Venetian Problems

Taking a closer look at New Year’s Eve

2 Comments
The Piazza is big, but it's not THAT big. I still don't grasp how 80,000 people got in there. Or got out.
The Piazza is big, but it’s not THAT big. I still don’t grasp how 80,000 people got in there. Or got out.

Probably nobody is thinking about New Year’s Eve anymore, no matter where they spent it. But here in Venice it’s not over yet, as the papers continue to publish a cascade of ever-more-detailed articles, personal stories, and editorials on how things went.

In a word: Badly.

So I’m going to back up from my earlier post and try this report again.  Because in case you don’t know, the three most beautiful words in the English language are not “I love you” (though they’re not the worst, either).

Nope.  The three MOST beautiful words are “You were right.”  And in my case, its close cousin: “I was wrong.”

I admit that I felt uneasy writing that sunny little post about New Year’s Eve.  Even as I wrote it, I had the strange feeling that I was unaccountably speaking in some unknown language from the planet where life is beautiful all the time.

I must have inadvertently disconnected my internal smoke-detector, because the news is demonstrating, in ever more lurid detail, why I will never go near the Piazza San Marco on the night of Saint Sylvester.  And how inexplicably incapable the city is of organizing big events in some reasonable manner.  And when I refer to the organization of big events, I have some small experience elsewhere; for example, the Fiesta of San Fermin at Pamplona, which I have attended twice. And I’d go back again, no matter how much I hate crowds, and one of many reasons is because it is organized and maintained in the most dazzlingly intelligent and diligent manner for nine solid days and nights.  And a mere twelve hours drives Venice to its knees.

From 9:30 PM, rivers of young people arriving by train filled the streets heading toward the Piazza, smashing bottles and setting off firecrackers as they went.

Far from being a scene of frolic and light-hearted conviviality, as the night dragged on the Piazza San Marco (and Piazzale Roma, whence thousands tried eventually to depart the most beautiful city in the world) resembled a war zone, or a frat party of intercontinental dimensions.  Words such as “assault,” “devastation,” and “outrage” highlight the reports of the night, and the morning after.

Piles of shattered glass bottles and pools of biological fluids from either or both ends of homo stupidus prostratus were only some of the abundant remains.  There were also the bodies of comatose sleeping revelers scattered around the streets, lying where they fell when the fumes ran out.

People are fascinated by the damage water can do to the Piazza, but somehow the maxi-posters and the maxi-mobs have slowly come to seem normal. The water is normal, too, and has been normal for longer than there's been a city here.
People are obsessed by the damage that water can do to the Piazza, but somehow the maxi-posters and the maxi-mobs have come to seem normal.  So millions have been spent to control the water, but virtually nothing to resolve what in fact should be much easier to deal with.  I don’t get it.

The story in figures:

80,000 partyers, 10,000 more than the past two years.  Most of the yobbos weren’t Venetian, but from everywhere else — what in New York are called “bridge and tunnel” people.  I’ve seen them there at the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and it’s not lovely. It’s no lovelier here.

50 interventions by the 45 emergency medical personnel from the Green Cross, Civil Protection, and SUEM, the ambulance entity; most crises related to alcohol drunk, alcohol spilled (rendering the already wet pavement dangerously slippery), cuts by the broken glass of bottles blindly hurled into the air, blows to the head, and panic attacks caused by the mob and the explosions of firecrackers at close quarters.

100,000 euros ($135,868) the estimated cost to the city, excluding fireworks.  This approximate number comprises: 60,000 euros for the collection and removal of 135 cubic meters  (4,732 cubic feet)of garbage, of which 20 cubic meters (706 cubic feet) were of glass; 15,000 euros for the 60 Municipal Police agents on security duty.  And the cost, not yet quantified, of the extra transport personnel (50 bus drivers and an unspecified number of vaporetto pilots). And the fuel required by the 20 garbage barges.

