Problems | Venice: I am not making this up

“Besieged” — a word about tourism

Most of the journalism about Venice, either print or TV, points out tourism as Venice’s main defining characteristic, which is about as simple a discovery to make as that water fills the canals. Apparently the appeal is eternal to the average journalist and editor looking for a story which is immediately sensational and not at all hard to do. A story on tourism here practically writes and photographs itself.

In doing so the reporters universally bewail it, to one degree or another, in the same way one would bewail any uncontrollable natural disaster such as grasshopper swarms, tornadoes, avalanches. You’d almost think that tourists come to Venice deliberately to wreak havoc on an innocent, helpless, unsuspecting, undeserving victim. The lines in these stories are usually pretty clear: City Good, Tourist Bad.

Pictures of mass tourism at its most intense are the easiest images in the world to take, the journalistic equivalent of hitting the bull’s-eye from one foot away. Anybody can do it — I’ve done it myself. You don’t even have to open your eyes to take impressive pictures of the worst aspects of mass tourism. In fact it’s probably better if you don’t.

But there is much more to the situation than the simple outlines sketched by the just-passing-through journalists.

Catching some rays at the entrance to the church of San Zaccaria.

I am not defending the behavior of large segments of the mass tourist population. These are generically labeled “turisti da culo,” which literally means ass-tourists, but generally conveys a wide range of rude, thoughtless, generally sub-civilized behavior. There is never any lack of examples, especially in the summer. This race of tourist is horrifying, demoralizing, offensive, depressing. I could tell you stories. And yes, of course there are too many of them.

A bridge, the narrower the better, is always a useful place to have lunch.

But I want to pause for a moment in mid-cliche’ to regard the situation from two important points of view which are rarely addressed as everyone is busy wailing and gnashing their teeth.

And you bivouac the troops wherever you find a space.

First, the city officials who have been assigned the role of City Councilor for Tourism over the years are politicians. They are not trained in the industry of tourism, an industry as demanding and complex as making steel or developing drugs. Further, it is the nature of the political breed to be cautious and easily swayed by conflicting demands, which makes planning, and then executing any plan, hugely difficult. And unappealing. Politicians on the whole tend to avoid “difficult” and “unappealing.” So a lot of tiny, disconnected actions are undertaken to minimize, if not solve, whatever is the most pressing problem of the moment.

The current Councilor for Tourism, a native Venetian lawyer named Augusto Salvadori, is famous for his impassioned oratory on behalf of his beloved city, the need to protect her and defend her and nourish and cherish her. It’s like the wedding vow. He is often on the verge of weeping before he finishes. People have come to expect it.

But he has no program, he has only little temporary fixettes. My favorite was the recent day to promote Decorum (yes, that’s the word they use for clean, tidy and polite), one of whose more publicized aspects was that the city offered to donate geraniums to anybody who wanted them, in order to brighten up the windowsills. If he had thought of donating the same number of large trash bins to be distributed far and wide to mitigate the incessant leaving of garbage on said windowsills because no alternative is to be found, the city wouldn’t need flowers in order to look better. You can walk from the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello as far as the Bridge of the Veneta Marina (a straight shot of about 20 minutes, if you dawdle) without finding one (1) trash bin of any size whatsoever.

Speaking of decorum, this little midden is two steps from City Hall. It's been here so long that cobwebs have begun to cover it.

There aren’t many people who are willing to walk around town indefinitely with their empty soda can, beer bottle, or plastic ice-cream cup in their hand, searching for a place to dispose of it.

So: Point One is that the persons in charge of tourism here are unprepared for anything other than Making Suggestions. Which isn’t the same as Having Ideas.

Tourism is Venice’s only source of income. Yet it is inexplicably and profoundly — even stubbornly — even proudly, it sometimes seems — mishandled. The individuals charged with managing this important, complicated, potentially destructive resource could be compared to a person hired as director of a mercury mine whose previous job had been, say, as the Judges and Stewards Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.

“We need some truly visionary people,” professor Fabio Carrera told me the other evening. “There’s no long-range thinking. It’s very short-range.” A few months ago there was tremendous blowing of trumpets and waving of banners to publicize “VeniceConnected,” the next big step in tourism management here: One-stop online booking. Carrera snorts. “All these ideas that were good maybe five years ago, like VeniceConnected online. We should be doing ten times better in the future. But they think ‘We’re innovating’ by doing this crap.”

The fact that there is chaos at the top naturally leads to chaos all the way down to the poor bastard trying to find a place in the shade to have some kind of lunch that won’t cost a fortune. Bathrooms — can’t find them. Open late, close early. Vaporettos — confusing. Signage — random and often homemade. Street vendors — insistent and vaguely disturbing. Which leads to Point Two.

