. We’d pull off the outer leaves and eat the inner morsel raw. We’d simmer them in olive oil and garlic. We’d cut them in half and throw them on the griddle. We even experimented with boiling them and then storing them in a jar full of olive oil. No verdict yet on how those turned out, but it’s hard to imagine they could be bad.

I approve of a food that comes in its own wrapper, even if I do have to pay for the extra weight.

Peas: Fresh peas are next up, the crucial element to risi e bisi (REE-zee eh Bee-zee), or pea risotto, a Venetian classic. Preparing artichokes is a very grown-up sort of thing to do, but shelling peas takes me very, very far back. I could be anywhere (say, Venice) and it would still make me feel like I was sitting on somebody’s back porch. The only thing I object to about fresh peas is the same thing I object to about fresh pinto beans: you pay by weight, which means you’re paying for a whole pod in order to get a batch of little pellets. That’s another thing I’m going to have to change when I get to be in charge of the world.

This is an early spring bonus: carletti, which Lino finds on foraging expeditions along the lagoon edge of the Lido.

After a few weeks of glory this trinity of sublime plant life has begun to fade from the scene and I will not be eating them again till next spring, even if I could get them from hothouses in Sicily or Israel or who knows where. But other things will be along — lettuce and string beans and tomatoes and eggplant. The faithful old zucchine. Fresh tomatoes right off the vine — we make our own sauce. Around here, “Eat your vegetables” sounds like an invitation to a party.

Clamming is hard work if you don't really love it. Lino's got the capacity to focus of a — Clamming is hard work if you don't really love it. Lino's got the focus of a lion stalking its prey.

And the clamming season is now officially open — to the entire world, if your average Sunday afternoon in the lagoon is any indication. Of course it’s open all year to the professionals, but families spend recreational summer hours digging around in the shallows, and it is probably Lino’s favorite thing to do, way ahead of sleeping or eating. Maybe even drinking. It must be like meditation or yoga. He can do it for hours.

So we’ve already been out a few clam-hunting expeditions. The trick is to find some patch of terrain that hasn’t already been ravaged by legions of trippers. Lino is very patient and he actually looks for the clams, one by one, whereas most of the other mighty nimrods just claw up fistfuls of mud hoping to find something good. These are not fishermen, these are locusts.

After we’ve let the clams soak in a bucket of lagoon water for several hours, we take them home, and get ready for the Great Cooking Thereof. This may not happen immediately; we may have to leave them in the fridge in their plastic bag for a little while. They kind of hang out in there till we’re ready to cook them. When we put the bag in the sink, I can hear them making moist little shifting and tchk-tchk noises. Yes, they’re still alive, and these little sounds sort of do something to me. Maybe they’re talking about how much they enjoyed spending the afternoon in the dark and the cool. I hope so. I’m glad they don’t know what’s coming next.

Lino brought home the ideal assortment -- cape tonde ("malgarote"), caparozzoli, sansonei, lungoni, and the occasional bevarassa. Now we're introducing them to oil and garlic.

So we throw them into a large saute pan with garlic and oil. Steam goes everywhere. About a minute later they’ve given their last dying gasp, opened their shells and succumbed. We put them in a bowl where they slosh around in a celestial broth of their own saltwater, garlic, lemon juice and chopped parsley and we eat them like crazed little swine, right out of the shell — ignoring scalded fingertips, drops of oily water falling at random.

I’ve been talking about clams in a generic sort of way, but there are all sorts of bivalves to be had out there. Bevarasse (Venus gallina), sansonei, cape lunghe (Solen vagina), cape tonde (Cardium edule), caragoi (Vulgocerithium vulgatum), canestrei (Pecten opercularis), to name a few. There are also oysters — Lino went out on Christmas Eve a few years ago and brought back a load of fresh lagoon oysters, which were delicately sweet. Wish he’d do it again.

Just a few short hours ago, these mussels were clinging to their piling wondering what to do today. Unfortunately for them, we got to decide.