60 extra buses coming into Venice from the mainland; 123 extra buses between midnight and 7:00 AM from Venice to the mainland.  Does this sound like a lot?  Au contraire; the ACTV, in its wisdom, put on extra vaporettos, which worked well, but reduced the basic number of bus runs on a holiday eve.  Because it’s, you  know, a holiday, and the drivers want to be at home. New Year’s Eve in Venice, with reduced bus service.  Explain this to the masses of tired, cold, exasperated people who were trying to get back home, who even overwhelmed the relatively few taxis in Piazzale Roma.  Explain it to anybody, if you can. And I still can’t figure out how 50 extra bus drivers were sent to work if there were fewer buses.  Or were they put to work scrolling the “Out of service” sign onto the buses’ forefronts?

 The story in voices:

“It was hard, if not impossible, to move.  Funky air, a mix of piss and drugs, the pavement “mined” with bottles, cans, and every sort of garbage…The Piazza was a disaster.  Electronic music at full volume incited the crowd that was already drunk and out of control.  A great number of young people had taken over, armed with every type of alcohol…the center of the Piazza was an inferno.  Not just fireworks, but young people, Italian and foreign, were competing in a new entertainment: the launching of bottles…I didn’t see any security agents that would have forbidden this behavior…The day after, the marks remained on our city, heritage of humanity, devastated by barbarism.”  (Margherita Gasco)

“According to a recent international survey, the night between the last and first of the year shows Venice to be among the principal capitals of the festivities on the planet.  This shouldn’t prevent us from … reflecting critically on how these events are carried out — if they’re worth the trouble, if they still have their original sense.” (Gianfranco Bettin, the assessore for the Environment).

“Such a high number of people wasn’t predicted, nor predictable,” said Angela Vettese, the assessore of Culture and Tourism Development.  (It wasn’t predictable? Does she not read tourism surveys?). “In the future, more prudence is necessary to protect the Piazza, and to invest in more surveillance, so that the police can check, count, and keep access to the Piazza within a determined limit. Furthermore, it’s necessary to organize only high-quality events, with spectacles that involve the public (more involved than they already were?), maintaining greater tranquillity.”  She’s still new on the job, or she wouldn’t be talking like that; all these things have been said before, and before, and even before that.

A tranquil morning in late October.
A tranquil morning in late October.

Social network comments were divided between those who think New Year’s Eve in the Piazza is the greatest thing ever, and those who think the care and protection of the already fragile city is more important; those who insist it was just a normal night of festivity, and those who characterize is as another example of sheer lunacy.

“I urge the church to make itself heard, seeing that the civil authorities don’t feel any special need to safeguard the Piazza San Marco…Can we imagine an event like last Tuesday in the Piazza San Pietro in Rome?”  (Franco Miracco, art historian).

“San Marco can’t be the only stage for events” (Mons. Antonio Meneguolo, diocese of Venice).  “It’s not the number of people which creates bad behavior,” he said.  “We can increase the security but it would be better to organize other activities elsewhere, and remove the emphasis of the publicity for “New Year’s in the Piazza,” seeing how the event ends up.”

“Venice continues to be seen as a city to exploit touristically down to the bone,” said Lidia Fersuoch, president of Italia Nostra. “More than limit access to the Piazza, it’s necessary to limited access to the city itself, because it’s impossible to contain more than a certain number of visitors.”

“Certainly, if we take as the limit the Pink Floyd concert of 1989, anything even just barely below that is considered tolerable…But hurling bottles, explosion of firecrackers, people who urinate and vomit in the streets, are these part of the normal course of public socializing?  For some people, yes, but for us, no.  Especially if it happens in the Piazza San Marco, which isn’t just any piazza, but a monumental area, as it was defined when concerts were stopped (because they have an excessive impact on the Piazza itself)… But why no to concerts, and yes to New Year’s Eve? We speak of “outrage” precisely because it’s a monumental area; you can’t remain indifferent seeing people climbing up the 16th-century columns of the Loggetta of Sansovino at the feet of the campanile.  The piazza has always been the place for socializing, for events.  But what events?” (Davide Scalzotto)

I think the Piazza looks wonderful like this. It's not that I'm anti-social, but on days like this it looks peaceful, and clean, and safe. I don't mean I feel safe, I mean it looks safe from us.
I think the Piazza looks wonderful like this. It’s not that I’m anti-social, but on days like this it looks peaceful, and clean, and safe. I don’t mean I feel safe, I mean it looks safe from us.