Point Two: Nobody ever takes the trouble to report on what is demanded of a tourist here. I see it every day and even as it repels me it also inspires something like pity. It must be the vacation equivalent of the Ranger Assessment Phase at Fort Benning, especially if you’ve got kids. I once stopped to help a family of three standing at the foot of a bridge with their eight suitcases (I counted them), unable to figure out where they were, much less how to get to their hotel. They had been standing there for a while.

Visiting Venice in the summer will almost certainly be hot, tiring, baffling, occasionally even upsetting, and it can cost far too much. A one-ride ticket on the vaporetto costing 6.50 euros ($9) is far too much. Two euros ($2.80) for a half-liter (two cups) bottle of water is far too much. Disposing of the result of the water you drank, if you avail yourself of one of the few but very clean municipal bathrooms costs 1.50 euros ($2), which is far too much. But cheaper than the original bottle of water, true.

I am not defending or excusing the type of tourist of which one sees way too many here: Oblivious, rude, loud, and often, yes, ugly. The garb, the behavior, the everything is impossible to defend. When people leave home, many evidently leave their manners at the kennel with the dog. (The fact that there can also be rude, loud, ugly Venetians is noted by the court, but doesn’t have any bearing on this case.) But to be a tourist here, enchanting as the city is, must be debilitating.

Still, that doesn’t explain why they have to shuffle around the narrow streets like wounded water buffalo, stopping with no warning and blocking your passage, or to ride the vaporetto with 60-pound packs on their backs, nonchalantly laying waste to everyone around them as they turn this way and that, admiring the view.

So let’s sum up the situation: The city puts up with aggravations and discourtesies and even damage, large and small, all day, every day, and also at night, but it gets money. And the tourist struggles around a bewildering, overloaded bunch of Baroque/Renaissance/Veneto-Byzantine-laden islands, but gets lots of pictures of canals and belltowers.

I don’t know. Something is definitely missing from these equations.

The Vogalonga bites back

Every year since 1975, the organizing committee picks a Sunday in spring and announces the date of the next edition of the Vogalonga, or “long row.” When we heard it was going to be May 31 this year, the first thing most of us thought was “Saharan sun-scorch.” None of us thought “Arctic gale winds,” at least not until we looked out the window that morning.

What it is:

A 30-km (18 miles) course around the islands of the northern lagoon, beginning and starting in the bacino of San Marco, open to any boat propelled by oars.
A chance for people to get down and party, before and after, and occasionally also during.

What it isn’t:

A race. It starts at 9:00 AM with a blast from the cannon on the island of San Giorgio and a glorious ringing of major church bells. It ends when you return to your base camp, wherever you’ve organized it. The reviewing stand at the mouth of the Grand Canal, where your diploma of participation and medal get thrown into your boat, closes at 2:30. But as far as anybody’s concerned, you can get home long after lights-out.
A protest against anything. A foundation-myth has been created over the years, for reasons having more to do with local politics than anything else, that this amateur non-competitive marathon is a protest against the “motondoso,” the infamous wave damage which is destroying the city. Motondoso is a fatal phenomenon which Venetians call the “cancer of Venice” and deserves, more than to be protested against, to be resolved once and for all.

The reason it makes no sense to promote this event as a protest is because:

Each year of the past 35, the motondoso has increased exponentially. If a once-a-year Sunday morning mega-row is supposed to convey serious dissension, something isn’t working.
By now, the number of participating Venetians has shrunk from 99.9% of the total rowers to about 20%. Or, of some 1,600 boats, only around 300 were Venetian; the rest come from everywhere else — the US, Canada, Russia, Australia, all of Europe, even the Comoro Islands.
The Venetians already know everything they need to know about motondoso, including the futility of protesting it, either with oars or guns (though guns haven’t yet been tried. Hm…).
The non-Venetians also have no power to affect anything that happens in Venice, except perhaps the quantity or quality of the garbage they may or may not leave behind. Other than that, it’s pretty clear that if the city government can plug its ears and sing LA-LA-LA-LA when its voting citizens speak up, it’s not going to change everything when a batch of Hungarians or Poles or Kiwis or Comorians lodges a complaint. Which they wouldn’t anyway, because unless some feral taxi should capsize them, they’re probably not going to be too bothered about waves, because motorboats are forbidden along the course. So the rowers have very little chance to experience the glories of motondoso in any case.

