This is the snap I made which gave the lady to suppose that I was a tourist. But wait — she then proceeded to complain that there are too many tourists? Was she referring to me? I totally missed that.
Talking about tourism in Venice is like talking about altitude sickness on Kilimanjaro. I speak from experience, as you know.
Both phenomena can be extreme, disagreeable, and unavoidable. (Well, altitude sickness is avoidable, theoretically, if you have enough time to acclimate yourself.) I haven’t discovered a way to acclimate to tourism here, at the point it has reached, except by avoidance. Which is like solving altitude sickness by not climbing the mountain. No taking the vaporetto on the Grand Canal on Sunday afternoon, for example. No Piazza San Marco pretty much ever until winter.
But yesterday morning at the Rialto Market vaporetto stop I had a useful exchange of views with a heftily-middle-aged German lady. (Useful to me; she was untouched by the experience.)
So we’re standing on the dock, as I said. I snap a photo of some people I know from the rowing section of the Railway Employees’ Afterwork Club, as they rowed their gondola downstream. They were followed by a caorlina from another club. I didn’t raise my camera.
She speaks: “Don’t you want to take a picture of them?”
I reply: “No, I was just taking a picture of the other people because I know them.”
“Are they training for something?”
“No, they’re just out for a spin in the morning. It’s something people in the boat clubs like to do.”
“Well, I’ve never seen them and I’ve been to Venice many times.”
“Oh. That’s odd.”
A pause.
“So you live here?”
“Yes I do.”
“HOW do you STAND IT with all the TOURISTS?”
Certainly the number of people in town — especially the Piazza San Marco — exceeds the maximum capacity allowed by any fire department you can name. But how do we decide who gets to stay and who gets sent home? Is Venice going to become some demented reality show, like “Survivor”? Now that I think about it, it kind of already is. What’s missing are qualified judges.
I could tell — as perhaps you can too — that she wasn’t asking because she wanted to know. She wasn’t asking, actually. She was announcing her opinion on what it would be like to live here, and clearly it would be worse than five forevers in Hades. But I decided to go with it for a while, just to see where we might end up.
“Well, every place has its positive and negative aspects,” I said. (Aren’t you proud of me for being so tactful?) “If there is a perfect place on earth, please tell me where it is, and I’ll go there immediately.”
But she was not to be pried loose from the subject of all the TOURISTS. Though now that I think of it, I should have asked her which corner of paradise she comes from.
“I’ve always come to Venice in the WINTER when there is NOBODY. I went to (I can’t remember where) in the winter and there was NOBODY. It was WONDERFUL. I don’t LIKE people.” Something in her voice made me picture a scene of utter desolation in which she, rejoicing, wandered solitarily through deserted streets as the evening shadows thickened over the stiffening corpse of a large rat in the main square.
Perhaps this is the lady’s ideal view of Venice, or will be, just as soon as those two annoying people in the distance are eliminated.
“So why did you come in April?” (The obvious question.)
“Oh, I’m on a CRUISE.” As if this made her presence on the dock at the market inevitable. Do they drive people off the ship with whips? And I suppose she had examined the itinerary, hence was not taken by surprise to find herself in VENICE. But I didn’t reach for any of these flapping loose ends.
Our vaporetto was pulling up to the dock. “I hope you enjoy your cruise,” I said. She didn’t reply but I had the impression she was already doubting that that would be likely.
As I thought back over this very unsatisfactory conversation, I realized that I had missed my chance to throw her to the mat and painfully pin her, even if she did weigh twice as much as me.
It would have been easy. All I needed to do was to say, ” If tourists annoy you, what are you doing here? Because you’re just as much a tourist as the rest of them. Maybe you’re annoying everybody else. So why don’t you get the ball rolling by going away?”
I know that Lino would have put it more succinctly; he’d have said “So go home already.” But that lacks the philosophical twist that interested me.
Who gets to decide who should be allowed to be a tourist in Venice? They’re irritating because they’re here? You’re here too.
As Stanislaw Lec observed, “No snowflake in an avalanche feels responsible.”
Foggy thinking doesn’t help you understand anything. Though if you’re lucky you might sound poetic, instead of merely incoherent.