Here is what I ask myself and anyone who might be listening:  There is a Superintendency of architecture, of art, of treasures. There is the Polizia di Stato, the carabinieri, the municipal police, the Guardia di Finanza.  There are ordinances forbidding almost every dangerous and tumultuous form of behavior and the hazardous objects associated with them.  Why is there no evident point at which any of these elements meet?  The behavior and objects are at Point A, and any uniformed persons authorized to intervene are at Points Q, X, and Z.  All told, there may have been more garbage collectors than anybody else at work in the Piazza, which seems backwards, to me.

In theory, if there were more agents of public order on duty, there would be less need for the First Aid stations, not to mention the ambulances and garbagemen.

But let me move on to a much more distressing thought.

Venice is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which, unlike many of the 981 sites on their list, is a real place where real people live and move and have their being.  This presents special problems which nobody seems able to anticipate, or resolve. I am at a loss to say why, except that with ten fingers per city councilor, there’s plenty for pointing at other people.

There are 49 UNESCO sites in Italy, more than any other country on earth.  So far, none is marked as being “in danger.”  I think Venice should be.  I cannot conceive of shenanigans such as New Year’s Eve in the Piazza San Marco being tolerated in Angkor, or Machu Picchu, or the Alhambra, or the Red Fort Complex, or the Etruscan Necropolises, or the Potala Palace, or the Galapagos Islands.  And this is not the first time.  And yet, it goes on.

And I’ll say one more thing, as long as I’m on the subject: Of all the “properties” on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites, only two, so far, have been de-listed.  The reasons are given on this page of their website.

Between the catastrophes visited upon Venice under the ever-fresh rubber stamp of the Superintendency of Architectural Treasures (the tormented issue of the maxi-posters in the San Marco area has only been moderately resolved, among other things), and the continued abuse of the lagoon, which is also part of the World Heritage designation (from the Canale dei Petroli to MoSE and now to the imminent approval of the digging of the Contorta canal), I don’t think it’s inconceivable that eventually Venice could see itself de-listed from the UNESCO panoply.

This is not the most improbable scenario I’ve ever come up with.  Except that I’d love to be able to say “I was wrong.”

Continue Reading

Venetian Problems

Situation Normal (Part 2): The tourists and the tombs

No Comments
I'm sadly lacking in photos of the cemetery, either inside or out. But if you're looking at the regata of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, you're inevitably going to get a glimpse.
I’m sadly lacking in photos of the cemetery, either inside or out. But if you go to watch the regata of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, you’re inevitably going to get a glimpse.

I know that many people have a passion for cemeteries, their gravestones, their curious names and dates, and their general atmosphere of  composure and calm.

But the customary calm at the cemetery on the island of San Michele here has been rattled in the past week or so by a very disagreeable discovery, and it doesn’t have to do with the dead, but the living.  And the fact that they have taken up housekeeping together.

Because it’s one thing to visit the cemetery to bring flowers to your defunct relatives, or for a brief meander, and another to rent a cheap room in what was part of the old monastery.

Room?  A room with a view of a tomb?  The first the city heard of it was via the Gazzettino and the Nuova Venezia; the headline on the hoarding essentially said “Now there are tourists even in the cemetery.”  The power of this phrase lies secondarily in the word “cemetery” and primarily in the word “tourist.”  Neither is a noun that inspires much of a smile on Venetian lips, and the combination produced a city-wide snarl.

The snarl soon became garnished with sneers, because the truth did come out, and a tiresome little truth it was, too. Remember Zwingle’s Eighth Law?  “Everything is fine until it’s not.”  Or one could put it this way: “We’ll do what we want until we get caught.”  Gosh, it even rhymes.