And now it’s mussels. A friend of ours went out in his boat yesterday with a fiendish contraption and scraped a huge amount of them off the pilings — wait, I’m not finished! — the pilings in the lagoon near the island of the Certosa, near the inlet of San Nicolo’, where the tide is so strong that the water is always really clean. Last night we permitted ourselves a modest gorge, annihilating a large bowl in a very short time. They were divine.

Somebody gave us a batch of canestrei, or "lid scallops." It took no time at all to open, bread, and fry them. You don't like fried food? Try these.

Whatever remains of the clams or the mussels is either thrown into tomato sauce for pasta later, or set aside (clams especially) for a risotto. Then we go out and get more.

I haven’t even gotten to the subject of fruit or ice cream, which are whole galaxies of delectable on their own, but I’m worn out. So let’s all put our heads down on our desks and be quiet for a few minutes.

But as we do, let me just repeat something I say far too often: It’s not easy to eat really well (not impossible, but not easy, to eat really well) in a restaurant in Venice, but here at home we eat better than the entire dynasty of Gediminids.

Nature, Venetian-ness

Sensing Venice: Sound

June 14, 2010 2 Comments

That tenor with the Kevlar lungs has no trouble getting your attention. But what may be a little harder to imagine is how beautiful Venice sounds when left to her own devices.

Nothing against sight; of all the senses, sight comes first, at least for us humans. But sight can make you lazy, especially in Venice. All you have to do is open just one eye, even squinting, and you’d still see enough beauty to keep you going for months. Which led me to believe, for quite a long time, that being blind in Venice would be the worst thing in the world. I mean, if you had to be blind, you might as well go live somewhere else. Bland, Missouri. Oil Trough, Arkansas. Anywhere but here.

Venice in fact is doomed to be stared at, posing for a million of the same photos every day, a life as predictable and monotonous as the typical gondolier’s. So it’s easy to assume that it’s your eyes that you need most.

I don’t think so anymore. Here is how Venice sounds to me.

Silence. There is plenty of noise all day long here, normal third-millennium racket ranging from pneumatic drills to 40-hp motors to deafening boom-boxes in passing boats blasting that car-crash-torture-dungeon music. And on summer nights, when people tend to stay out till dawn, along about 2:00 or 3:00 there is the boisterous chorus of their inane “Good-night-it-was-great-see-you-tomorrow-I’ll-call-you-okay-I’ll-text-you” comments from right outside our bedroom window, which naturally has to be open because of the heat. You’d think somebody in the group was going off to walk across Antarctica, the way some of them carry on.

I sometimes wonder whether anybody out on the street bothers to consider that there might be people — us, for example — behind our Venetian blinds. But even if they did, I don’t think they’d care. The street by our window is like Andorra, a zone free of duty — any sort of duty, like not shouting after midnight. Public space here isn’t understood to belong to all of us. It’s understood to belong to none of us, nobody at all. Do whatever you want.

But there comes a mystic moment somewhere in the night when a silence suffuses the city that is almost more beautiful than Bach. Deep. Intricate. Voluptuous. It’s not merely the absence of noise, this silence is an element entirely its own, made of everything alive but inaudible, the tide turning and the breeze that begins to waft from the sea and the luminous darkness itself. The proto-morning is filled with a silence that could be the distillation of every sound in the world that we can’t hear.

Blackbirds. Just as I wait for certain flavors to appear in season, I wait for certain sounds, and beginning in March and going on till around now, the blackbirds announce the dawn with an accuracy a chronometer could only dream of. In fact, I know it’s 4:00 AM as I lie there in the dark because one blackbird will begin to sing. One. A single voice that’s like a flute that wants to be a crystal bell. It’s almost more beautiful than laughter. It is so beautiful that I challenge you to suggest a song that could even come close. It hasn’t been written. And as long as there are blackbirds on earth, I really don’t care. Too bad they got such a boring name, but I suppose calling them the “voice of angels” bird would sound worse.

A shutter opening (or closing).

These are working shutters -- nothing decorative or ogival about them. Strange to say, while leaving a shutter open at night will kill you, you must open them in the morning, even if it's below freezing outside.