The catastrophe of the Costa Concordia two weeks ago today has been a good thing in at least one (sorry, I mean only one) way: It has given a turbo-boost to the local opposition to allowing big cruise ships to slide past the Piazza San Marco like floating Alps.
By now, images of these behemoths and Venice have become as trite as Venice and acqua alta.
Just one example at random of a typical big ship coming to Venice. The top deck is lined with thousands of people, all making the same photograph of the Piazza San Marco. As far as I can tell, this is the main reason why the big ships insist on entering and leaving Venice by the Bacino of San Marco.
There was murmuring before, but the death of a ship and some of its people has created a good deal of commotion, not only in Venice but also at the national level, concerning the desirability of allowing these ships to come here. Needless to say, the political parties have all hoisted their shields and battle-axes and are ready for combat. And, as usual, the trumpet sounding the charge tends to drown out any other sound.
I’d like to review the main points, though I have to warn you that this subject, like most other subjects here, has become a mass of insanely knotted statistics and semi-statistics and facts and semi-facts interpreted in 11,552 different ways, according to who is speaking and, ergo. what they want. Debates of the pros and cons of heavy cruise ship traffic in the world’s most beautiful city and environs are so loaded with emotion that it has become virtually impossible to hear what anybody’s really saying, though the various viewpoints are fairly simple to summarize.
Cruise statistics for 2011 as published by the Gazzettino.
Pro: There is only one item in the “pro” column on the proverbial yellow legal pad, and that’s “Money.” Venice has done everything possible to attract and keep cruise business. In 2000, only 200 ships visited Venice, and it is now the Number One cruising homeport in the Mediterranean, and the third in Europe. With the shrinking of the income from the Casino, the starving city budget is being kept alive primarily by this new touristic medium.
Don’t be distracted by the number of companies whose ships come to Venice (43), or how many ships visited last year (654) or the number of transits they made of the Bacino of San Marco (1,308) — I’d have thought there were more — or the number of passengers last year (2,248,453), even though all these numbers are pretty impressive (fancy way of saying “huge and scary”).
The only number that matters to the city, and the only factor which virtually guarantees that cruising will continue to be crucial here, is the money the city earns from it: 300 million euros (US$390,246,000) last year.
If you want to object to cruising in or around Venice, you need to come up with a suggestion for some other activity that will make that kind of money. Or, preferably, even more. Feel free to get back to me on this.
A view of the docks at Tronchetto. As you see, seven assorted ships can fit in here at any one time, though these is space for smaller ones (yes, there are smaller ones) at the Zona Marittima nearby -- three are moored there in this picture, just to the right of the big docks. Discussion is underway to expand the dock area.
Con: The conscientious objectors to cruising offer many urgent reasons why it is deleterious to the city. These reasons are more or less persuasive, depending on how deeply their proponents have managed to bury their ulterior motives.
The two main items in the “con” column concern the environmental damage wrought by the floating Alps.
They are:
Erosion caused by waves (there are no waves) and/or by the suction of the motors. This suction is real: I can attest that the motors of these ships perform a phenomenal sucking/pushing action, very much like what happens to the mouthwash when you rinse your mouth. I have seen with these very eyes the waters surging in and then surging out as a ship passes, even if it passes at a distance. It’s hard to think that this could be unimportant. As we know from the humbler but more destructive daily motondoso, water going into a fissure in a foundation pulls something with it — soil, mainly — when it comes out. This eventually creates empty spaces under buildings and sidewalks.
Ships maneuvering to enter or back out of their berths also create massive suction, as the brown sediment churned up here attests.
A study done by Worcester Polytechnic Institute on the hydrodynamic effect of big ships found this: “As cruise ships pass smaller canals along the St. Mark’s Basin and Giudecca Canal, they displace and accelerate the surrounding body of water, essentially pulling water from the smaller canals. This caused a noticeable increase in canal speed and a drop in the water levels. A total of five velocity tests were completed resulting in a 57.4% increase in canal speed, and two canal height tests were completed which showed an average water level drop of 11 c (4.3 inches). The observations suggest that the root cause for these accelerations can be explained by the Bernoulli Effect: the colossal geometry of cruise ships creates fast currents and low pressure areas around the moving vessels.”