These tourists were not sleeping on the slabs, but in the former monastery’s infirmary, which the city had made available to the Danish Committee for Venice (Comitato pro Venezia Danimarca) via a free 30-year concession. The Committee wanted to create (fund, establish) a Danish Cultural Center, and in exchange, agreed to restore the wing of the late Franciscan friary at its own expense.

They got the Center going pretty quickly, which is where the tourists come in, who were supposedly scholars and intellectuals and  art lovers and others with an evolved attitude toward Venice, but who could also be anybody who joined the Friends of the Danish House.

Thus tourists have been enjoying this facility for the past two years. Perhaps more; I haven’t been able to locate a specific number yet.  But it’s been long enough for the drivers of the vaporettos going to and from Murano to get used to stopping at the cemetery, even in the evening, to let people with suitcases on or off.  For 200 euros a week — not a typo, and not made up — you can believe there was no lack of travelers checking in, with keys, no less, after the cemetery had closed.

Let’s say that the idea of sleeping in the graveyard doesn’t offend you; after all, it”s not as if skeletons are going to be taking out the trash.

But a lot of people here have been offended by what they regard as lack of respect.  And most people anywhere would probably agree that it’s offensive that nine years have passed since the deal was struck, and the restoration still has not begun, while in the meantime the Danes have been operating this lodging which was never mentioned or even hinted at when they got permission to set up their Cultural Center.

A closer look at the legal document also reveals that the city granted the Danish Committee this free concession for 30 years “to be counted as beginning when the work of restoration begins.”  So we’re already slightly  out of sync here.

Nor is it clear whether the Danes were to be allowed to create their Center before the restoration work had been finished. Or at least begun.

When all this began to come to light — on All Souls Day, the day on which hundreds of Venetians go to the cemetery to visit their departed relatives — the citizens were galvanized. All those supposedly apathetic Venetians who have more or less accepted that they are inaudible and invisible suddenly spoke with one voice, and that voice said “No!”

A petition sprang up on the Fondamente Nuove, where the vaporettos leave for the cemetery, demanding that this wildcat bed and breakfast be closed immediately.

Venetians were signing it.  Tourists were signing it.  Even Danish tourists were signing it.  The petition has reached some 2,000 names.

“By opening a guesthouse,” said Roberto Monegato, who is one of the founders of the petition,”the Danish have violated seven articles of the regulations of the cemetery. Furthermore, the convention was signed nine years ago; the property was given in concession in order that restoration would be made, but till now nothing has been done.”

A week of ire was spent in dealing with all this, during which the thoughts of assorted residents, some city councilors and even the vice-mayor were all amply aired. The letters to the editors were all of one opinion: Shame!

Nobody spoke up to defend the Danes — not even the Danes themselves. Silence reigned; one might almost say the silence of a cemetery.

However, the Committee for Venice (which had been shown to be essentially the Committee for the Danes), has now closed the hostel and is preparing to begin work on the promised restoration.

There.  That wasn’t so hard, was it?

 

 

Continue Reading

Finances

The wonders worked by gold

No Comments
Simple little gold. I don't know how much this is worth, but I know I could use most of it.
Simple little gold, otherwise known as Au, or 79. I don’t know how much this is worth, but I know I could use most of it.  So could Venice, but I”m not sharing. (Dallas Refining)

Money in Venetian is known as schei (“skay”).  It is also known, by extension, as the thing we need most and have least.  In fact, we have none.  We never have any.  There isn’t any.  We can’t pay for anything because we haven’t got anything to use, not even bricks of salt or boxes of tulips.  We’re broke, and proud of it.

I’m broke because no money comes in.  The city is broke because money comes in but then it goes out again, somewhere, lots of somewheres, all according to accounting systems that bear more resemblance to Advanced Squad Leader than simple little double-entry bookkeeping, which was invented in Venice, by the way.

