Tourism | Venice: I am not making this up

History, Problems, Tourism, Venetian-ness

Crybabies?

September 1, 2009 1 Comment

It seems like Venice is always under some kind of cloud, even if only figuratively speaking.

The daily cri di coeur (that would make a great newspaper name) comes via the Gazzettino from Paolo Lanapoppi, a Venetian and former president of an association called Pax in Aqua, about which much more some other time.

Lanapoppi felt compelled to write to the Gazzettino, even as the wind whistled through the windmills toward which he was spurring his horse, so to speak, to take issue with the latest jab which mayor Massimo Cacciari had made to the few remaining morons who insist on living in his city and dare to criticize its administration.

A day or so earlier, Mr. Cacciari had brushed aside a discouraging word from some constituent with the brusque observation that Venetians are “piangnoni” (crybabies, kvetchers, whiners) and Mr. Lanapoppi sees it quite differently. I’m translating his missive here not because I want to spoil your day, as I know you have problems of your own to think about, but because it summarizes very eloquently some basic points which deserve to be criticized here, and why.

Venetians are crybabies? Who has governed the city since 1993? We need a new governing class (August 27, 2009)

It seems incredible. As the number of residents continues to fall and the city is clogging up with vacation rooms for rent, trash in the shop windows, tourist launches, day-trippers, the mayor is declaring that the city needs to free itself from the monoculture of tourism. He even goes so far as to say that Venetians have to stop being crybabies.

But who governed the city from 1993 to 2000? Cacciari. And from 2000 to 2005? Paolo Costa, elected with the support of Cacciari. And from 2005 till today? Cacciari again, naturally.

It isn't always like this. But there's nothing stopping it, either.

So who is supposed to be battling the monoculture of tourism? The opposition? Or the elderly in their nursing homes? Or we members of a thousand organizations which fight every day to have a little space in the newspapers to denounce an unsustainable situation, and that find ourselves at thousands of conferences and round tables being snubbed by the administrators?

So to the damage they’re now adding mockery: we’re being accused of being snivelers. Instead, there’s Cacciari fighting the tourism monoculture, inaugurating new museums as if they were for the 60,000 residents, who inaugurates new piers as if they were nursery schools for the Venetians, who sets up a brand-new dock for the tourist launches in the Riva dei Sette Martiri, who ignores and lets languish an area of tremendous potential like the waterfront in Marghera, who has not succeeded in many years to create even one great center for research or for work, who goes to the Biennale and the Film Festival to do “culture,” who sells the facades of the palaces under restoration for publicity.

One sees the desire to get out of the tourism monoculture, one sees it clearly. All you have to do is look at what the Cacciari government is doing.

Then, on the same day, the vice-mayor, Michele Vianello, comes out with an incredible quip: To put an end to the motondoso in the Bacino of San Marco, what we need is a single authority. That he would have the courage to say so after five years of the commissioner (N.B.: against motondoso, as well as mayor) Costa would be amazing if it weren’t offensive to the intelligence of his listeners. Because there’s something else that is needed: What’s needed are people in power who have the capacity and the will to make changes. Venice — and notable people such as Riccardo Calimani, Francesco Giavazzi, Gherardo Ortalli, have said it unanimously and in public — has not been capable of producing a class of governors worthy of its history and its potential.

It has been, at the most, a springboard for launching people who are seeking national notoriety; meanwhile, the city is crumbling under the suction of the propellors (another reference to motondoso) and is being transformed by the pressure of 20 million voracious grasshoppers (tourists) a year. As for the future, one hears predictions of 40 million in another 20 years. We’re already preparing the hotels of the future Tessera City (the village near the airport) and the under-lagoon subway to facilitate their arrival.

Nice way to get out of the monoculture of tourism.

img_5218-clouds-6-comp — But you can still see why people want to come here.

Boatworld, Events, History, Tourism

See you in September

August 31, 2009 1 Comment

There are two months here — well, two and a half, if you count the 12 days of Carnival — which are the most intense (polite way of saying “difficult”). They are May and September.

A brigade of lions could help with crowd control. This one doesn't look like leadership material, though. Worry has already taken a toll.

As we’re on the verge of September now, I can say I already feel its ponderous impetus, in the same way a river lifts at the unseen approach of a heavily laden barge.

On September 2 the Venice Film Festival begins (runs till September 12). This world-class event overwhelms the Lido, where our boat club is, which means that going to row and getting home again is going to be hard. The Lido is 6 miles [11 km] long and something like 1/3 of a mile [500 meters] wide, which comes to about two square miles [5.5 square km]. That’s not a lot of space for thousands of visitors all at once. True, most of those thousands spend most of their days (and nights) indoors, at hotels or bars or most of all, screening rooms. But they do come out occasionally, especially to go have a look at Venice, and I leave the rest to your imagination. The vaporetto stop at the Lido is like the fall of Saigon.

Then there is the Campiello Prize, an important national literary event whose peak moments will occur on September 5 and 6. So we add all the literati to the streets and vaporettos.

Fangs and claws. Now we're getting somewhere.