For me, this is one of the quintessential sounds of Venice, even more than foghorns or the bells of San Marco, God forgive me. It is one of the elemental sounds of dawn, an intimate, homely scraping noise ( it depends on how old and how plumb the shutters are) followed by two clunks as the shutters reach the outer wall. It’s the domestic equivalent of the trumpet at Churchill Downs.

Shutters are no mere decoration; Venetians believe — sorry, they know — that drafts are the thin end of the health wedge. Anything from a head cold to pleurisy, hiccups, the blind staggers, whatever you’ve got will almost certainly have been caused by a draft that was carelessly permitted to enter. “Colpo di finestra, colpo di balestra,” they darkly say: “A blow (as in punch) via the window is a blow from the crossbow.” No doubts, no discussions. If you don’t close your shutters, you’re just asking for it.

Rolling suitcases, all sizes, from carry-ons to steamer trunks. This is a fairly new sound which — unlike the birds and the shutters and all — the Venetians of yore might have trouble identifying. Considering how tourist apartment rentals have proliferated all over the city, the suitcase-sound has become as irrevocable as the sunrise. I will hear it as early as 3:00 AM, if the hardy travelers are trying to make the first flight at 6:35 sharp. (Unlikely, as that plane is going to Lyon, but they’ll almost certainly want one of the following flock of early flights to Rome, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and all those other big connection points for intercontinental flights).

Your average rolling suitcase isn’t any happier to be up at this hour than its people are, because it makes a heavy low grumbling noise as it is dragged along the granite streets. Then it goes bumpbumpbump twelve times, up the steps of the bridge. And twelve bumps down the other side.

Until a few years ago, the only hotel in this precinct was a modest if overpriced former palazzo with guests who traveled at decent hours. But now there has been an explosion of little bijou hotels which call themselves “bed and breakfast” but which have no relation whatever to the classic British version I remember so fondly (a spare room in some little retired couple’s house). There has been an even greater efflorescence of apartments for rent; if you start noodling around on the Net, you might think there is no dwelling left for Venetians, a feeling which many Venetians have begun to share.

So with all these places to stay, about ten to fifty times more people are hauling their stuff around today than even two years ago. The second-floor apartment across the street from us — all of ten feet away — belongs to someone who rents it through a French agency, because only French people stay there. They annoy the hoo out of the Venetians who live in the building, because they forget to close the front door, or they put their garbage out at inappropriate times (“Well we’re leaving before the trash is collected tomorrow,” one woman told me huffily, and I had to admit she had a point). And they toss their cigarette butts out the window. I never see them do it, but I also don’t see any excuse for it. Every few days I go out and sweep up all the cruddy filters strewn between their door and ours. (Filters — strange, I know. They don’t make French smokers the way they used to. Next thing you know, they’ll be drinking Coke. Oh wait — 42 percent of the French population does drink Coke. Well there you are.)

Via Garibaldi toward evening, not long before the kids begin to have their nervous breakdowns.

The sounds that shape the rest of the day depend on weather, whether or not school is in session (parents and children chattering on their way home), when the shops close (usually between 12:30 and 1:00) which means clumps of women form at the foot of the bridge to finish whatever it was they were discussing). It also depends on whether or not the kids have had their naps, or snacks, or have been thwarted in some way as their blood sugar plummets. Between 5:00 and 6:00 it seems that every toddler in the neighborhood collectively snaps, because what I used to think of quaintly as the “aperitivo hour” I have now re-labeled as the Hour of the Imploding Child.

The invisible piano. This is my favorite summer sound. I’ll hear it in the early evening, wafting out of an upper-storey apartment at the foot of via Garibaldi, behind some trees. It’s obviously a person and not a recording because of repetitions and occasional errors, and whoever it is (man? woman? no way to guess) plays well enough for it to be enjoyable but not so well as to be off-putting. Chopin ballades, sonatas by Scarlatti, “Invitation to the Dance” by Weber, music my mother used to play after supper. It makes me feel happy.

Fog is always beautiful, even if it does wreck your day's logistics.