It’s something astonishing.  Venice can’t pay for the Regata Storica.  It can’t pay for the city hospital.  It can’t pay for repairing (fill in name of favorite monument, church, work of art here).  It can’t pay to build a new cinema for the Film Festival.  It can’t pay to correct the errors which were paid for with money which it didn’t have.  It’s trying to sell the Casino because the once-flourishing cash cow is running out of butterfat.  Somebody wrote to the Gazzettino that the best way to settle the evergreen conflict about whether the Italian Region of Alto Adige is really the Austrian Region of South Tyrol is to sell it to the Austrians. Conflict over, coffers bursting.

The only way to confront snaggly streets and exhausted bridges and anything else that needs fixing is to seek a sponsor.  The word “sponsor” has acquired the lonely, sacred, unattainable significance of “Holy Grail.”  “We have to find a sponsor” is the most annoying, monotonous, “I got nothin'” phrase since “Have a nice day.”  It means “We have to find an oil field,” “We have to find a rhodium mine,” “We have to find something that doesn’t cost us anything and gives us everything.”

But money there is, because it keeps popping up where it isn’t supposed to be — not only in Venice, but all over Italy.  Bribes.  Payoffs.  Fake blind people imbibing state subsidies for disabilities.  (A woman has just been nabbed for having requested — and received — a 300-euro contribution to pay for her children’s schoolbooks.  She claimed to have only 6,000 euros in this world.  But in fact, she turns out to have 480,000 euros in this world.)  One man who has finally been cornered for some malfeasance I haven’t been tracking was discovered to have 238  bank accounts.  Is that a lot?  I have no way of knowing.

If it's hard to earn gold to spend on cars and clothes, think of how hard it is to earn gold in Olympic medal form. This is from the Winter Olympics of Cortina d'Ampezzo, 1956.
If it’s hard to earn gold to spend on cars and clothes, think of how hard it is to earn gold in Olympic medal form. This is from the Winter Olympics of Cortina d’Ampezzo, 1956.

I do know that there were long, convoluted negotiations between the city and Pierre Cardin about the “Palais Lumiere,” the cyclopean ultra-modern glass skyscraper he wanted to build on the edge of the lagoon.  Everybody but the two aforementioned entities thought it was a terrible idea and finally he gave up and took his idea and went away.  Which means that now the city suddenly doesn’t have the 30 million euros (I believe it was) which they had already happily scribbled onto the “Income” side of the ledger.  Which means that now they haven’t got enough to pay for extending the tram across the bridge from Mestre to Piazzale Roma.  Evidently the phrase “You should have thought of that sooner” applies to more situations than to five-year-olds in the back seat of the car who suddenly have to go to the bathroom.

As usual, everyone is wailing about taxes and many are wailing about the cost of government.  (Feel free to wail in your own language.)  But if anybody has the sensation that the taxes are going nowhere, it’s possible to discover at least some of the wheres.  Such as running the government.  We heard on the radio that the cost of government in Germany is 4 euros per person; in Greece it’s 6 euros per person; in Italy, it’s 27.  It’s expensive to keep 630 people in Rome arguing all day about the other parties’ members and mistakes.

Am I going somewhere with all this?  Certainly.

I am reading a very diverting book entitled “A Book of Scoundrels,” by Charles Whibley (1897), which delineates the careers of England’s most notable highwaymen and other sorts of thieves and criminals.  Short version: In spite of their faults and failures as humans, he was basically on their side as long as they had panache, originality, and/or great clothes.

I offer the following segment in honor of all the fiscal frivolity that crowds the newspapers and the courts.  This may be the only period that I’ve ever wished I were a lawyer; I’d be fixed for life.

And there was that little unpleasantness about the Golden Calf. Based, as I recall, more on its calfness than its goldenness. A detail, and not one that would get me out of court.. (The Nuremberg Chronicle, Vanderbilt University).
And there was that little unpleasantness about the Golden Calf. Based, as I recall, more on its calfness than its goldenness. A detail, and not one that would get me out of jail. (The Nuremberg Chronicle, Vanderbilt University).