Then we throw in the Regata Storica, or Historic Regatta, which is always the first Sunday of September and this year will be on September 6. This draws mostly day-trippers, or people who are already in town for some other reason. I don’t believe many non-Venetians do more than come in for the day, and many more now stay home and watch it on television. But it does majorly disrupt some of the vaporetto service, seeing as the Grand Canal is blocked for about six hours for the races. Trying to decipher the official timetable for the day is like solving one of those innocent-seeming problems in logic which eventually unhinge you, problems which posit A, B, C and if not A but only B, or if A and C but not B, and so on. It doesn’t bother me because I’ll be out in a boat most of the day and into the night, but yes, there is disruption.

Or cannon. A bronze lion with a cannon might be all that's needed to keep the vaporettos in order. And quiet, too.

Then — because the foregoing wasn’t enough — an international show-jumping event, the Venice All Stars, is planned at the stable next door to our rowing club. This will be September 16-19. Workers have been slaving away at primping up the general area, since it is usually in a state of resigned degradation. The major arteries of the Lido (both of them) will be sclerotic, I imagine, with vans and horse trailers and cars. Equine events seem to involve more wheels than hooves, when you think about it.

But all these mammals, however many legs they may have, will require fodder. So to the restaurants (and also hotels), I wish a hearty mazel tov, this is your big (only; last) chance to recoup whatever losses the skimpy tourist year has inflicted on you. And I have no doubt that recoup you will. Then we’ll spend the next three days reading articles in the paper about how expensive Venice is and how people have been carried out on stretchers after getting the bill for a pizza and a beer.

This dude has got the right idea. He's not taking anything seriously. He ought to get to know the bronze lion, who is probably more stressed out than a carnivore with a cannon ought to be. — This dude has got the right idea. If he's serious about anything, he's seriously mellow. He ought to get to know the bronze lion, who is more stressed than a carnivore with a cannon ought to be.

I did in fact just make that last part up. What does happen, however, is that they get the bill and then go to some office and make a formal protest. Complaint. Denunciation. Assorted Venetians read these accounts and go, “Bummer, man.” Or the Venetian equivalent, which doesn’t immediately come to mind.

And on we go.

Problems, Tourism

“Besieged”: tourism update

August 27, 2009 3 Comments

I know it might seem that this subject just won’t go away, even if, as Mark Twain said about something else, you take a stick and hit it on the snout. But as it’s one of the central subjects of existence here, there is no escape.

I was interested to see the headline in the Gazzettino two days ago, “Venice doesn’t know how to keep its tourists.” This is intriguing, considering that much of the criticism hurled at tourism here seems to have to do with wanting the tourists to go away.

Just in case, though, that my recent disquisition on tourism might have seemed like the lonely ravings of a solitary misfit, a recent study by the Confindustria Venezia, a business consortium, which looked at Venice, Rome and Florence, has shown not only the brevity of the average stay (2.47 nights), but that tourists rarely return to Venice. And they say outright that, as I mentioned the other day, the city lacks a tourism strategy.

“The central point,” said Elisabetta Fogarin, president of Confindustria Venezia Turismo, “is that Venice needs a policy of Destination Management. It needs to be relaunched at the international level, to make it an icon and a glamour destination again, where the visitor and traveler can live an experience that can’t be repeated somewhere else.”

Glamour is the grail of tourism here, the notion that quality can be made to replace quantity in the economic equation. I’d suggest that this dream is something like wanting all trains to be like the Orient Express, including the Venice-Pordenone local. Which I would totally endorse, except that there are too many people who just need to get home from work to make that even imaginable.

The statistic of 2.47 nights here is, according to the study, a sign that Venice is drastically under-realizing its potential; in any case, it’s not indicative of “culture tourism” (for which one needs more time, clearly. Anybody who has entered the Uffizi Galleryin Florence with the intention of seeing it all knows that about five months is probably a more reasonable time frame for visiting some cultural monuments here.) And 2.47 nights is just another way of saying “not quality tourists.” Bearing in mind that to reach an average, you must have many people who are staying less time (and at least some who are staying longer, true.) But mostly tourists just hit and run.

I think somebody has already recognized this and decided to play to Venice’s currently somewhat battered image. A new campaign promoting the city’s museums shows two scenes: One is a detail of the huddled masses in the Piazza San Marco, next to a shot of the magnificent Scala d’Oro in the Doge’s Palace, a ceremonial staircase dwarfing two lorn humans. The slogan in Italian translates as, “If you stay outside, you can’t say you’ve seen Venice.” Which I like better than the way they translated it, snappy as it may be.

So to really see Venice, you have to get away from Venice? Well, I guess that’s as good an approach to crowd management as another. It just seems slightly regrettable that instead of promoting this monument for the wonder of the world that it is, this angle is more like “Want to get away from all those uncouth boors outside? Flee into our gorgeous past, which is deserted,” which actually sounds pretty good unless you know that this means you’re going to have to pay 13 euros ($18) to walk through endless non-air-conditioned rooms and look at a million paintings that all look alike. Or so it might seem if your primary motivation for entering was merely because it isn’t Out There.