Particulate Matter, the form of air pollution made up of tiny bits of stuff from combustion exhaust. Nobody made an issue of this when Venice was a real industrial center, and nobody brought it up when the Industrial Zone on the shoreline was going full blast. Nobody made an issue of it, Lino points out, when everybody — everybody — heated their homes or cooked using wood or coal. “You didn’t need to smoke anything,” he said — “smoke was everywhere.” But particulate matter from the ships is intolerable.
The view of the Giudecca Canal as seen by the passengers on a departing ship. I'm on a Minoan Lines ferry to Greece. If a ship were to go rogue here it could endanger city on both sides.
Four days after the Concordia ran aground, Corrado Clini, the new Minister for the Environment, came to Venice for a day. He was shown a number of things (MoSE was not on the list, which I can understand, because nothing can be done about it now), but the subject on everybody’s mind was the big ships.
He offered the following opinion: “Common sense suggests that if the principle value to care for is our natural patrimony, the fundamental resource for our tourism, we must avoid that it be put at risk.” You can’t argue with that.
He continued: “The traffic of these ‘floating apartment buildings’ in the Bacino of San Marco, with a notable impact, are without utility for the environment and for tourism.” If he is seeking utility for tourism, all he has to do is look at the municipal balance sheet. However, “without utility for the environment” is hard to refute.
Luca Zaia, the President of the Veneto Region, who was on hand, remarked that “The big ships in Venice are dangerous and certainly a problem to resolve. I have to admit that to see these colossi at San Marco is, to say the least, horrifying.” I myself have to admit that it’s odd that he only became horrified after the Concordia ran aground; the ships have been passing for years.
Giorgio Orsoni, the mayor of Venice, contributed these observations: “The subject of the big ships is an open one. With the Port Authority we have begun to reflect on a rapid solution which will satisfy the touristic system as well as the economic one.” Rapid solutions are not easy to come up with, because every player wants his concerns to come first. Nor would a rapid solution instill much confidence. If complex, well-reasoned solutions haven’t been found yet, why would a rapid one be any easier to devise, much less implement?
Sandro Trevisanato, president of VTP, which runs the port, stated that the big ships are the least polluting form of tourism, adding that the buses, the big launches, and cars create much more pollution than the big ships. (For the record, I’d like to say that this is the most intelligent comment so far.) He points out that emissions are one of the arguments used by those who want to ban the cruise ships from the lagoon, far beyond the aesthetic question. It’s a question of taste,” says Trevisanato. “In a few seconds the ships have passed and disappear.” Seconds? Has he never stood on the embankment on a summer Sunday evening to watch the March of the Pachyderms as they depart? Even one ship, by my estimate, takes at least 45 minutes to pass from Tronchetto to Sant’ Elena. And there could easily be seven of them, virtually nose to tail.
In any case, everybody directly involved in cruise tourism agrees that pollution must be kept at “level zero.” How to do that isn’t explained.
As for the possibility — remote, all agree — that something could go wrong with the motors, or that the ship for some other reason would suddenly become ungovernable, and that the force of inertia would impel it to ram bow-first into the Piazza San Marco or some other bit of Venice, Trevisanato says that the port is one of the most secure in the world, as the ships are protected from the effect of wind and waves, and the ships pass at a reasonable (I put that in) distance from the shores. Hard to say what is “reasonable” when the Giudecca Canal is only 320 meters (1000 feet) wide, or less. But you will have noticed that referring to wind and waves prevented him from discussing the consequences of a big ship going adrift in the Bacino of San Marco.
Someone reminded him that in 2004 the ship “Mona Lisa” ran aground in the fog in the Bacino of San Marco. His reply: “Exactly: and nothing happened.” This is true; the ship was on its way after a mere hour, undoubtedly thanks to the help of the rising tide. But the “Mona Lisa” is 201 meters (609 feet) long by 26 meters (85 feet) beam, and a gross tonnage of 28,891; not exactly a floating Alp.
The Concordia was 292 meters (958 feet) x 35.5 meters (116 feet); gross tonnage 112,000.
In any case, saying “Nothing happened” isn’t very helpful. It brings to mind the famous exchange in a Ring Lardner story: “‘Daddy, are we lost?’ ‘Shut up,’ he explained.”
The "Mona Lisa." This is what most cruise ships used to look like, before they put them on steroids.