The characters: James Hind (1616 – 1652) a notorious highwayman of Royalist sympathies who happened to get his clutches on John Bradshaw, the judge who had condemned King Charles I to decapitation. The scene: The luxurious open spaces of Dorset, near Sherborne.

First, Hind took all of the judge’s money, told the bodyguard (who had judiciously decided to suspend his active service) to take off his hat, and then delivered the following discourse on gold:

“This is that incomparable medicament, which the republican physicians call the wonder-working plaster.  It is truly catholic in operation, and somewhat akin to the Jesuit’s powder, but more effectual.

“The virtues of it are strange and various; it makes justice deaf as well as blind, and takes out spots of the deepest treason more cleverly than castle-soap (sic) does common stains; it alters a man’s constitution in two or three days, more than the virtuoso’s transfusion of blood can do in seven years.

“‘Tis a great alexiopharmick, and helps poisonous principles of rebellion, and those that use them.  It miraculously exalts and purifies the eyesight, and makes traitors behold nothing but innocence in the blackest malefactors.

“‘Tis a mighty cordial for a declining cause; it stifles faction or schism, as certainly as the itch is destroyed by butter and brimstone.

” … The very colour of this precious balm is bright and dazzling.  If it be properly applied to the fist, that is in a decent manner, and a competent dose, it infallibly performs all the cures which the evils of humanity crave.”

Thus having spoken, he killed the six horses of Bradshaw’s coach, and went contemptuously on his way.

Take that!  And that!  Hind’s scorn might be wasted on the prime exemplars of modern brigandage here in the cradle of the Renaissance.  Not that they’re unfamiliar with scorn, and some irony manages to make itself heard from time to time, but discourses such as Hind’s would lack flourish in Italian, where utterances often depend more on blunt instruments (words such as “shame”) than the whetted poniards of true rhetoric.

But I feel better now.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe because it shows that there’s no point in struggling to be better people. It’s been this way forever.  Here we are, and here we’ll stay.  Evolution is over.

So let's revert to mythology, when life was simpler, if shorter. Danae met Zeus in the form of a golden shower, the story goes. James Hind could only dream of this. (Orazio Gentileschi, date TK, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg).
So let’s revert to mythology, when life was simpler, if shorter. Danae met Zeus in the form of a golden shower, the story goes. James Hind could only dream of this. The gold, I mean, not the girl. (Orazio Gentileschi, c. 1621, Cleveland Museum of Art).

 

 

Continue Reading

Uncategorized, Venetian Problems

The more things change….

2 Comments
The sun is shining but the sky is dark. I know it happens everywhere but here it has a sort of metaphoric vibe.
The sun is shining but the sky is dark. I know it happens everywhere but here it has a sort of metaphoric vibe.

People sometimes ask me — or ask themselves, standing next to me — why the government of Venice doesn’t do one thing or the other to resolve the city’s problems, which are right out there for everybody to see.  It seems impossible that nobody has come up with any ideas for what to do to make it cleaner, safer, more efficient (well, that might be a reach) — or just generally spiffed up and functioning.  How can it be that no long-term solution is found for something — anything?

If we were to take the proverbial legal tablet and write the proverbial two comparative lists, one would be titled “Problems” (it would be a very long list), and the other “Solutions” (which would also be long).  But there are almost no points at which they recognize each other and embrace, like twins separated at birth.

But guess what I just found out?  People were raising red flags, launching the lifeboats, pulling out handfuls of hair in 1970 about the very same problems everyone complains about today.  That’s 43 years of standing in one place.  If I were a city, I’d be tired by now.