Foghorns. My favorite winter sound. There are a few unpleasant aspects to fog, of course — clothes on the line which have given up all hope of ever drying; vaporettos re-routed up the Grand Canal for safety reasons, which drastically distorts your route to wherever you need to go. People not from Venice think that high water is a nuisance, but they’ve never seen what fog can do to your day. Hordes of tired, hungry, harassed people accumulating on the dock at Sant’ Elena waiting for the vaporetto with the radar to finally arrive and take them the five minutes across to the Lido. No radar, no vaporetto. Boats used to make this little crossing all the time, now you’d think that they were facing the iceberg zone off Greenland or something.

But when I hear the distant foghorn, it carries more romance to me than 289 gondola rides — or even one, actually — under the Bridge of Sighs. The occasional deeper blast from the Minoan Lines ferry arriving from Greece — warning? threat? — is also exciting, especially if you’re out rowing in the fog and it’s blowing at you. This has happened to me.

Bells. The bells in the campanile of San Marco ring several times a day, but I pay special attention to certain ringing. Such as the single bell that sounds at 3:00 PM every Friday, to recall our thoughts to Good Friday and the crucifixion of Christ. There is the midnight tolling of the marangon, the deepest of all, which you can hear from many parts of the city. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, I’ve even heard it when we were out in the lagoon. Deeply comforting, like the sentinel on the battlements. The bells also ring every July 14 at 10:02 in the morning, to commemorate the epochal collapse of the campanile at that moment in 1902.

But with the dark that sumptuous stillness (eventually) returns, permeated not only with the voices of forgotten doges but also the voices of exasperated mothers and Macedonian plasterers.

Of course it would be terrible to be blind in Venice. But it would be at least as bad to be deaf here.

History, Nature, Problems, Tourism, Water

MOSE : no happily ever after

April 1, 2010 No Comments

It’s probably way past everybody’s bedtime, so I’ll wrap up this little philippic.

Imagining momentarily that a satisfactory conclusion could ever be reached in the Gordian convolutions of the “floodgate” project, permit me to make a few very brief observations.

First, let us make a concerted effort to ban all those irresistible emotional words that acqua alta seems to force from journalists’ subconscious. “Venice under siege,” is a common one. CNN said that the high water of December, 2008 had been caused by the Adriatic “bursting its banks.” (Banks? Bursting? Are we in Holland?). The Discovery Channel stated that the high water was “cannibalizing” the city’s buildings (OMG). And on and on. One could smile if this kind of reporting wasn’t cannibalizing common sense.

If the city can't manage to find some money for people, even when we've got MOSE we may no longer have any people. I'm sorry moments like this will become so rare. — If the city can't manage to find some money for people, even when we've got MOSE we may no longer have any people. Good thing we have pictures.

When I think about it really calmly, it appears to me that it’s actually impossible for the planners and builders of MOSE to be able to make any promise (guarantee, statement, claim, whatever you like) about their creation that they can prove is accurate.

There are simply too many unknowns in the many different scenarios devoted to its use: How well it will function — that’s the big one — how much its maintenance (routine or extra) will cost, where the money for feeding and caring for it will come from, etc.

Every claim from its proponents is supported so far only by data assembled by them.

Probably the two major areas of concern for its success are:

First: How high the highest tides are likely to become. Some estimates only give MOSE 100 years of usefulness, after which the highest tides will spill over its maximum height. The frequency and duration of these exceptional high tides are also subject to interminable debate. But nobody knows.

I wonder who will put up the laundry everybody (including me) loves to photograph. Maybe they'll hire somebody. — I wonder who will hang out the laundry everybody (including me) loves to photograph. Maybe they'll hire somebody.

Second: How well the individual caissons will remain aligned. As I mentioned in my last post, if they begin to lose their perfect uniform surface (even if only one of them doesn’t rise as high as its neighbor, or the seal begins to leak), the strength of the entire “wall” of caissons will be compromised.

I have rowed against the incoming tide at the inlet at San Nicolo, in normal weather with no hint of wind or surge, and it is nowhere near being a joke. If the barrier isn’t perfect, the tide will come in whether MOSE is ready or not.