One other thing: I’ve experienced a few protests over time, events involving mounted policemen and tear gas and so on. I don’t remember there being people laughing and waving to their friends and taking each other’s pictures and drinking beer. Call it whatever you like; the Vogalonga is essentially one big party, and two large objects like parties and protests just can’t occupy the same space. So much for the protest theory.

We were there this year rowing “San Marco,” the club’s 8-oar gondola. And I’m pretty sure that like everyone else out there when the starting cannon fired at 9:00 AM, we were all thinking, in our various ways, “ohgodohgodohgod.”

Lino admitted when it was all over that he’d had the tiniest hint of a second thought as we started out, but he’s done all 34 and he was determined to make it through the 35th. There aren’t many left who can make that claim, and he was going to do it unless, you know, sheer survival were to become an issue. Not too bad, when you consider that within the space of five months, he’s had a new hip and a pacemaker installed. And that two of the boys aboard had rowed only twice. Ever.

A tremendous wind was blowing, the implacable northeastern blast called the bora, and there were gusts up to 50 miles an hour. Also, the tide was going out, which meant that naturally everyone had to row against it, too. Wind and tide. And it was cold. I’m telling you.

It took us seven hours to finish what normally would have taken four (well, five), but at least we didn’t run into anybody or anything, like channel-marker pilings, though we came close a few times, and we didn’t capsize, which is more than some 30 other boats could claim. The assistance teams stationed around the course had to call for reinforcements to pull people and assorted hulls and oars out of the water.

But we did it, due mainly to Lino, not only because of his strength but even more because of his experience and savvy (“You don’t row with your arms,” he says, “you row with your brain.” The proof of this was seeing the consequences to rowers who didn’t think of how to find some way to make their life out there at least slightly easier, looking for positions that would be more sheltered from the wind, or where the tide would be less strong).

But even with his experience and grit, we, like everybody else out there, had to put everything into it. The wind just never let up, though occasionally it would hurl itself against the right side of the boat, which would slew to the right, so I had to exert a sudden powerful counterstroke to keep the boat from slewing around to the right, usually in front of an onrushing cavalcade of hapless rowers. Lino, astern, exerted his own counterstroke whenever the wind shifted to the left side of the boat. the same when the wind shifted. The others just kept rowing along, like the slaves below decks in Ben-Hur.

But we all had confidence in him, which was the real secret to it all. I can say that because another boat from our club turned back. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do it physically; they had no confidence. Mental, not muscles. I want you to remember that — it’s another of those crucial Life Lessons you pick up in a boat. I have quite a list by now.

Just one of the events at the turn into the Cannaregio Canal. Photo by Karol Sibielak.

About those capsized boats. Some accounts make it sound as if the entire course was like the Spanish Armada being blown around England. In fact, the accidents were pretty much limited to a particular category in a particular location:

Low slim sculls of various-size crews. Not really built for the high seas, as it were; not especially capable of having the last word in an argument with waves.
The entrance to the Cannaregio Canal, where the rowers enter Venice and head into the Grand Canal and down to the finish line.
This was the most hazardous place for sculls because it was full of large, heavy, following waves caused by the particular behavior of the tides at that point. And because….
Many rowers didn’t calculate for the rebound of the waves from the nearby embankment. They might have managed to surf along atop one set of inbound waves, but couldn’t deal with the busted-up remains of the same waves coming back at them.

And to think he'd almost done the entire course. I hate that. Photo by Karol Sibielak. — And to think he’d almost done the entire course. I hate that. Photo by Karol Sibielak.

Knowledgeable, or cautious, rowers tended to swing wide before positioning themselves for entry into the canal, thereby avoiding the worst.

I’m explaining all this because you never know when it might be useful to know this.

I took several aspirin and was in bed before 9:00 that night. My last thought was wondering which parts of my body were going to hurt the most the next morning.

Surprisingly, very few. Almost none, really, except for a lovely pair of screaming matched trapezius muscles. And my hands, which felt like lobster claws. Gripping an oar, exerting about a thousand pounds-force per square inch on a stick of wood for much of seven hours, has quite an effect on the old mitts. All those years of piano lessons? No more hope of Rachmaninoff for me.

What really astonishes me is my capacity to remember events like this with something like pleasure. Must be hormones or something, the euphoria of survival. The traps have stopped crying, the hands are back at the keyboard, and I’d say I’m almost ready to do it all again. Like so many things in Erlaworld, it makes no sense.

(Below: In the Cannaregio Canal. We’re smiling because the end is in sight, and because finally we’re going with the tide. I’m the waver wearing the red baseball cap. I have no recollection who I’m waving at.)