This would be a characteristic glimpse of Venice -- not so much due to the water, but the history of the house on the right. The windows have changed several times -- being opened, being bricked up, being put wherever there's a free spot. Lots of changes, none of which essentially changes anything. Yes, I'm definitely on a symbolism streak today. Bonus: a glimpse of the future, which isn't pretty: The missing block of stone beneath the lowest window, which has left the stone above it just hanging in empty space, waiting to fall down. You can see it, you can understand it, you can even know what to do about it. Except that you don't.
This would be a characteristic glimpse of Venice — not so much due to the water, but the history of the house on the right. The windows have changed several times — being opened, being bricked up, being put wherever there’s a free spot. Lots of changes, none of which essentially changes anything. Yes, I’m definitely on a symbolism streak today. Bonus: a glimpse of the future, which isn’t pretty: The missing block of stone beneath the lowest window, which has left the stone above it just hanging in empty space, waiting to fall down. You can see it, you can understand it, you can even know what to do about it. Except that you don’t.

As I have long suspected, it’s not ideas that are missing here.  (I mean, constructive, forward-looking, beneficial-to-everybody ideas).  It’s execution.

Tides of ideas flow through Venice from all sides, but like the lagoon tide, they go out again.  Most of them.  To return again.  Most of them.  Some of them begin to be realized, then they stop.  Then they start again. You get the idea. (Sorry.)

Here are some of the most telling bits from a big article in the Gazzettino last Sunday, written by Pier Alvise Zorzi. It might be useful to know that the Zorzi family is documented to have been in Venice since 964 A.D.  That doesn’t mean he knows more than anyone else, I’m just saying he’s not the latest person to see the fireworks of the Redentore and decide to stay here forever.

Mr. Zorzi reports that back in April, 1970, veteran journalist Indro Montanelli dedicated virtually the entire month to articles about Venice and its problems — its particularity, its fragility, the housing depression, the political bungling, and so on.

“THE ILLS OF VENICE? THE SAME WERE REPORTED BY INDRO 43 YEARS AGO.  From depopulation to the risk of the touristic monoculture, from the sublagunare project to the problems of housing.”

“I have in hand a page from the Corriere della Sera (April 23, 1970) with the headline: ‘The Youth Front for Venice,’ with the subtitle “On the lagoon one breathes the air of the Titanic — the discouragement which by now pervades the Venetians is the main danger to face – to break this passivity a movement of young people has arisen without any political label ready to support at the next elections anybody who defends Venice.”

Under some emblematic photographs are these succinct quotes from 1970, which read like telegraph messages from the front lines.  It’s deja vu again, and again, and again.

“Tourism: The city can’t live only on hotels and restaurants.”

“Housing:  Too many uninhabited palaces and the cost of rent is through the roof (as they say here, “to the stars”).”

“Dignity: Enough of sterile complaints: each person needs to get involved.”

He continues:  “A young person who was interviewed complained of the progressive abandonment of the city…the problem of housing, which is not only decrepit but at much higher rents than on the mainland…And the culminating point, ‘We don’t intend to raise tourism to the level of a monoculture. A city like Venice can’t live only on hotels, trattorias, tips.  It will become degraded.'”

And the solutions these young people suggest are also, by now, hoary and draped with cobwebs: More artisans, for example, or linking highly specialized institutions to the world of production and cultural foundations in Europe and America.

The Front eventually fell apart, but the old problems are still here, and have been joined by some new ones: “The ‘hole’ of the Lido (endless construction projects that are badly conceived, worse realized, mercilessly expensive); the ghost of corruption on the MOSE project (more about this in another post), the mega-billboards which continue in spite of new ministerial regulations.”

But wait -- I see repairs going on! A few years ago the bridge over the rio dei Mendicanti was in clear and imminent danger (imminent being the only kind of danger that gets attention) because motondoso was, as you see, breaking the link between the steps and the balustrade. This is not an unusual sight -- you can find similar large fissures between fondamente and the walls of houses as the walkway begins to break off and slide toward the water. But it is nice to see it being fixed. Until you've been here long enough to realize that without fixing the cause, the same problem is inevitably going to come back again, and again, and again, and again. Is that enough "again"s to make my point?
But wait — I see repairs going on! A few years ago the bridge over the rio dei Mendicanti was in clear and imminent danger (imminent being the only kind of danger that gets attention) because motondoso was, as you see, breaking the link between the steps and the balustrade. This is not an unusual sight — you can find similar large fissures between fondamente and the walls of houses as the walkway begins to break off and slide toward the water. But it is nice to see it being fixed. Until you’ve been here long enough to realize that without fixing the cause, the same problem is inevitably going to come back again, and again, and again, and again. Is that enough “again”s to make my point?