But let us not be downhearted. Let’s say that the machinery functions perfectly, precisely as planned. Let’s say that exceptional high water occurs ever more frequently. as expected. Let’s say that every prediction is fulfilled, even though there is no way to assume they will be.

Here is the real question: Has Venice been saved from anything except some water in the street for a few hours?

The true inundation, the most implacable and destructive, is the endless tide of tourists. The number increases 3 per cent every year; in 2009 it reached 21 million in an area of about three square miles.

No need to waste any time worrying about the old folks, they'll be gone anyway.

Whether this fact inspires emotion or not, it is more measurable, and predictable, than the inexact, politically driven “science” that has given birth to MOSE.

So let’s say that while assorted interested parties continue to water and fertilize the popular obsession which the press has with acqua alta, some very real problems continue to be neglected.

Young families will continue to move away because they can’t afford Venice (housing, primarily, though lack of jobs is a close second), the older generations eventually die off, and before MOSE has become obsolete the city will be devoid of residents. In their place will be the tsunami of tourists — tended to by merchants who mostly live on the mainland — which will finally render the city completely unliveable.

So even if MOSE performs perfectly, the Venice that has been “saved” will amount to nothing more than a collection of really old buildings, beautiful or not, according to your taste.

If no comparable effort is made to revive and protect the life of Venice, then even if MOSE turns out to be an engineering marvel to rival the invention of the arch, the once-thriving city will be as devoid of life as Machu Picchu.

When that happens, there’s won’t be much point in vilifying MOSE, or bewailing the triumph of politics and fear over basic municipal common sense.

But unfortunately, and perhaps even unwillingly, even the not-so-old will be gone too.

But it seems clear, even now, before the first button is pushed, that if the time, energy, and billions of dollars that will have been spent to hold back the tide had been dedicated to resolving the chronic, debilitating problems that Venice experiences every day, in 50 years there would still be a living city worth saving.

History, Nature, Problems, Water

MOSE: yes? no? maybe? don’t know?

March 31, 2010 12 Comments

Having reviewed the barest basics of acqua alta, and the barest technical outlines of the “floodgate” project intended to keep Venice as dry as the Nebraska Sand Hills, I’d better warn you that not everybody is on board.

“This is a way of funneling a huge amount of money to business allies of the government,” a city councilor told The Christian Science Monitor last year. “There are better alternatives but they were never considered. There is a big question mark over whether it will really work.”

So has anybody spoken up? Only thousands of people. The project been protested, sued against, blocked and stalled in all sorts of ways for 30 years (yes: it’s taken three decades to get this thing to where it is today), and even now the arguments pro and con continue to be lobbed back and forth between the opposing believers.

Construction proceeds at the inlet at San Nicolo, the one closest to Venice. The artificial island in the middle, built to accommodate construction equipment, has already affected the tidal flows. It will not be dismantled.

There have been a few times when it appeared that perhaps the project would be annulled for various reasons: lack of money, the bizarre absence of the required Environmental Impact Statement, legal loopholes that kept being found and then quickly closed. But nothing has been able to stop its implacable progression toward completion. It’s like throwing gravel at the Kraken.

By the end of 2009, despite all the myriad stops, starts, and slowdowns, 63 percent of the project had been completed. There isn’t enough money to restore historic palaces and churches which are visible every day, but somehow money has been found to block exceptional high water, an event which might occur four to seven times a year. Or maybe not at all. You may have noticed that the weather is not operated by the Swiss railway system.

But doesn’t everybody in Venice want to save their city from the sea?

In a word: No. At least not everybody in Venice wants this to be the way to tame the tides. In fact, it is difficult to find anyone who is not directly benefiting from the project who thinks it’s a good idea. Quite the contrary.

There are four general categories to which most objections belong. Let’s look at the them:

Political: Not much to say here, because this is a sphere in which nothing is ever resolved. The political fortresses from which accusations have been hurled like stone cannonballs are very well defined: right, left, extreme right, extreme left, and a mass of foot soldiers in the middle with all sorts of commingled ideas. But if you don’t belong to some group, nobody will ever listen to you (not that they listen so much anyway). Only thing is, each group has an agenda which includes lots of other issues as well, so if you join one to reject the MOSE project, you could find yourself on mailing lists as being against a batch of other undertakings as well. Maybe you’re not against those, maybe you don’t even care.