I happen to worship the Doge’s Palace and consider it a given that if you don’t spend several hours here, you can’t have the tiniest notion of the greatness, brilliance and sheer power of the Venetian Republic. Without which, your visit to Venice is just a pointless trek through a flyblown postcard.

It’s just too bad to tell people they should see the museums because there aren’t any of those awful tourists there. But I guess if you have no tourism strategy, you’ll try all kinds of things.

Boatworld, Problems, Tourism

Gondoliers gone wild

August 20, 2009 8 Comments

Not only have gondolas changed fairly radically in the few hundred years since this image was made, but so have the gondoliers. Boatmen have always gotten into arguments; under the Venetian Republic there was even a special code of laws designed specifically to adjudicate boat-borne conflicts. Maybe we should bring them back.

Last Friday an unfortunate event occurred which not only did not shed honor on the worshipful order of gondoliers, it did way, way the opposite, and then some.

The two gondoliers involved have not only been suspended for five days till the jury decides whether to suspend them for three months (“You are so grounded!!”), but three sopping American tourists have been hauled out of the canal, and I think most of their personal effects have been recovered by the fire department divers.

For all its elegance, complexity, and historic value, in some ways the gondola is just another working boat in a city where most of the work involves a boat somewhere. Just like the blue cargo barge and the green garbage truck, the black gondola is here to make a living. What the passenger brings to the experience is kind of up to him or her.

In the early afternoon of the aforementioned Friday, two gondoliers based at the stazio near Piazzale Roma came to blows. I have to say that having heard their location, what followed didn’t come as a total surprise, seeing as the gondoliers here generally are not of the type you can imagine drinking tea with their pinkies extended. It is also fairly evident that conflict between the two men had already been on a low boil for some time now.

Gondolier A was boarding three Americans for a gondola ride. To do this, the gondolier ties his boats to some slim pilings next to a wooden platform with descending steps, and helps the passengers aboard.

Gondolier B approached and, seeing that the embarkation point was occupied and that the people were taking too long (in his opinion) to get aboard, was seized by a fury that impelled him to leap off his boat without even tying it up, and head straight for Gondolier A. The enraged bellowing, threats, imprecations, etc. that flew between the both of them did not need subtitles or any other form of translation; the Americans, seeing an ugly fight approaching, got scared and all stood up together to get off the boat immediately.

Sudden simultaneous movements, which involve weight as well as motion, especially all concentrated on the lower starboard side of a flat-bottomed gondola, are Not Good. The tourists know that now, because suddenly all three were in the drink and one was at least momentarily sort of stuck under the capsized gondola. This is Extremely Not Good.

Happily, at that moment a motor launch was passing, carrying some firemen back to the firehouse. Firemen here are almost always involved in nautical rescues, so they got right to it. People saved, boat righted, sunken objects (including a video camera) eventually retrieved. Gondolier A gets to washing and drying the boat, and peace — or the opposite of rage, anyway — descends.

Needless to say, the Ente Gondola (the gondoliers’ organization) is now taking steps, which will be determined after all the meetings have concluded.

An isolated incident between two men who haven’t had their rabies shots? Not quite, it seems. Because the scene now shifts to Sunday morning (two days later), at the Rialto area.

A batch of us had rowed over from the Lido, as we like to do on Sunday mornings, and had tied up our eight-oar gondola to the platform at the Erbaria, an open sort of small square facing the Grand Canal.

Being a popular tourist area, the Rialto is a place where some gondoliers tie up to await potential clients. Even to entice passersby to become clients. But not today. Enticement was not in the air.

The young gondolier kneeling on the stern wiping down his boat with a chamois cloth suddenly started to roar at a passing tourist who had stopped to make some snaps of him at work. “I’m not paid to be photographed,” the gondolier yelled, using plenty of vulgar phraseology and making some threatening motions that implied he might be ready to come ashore to demonstrate how much he meant it.

The tourist fled. We stood there, aghast. Lino was outraged.

“The gondola and the tourist are a gondolier’s bread,” he said. “If there’s one thing a gondolier depends on, it’s tourists. This shows that not only is he incredibly rude, he’s even willing to shoot himself in the foot.”

Say what you will, it's hard to think that this gondolier is feeling very much in tune with the romance and glamour the public might imagine was his lot. It can be a very demanding way to make a living, as you can surmise by imagining the frame of mind of a gondolier like this one, preparing his boat for a cold and possibly not very profitable day -- here, on New Year's Day at 9:00 AM.

Lino wasn’t shouting or gesticulating but I think he was angrier than the gondolier. Because the gondolier was merely responding to some random neural firing somewhere in the limbic system of his brain, whereas Lino felt offended as a Venetian on behalf not only of the gondoliers who aren’t insane, but the image of the city as a whole. It’s painful to him to think that people go away with an idea of his city as a place where you take your life (and your wallet) in your hands.

Let’s see if these two events turn out to have been merely some bizarre coincidence and we can all go back to sleep. Otherwise, I don’t know whether it makes more sense to approach a gondolier wearing a life vest or a bullet-proof jacket.