Zorzi acknowledges a few positive signs lately, small and tentative though they may be.  But the essential character of the situation is not only unchanged, but maybe even unchangeable. “The problem,” he says, and so do lots of people here, “is that everyone who is able to make the decisions is so tied up in the webs of common interests, either political or economic (but aren’t they the same?) that they move only with extreme, sticky slowness.

“The risk? That 40 years from now we’ll still be right there, at the same spot. I don’t want my grandchildren still to be reading, for example, about the Calatrava bridge, that economic abyss … or the suspected speculation on the renovation of the Manin barracks.  Or the hospital. Or the eternal MOSE. Or all the usual things which the national newspapers don’t bother with anymore because everybody’s fed up with Venice’s constant whining.

“I want Venice to have the dignity to save herself on her own, thanks to the citizens which consider her not as something to exploit, but something to invest in.  I want the Venetians to denounce the little local mafias, instead of trying to join them in order to gain something for themselves.  I want the multinationals who buy the palaces to invest in the city and not merely in their own image.  I want that each person, even in their own little way, should do something to safeguard our special character. If I were to live for a hundred years, I’d like to read something new about Venice.”

You know what’s too bad about this cri de coeur?  I’ve heard it before.

Which degradation is more disturbing? The kind shown here? (Anyone who considers the condition of this once-beautiful wrought iron to be charming can skip to the next question).......
Which degradation is more disturbing? The kind shown here? (Anyone who considers the condition of this once-beautiful wrought iron to be charming can skip to the next question)…….
IMG_1006 victory
Or this? Mass tourism creates blowing trash and cattle-car transport and other unattractive things which could be considered degradation. But you don’t need a mass of tourists to feel depressed. You can manage with just two, if they’re like this pair, relaxing in front of the church of San Zaccaria.
So I look for things that nobody can spoil. Like the sky.
So I look for things that nobody can spoil. Like the sky.
Or real human contact, of which there is still a heartening amount.
Or real human contact, of which there is still a heartening amount.

 

As you see. People lurking in crannies as the avalanche of uncontrolled tourism and uncontrolled everything surges over the city yet another day.
As you see. People lurking in crannies as the avalanche of uncontrolled tourism and uncontrolled everything surges over the city yet another day.
I didn't get close enough to listen in, but these Venetians are almost certainly talking about something that's either gone wrong, is going wrong, or will be going wrong. If I had ten cents for every time I've heard a Venetian say "Poor Venice," I'd be living in Bora Bora by now. The elderly gentleman, on the other hand, is saving his energy by merely reading about the day's problems in the newspaper.
I didn’t get close enough to listen in, but these Venetians give several signs that they’re talking about something that’s either gone wrong, is going wrong, or will be going wrong. (Perhaps it’s about work, or the mother-in-law, or the car.  But eventually it will almost certainly be about Venice.) If I had ten cents for every time I’ve heard a Venetian say “Poor Venice,” I’d be living in Bora Bora by now. The elderly gentleman, on the other hand, is saving his energy by merely reading about the day’s problems in the newspaper.
This is a view of what I think we need. I don't mean the doge (especially not this one, Francesco Foscari, who had enough calamities of his own). I mean the lion. I want this lion to come back and take the situation in hand, in tooth, in claw. He looks like all he needs is a signal from somebody.
This is a view of what I think we need. I don’t mean the doge (especially not this one, Francesco Foscari, who had enough calamities of his own). I mean the lion. I want this lion to come back and take the situation in hand, in tooth, in claw. He looks like all he needs is a signal. First thing he’ll do is throw the book at everybody.
Continue Reading