The lagoon has no idea there is a famous city sitting out there somewhere.

Others point out that the Special Law for Venice, by which federal funds are earmarked for the city, specifically authorized interventions to stop pollution and re-establish the morphologic equilibrium of the lagoon. It doesn’t appear that MOSE will satisfy either of those requirements. Au contraire.

Even more important, each side considers it a good day’s work if it has managed to frustrate or thwart the other. No other result is really necessary. This reality is the cholesterol in the political metabolism, hardening and constricting the arteries through which ideas and energy and good will might otherwise have flowed to produce something beneficial to the organism (the city and the lagoon) as a whole.

Economic: Every enormous public work since the Great Pyramid of Cholula (and perhaps even that one) has exceeded its projected cost. The original date of completion was given as 2010. This has now moved to 2014. Hence the costs have also changed. MOSE was budgeted at $4.5 billion, more or less, depending on whose estimates you follow, a number which it has now overtaken without even slowing down to wave. In 2008, the cost had risen to $7 billion.

There is also the cost/benefit aspect to consider. I think it’s fair to say that anyone who is not personally involved would concede that the costs and the benefits of this colossal undertaking do not come anywhere near matching up.

One foreign newspaper reported that $30 million a year is lost in business each time the Piazza San Marco floods (meaning that these 40-some shops can make $30 million in six hours, when the tide is in? Wow…. ). But let’s say acqua alta does cost $30 million, even if that number is cited only by the people who would benefit from the effects of such a prediction.

MOSE, as already mentioned, not only has cost $7 billion by now with 35 percent and two more years to go. Few if any mention is made of the estimated cost of annual maintenance of this behemoth: a mere $11.5 million. Of course, this will be eternal income to the interested parties. The project will be finished, but maintenance is forever.

Plenty of people would like to keep living here, if they could, in what can seem, to the locals, to be one of the great forgotten cities of the world. — Plenty of people would like to keep living here, if they could. But to the locals, it can seem like it's one of the great forgotten cities of the world.

But that isn’t the crux of the objections to its price tag. Simply put, it’s that money dedicated to MOSE is lost to anything else.

Stories which focus on the cost/disturbances inflicted by a few hours of water on the ground don’t tend to refer to the financial scorched earth the MOSE project has made of the quality of daily life for everybody everywhere in Venice, not just the shopkeepers around San Marco. Paying for this project, which might bring a temporary benefit to the city a couple of times a year, has deprived the city of the money required for numerous, more humble needs (schools, ambulances, restoration of monuments and private buildings, etc.).

Just about every facility or service which is important to city life, more important than the occasional need to put on the Wellies, has been cut in some way. The administrations’s constant cry “We have no money” tends not to explain why.

Environmental: When UNESCO designated Venice as a World Heritage Site in 1987, it specifically included the entire Venetian lagoon. It is the second-largest wetland in Europe (Europe has lost 2/3 of its wetlands in the last 100 years). It is vital area for plants, fish, and birds, some of which are already endangered. Every year some 200,000 birds winter, nest, or pause here in their twice-yearly migrations. One could make a reasonable case that the lagoon has a value which rivals that of Venice.

Local, national and international environmental groups have raised countless alarms about the effect of this project on the lagoon environment. Prominent among these are the World Wildlife Fund, LIPU (the bird people), RAMSAR (international wetland protection), Italia Nostra, and more, down to a local citizens’ group called simply “NoMose.”

In one of many reports, Italia Nostra summarized its concerns: “The dams will render permanent the Lagoon’s environmental imbalance: The deep channels dredged in the last century through its outlets will become concrete. The erosion that is now eating away the Lagoon’s precious wetlands would become permanent, and this rich coastal lagoon, protected by European law, would be transformed into an area of open sea.”

What is so elegantly called a cavaliere d'Italia (knight of Italy), in English is merely the black-winged stilt. Still beautiful, though.

The deepening of the channels to accommodate the cement frame for the caissons has already intensified the tidal flow — I can see and feel it every day. Faster and stronger tides mean many things: More erosion of the bottom sediments (one of the defining characteristics of a lagoon environment), consequent damage to the eelgrass which serves to anchor the sediment and which provide a habitat for many small marine species, and so on up the chain.

My favorite of many favorite ducks is a wintering species called a "tuffetto" (little diver). Their arrival and departure are parentheses around the winter.

There is also great concern about the physical impact of the materials used, specifically the caissons’ zinc plates (zinc is forbidden by European law) as well as the anti-fouling paint, which contains many toxic chemicals such as TBT compounds, assorted heavy metals, and solvents. Coats of anti-fouling paint have to be periodically renewed, so that will contribute another dose of this stuff to the environment. Damage to the lagoon and the Adriatic is seen as virtually inevitable. I must mention that the builders deny this.

Data and forecasts which justify the project have been questioned by many different sources. Some of the data does not appear anywhere but in the builders’ documents.

Engineering: Plenty of engineers from assorted countries, those who are not directly involved in the project, have always voiced doubts about whether it’s likely to work the way it’s supposed to.

Another perspective on the system, which clearly shows the the caissons fitting snugly together, forming a perfectly even wall. It will be great if nothing shifts or leaks.

Some of their concerns are:

It has never been completely tested.
The only positive assessment rendered by an independent panel of engineers was restricted to saying whether the design could function as intended — that is, whether it would work as designed. Virtually all other independent evaluations have been extremely cautious, if not negative. No engineers except the builders, to my knowledge, have risked saying whether it should be built. Maybe that’s not what engineers are supposed to do. UNESCO wrote an analysis in 2003 which concisely evaluated the project’s drawbacks, including the meteorological predictions on which it is based.
There are discernible aspects of the design which must ALWAYS function PERFECTLY (difficult in a salt-water environment),or they won’t perform the way they’re supposed to. For one thing, there is a high risk of the seal between the caissons not being watertight. If water begins to pass between the caissons, the wall they form could be dangerously compromised (fancy word for “weakened”). If the caissons for any reason do not align perfectly, ditto.
If for some reason encrustation of any sort remains on the caissons and/or their anchoring hinges (salt-water is great for fostering encrustations of minerals and critters), the barrier may not rise in the manner or at the rate necessary.
If sea-level increases fulfill the darker prophecies, not only will the caissons have to be used more often and kept in place for longer periods of time than predicted (undergoing stresses for which they were not designed), but eventually their maximum height may not be enough.
After decades of legal battles, the design was already obsolete before construction even began. Thirty years is an eternity in engineering terms. (Imagine buying a car designed 30 years ago.) Whatever its flaws, it should have been modified or updated in some way by now. But no.

Perhaps most important, critics point out that this titanic construction flouts several principles sacred not only to the hydraulic engineers of the Venetian Republic (not exactly amateurs) but also to commonly-accepted principles of environmental and engineering prudence. Those principles are:

The project should be gradual, to permit evaluation of the results obtained at each stage and, if necessary, permit changes to the original plan. This obviously isn’t the case here.
The project should be reversible. MOSE obviously isn’t.
The project should be experimental. By “experimental” the Special Law clearly intends that a project should be tested experimentally before it is definitely approved and funded and built. That never happened.

How did this project ever get approved?

I can’t swear that I know. Here is what I do know: That the project was assigned to the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, a consortium which the city has exclusively authorized (some have used the word “monopoly”) to intervene in the lagoon. This consortium is made up of more than 20 Italian engineering and construction companies — in a word, businessmen. Scientists who promote or defend the project are often consultants for the consortium.

So here we are. It’s too late to be any use, but I’d like to recall a comment by Wendell Berry, the farmer/writer/environmental critic.

“A good solution to a problem,” he said, “is one which does not create new problems.”

Seems kind of obvious, when you think about it.

Next: How will it all come out?