And the mayor’s statement that a “rapid solution” is in the works isn’t very reassuring, even if it were true. Solutions have been debated for years.
Proposed solutions so far:
Building an “offshore port” in the Adriatic where the floating Alps would tie up, and offload passengers (and luggage) into launches which would bring them to Venice. Objections: Cost, feasibility, and the obvious pollution, primarily motondoso, which would be caused by thousands of launches trundling to and fro all day. I can add the element of potential danger to people, if not to Venice, of boarding and traveling in a launch when the bora is blowing.
Make the Bacino and the Giudecca Canal a one-way street. Tourists get to snap the Piazza San Marco either coming or going, but not both. This has the advantage of not depriving them totally of this scenic opportunity, while cutting in half the number of transits. A tour operator told me that it isn’t uncommon for a potential cruise customer to ask if the ship passes in front of the Piazza San Marco. If the answer is no, it’s an immediate deal-breaker.
Bring the ships into the lagoon via the inlet at Malamocco. Heavy shipping already passes here, heading for the docks at Marghera, so more heavy ships wouldn't make any difference. Theoretically.
But this new system would require deepening a heretofore unimportant natural channel known as the Canal of Sant’ Angelo in order to create a sort of bypass. Enter the lagoon at the inlet at Malamocco, steam up the shoreline via the Petroleum Canal, then turn right in the Canal of Sant’ Angelo, which neatly brings the behemoth to Tronchetto. The ship would depart via the Giudecca Canal, so the passengers could all snap their photos.
Or, the ship would enter, as it does now, by the inlet at San Nicolo’, steam past San Marco (snap snap snap) to Tronchetto, then depart down the Canal of Sant’ Angelo, Petroleum Canal, and out into the Adriatic at Malamocco.
Sometimes a big ship moors downstream from San Marco at the Riva dei Sette Martiri. It might seem like a bright idea to put them all here, except that the passengers wouldn't get their snaps; also, there isn't enough shoreline for the typical job lot on a summer weekend. And there is also the issue of the vibrations from the generators and the blocking of television reception which are major irritations for the residents. Who would want to spend the summer with these just outside the front door?
What’s extremely wrong with this idea — in my opinion, as well as many environmentalists — is that deepening the Canal of Sant’ Angelo would be a reprise of the digging of the Petroleum Canal, a deed which many have long since recognized as a disaster for the lagoon. A channel as straight as an airport runway and deep enough for cargo ships and tankers behaves like the average water faucet, concentrating and accelerating the force of the water passing through it. Many environmental groups date the beginning of the deterioration of the lagoon ecosystem from the creation of the Petroleum Canal. Among other things, it is estimated that this canal is responsible for the loss of one million cubic meters of sediment every year. We don’t have to care, but the myriad creatures and plants which depend on the sediment certainly do.
Digging another deep channel will almost certainly cause the same phenomenon, thereby multiplying the damage. Just what we need, when you add in the same effect caused by the deepening of the three lagoon inlets for the installation of the MoSE floodgates.
So the bypass canal, which looks so good on paper, would be yet another blow to an ecosystem which UNESCO, along with the city of Venice, designated as a World Heritage Site. Now that I think of it, the only group that hasn’t weighed in yet on this is UNESCO. Maybe they’re thinking.
Last idea: Forget Tronchetto. Move the whole passenger port over to the shoreline at Marghera. Docks already exist, or could be created, so logistically the idea has a lot in its favor. Except that Marghera is part of the dying Industrial Zone, with all the aesthetic appeal of a dying Industrial Zone. It’s like selling a cruise from Venice that actually starts in the Port of Newark or Liverpool. Intending no offense.
Speaking of the force of inertia, debates, meetings, commissions, studies (oh good, we can always use more of those) and assorted pronouncements will undoubtedly continue. I can make that claim because when the “Mona Lisa” ran aground in 2004, the then-mayor, Paolo Costa, ringingly declared that a stop must be put to the big ships passing in the Bacino of San Marco.
He said (translation by me): “What happened has unfortunately confirmed my worries, and that is that an absolute certainty doesn’t exist on the possibility to guarantee the security in this zone of the city (Bacino San Marco) which is so important and delicate. It was horrifying to see the ship aground a mere 30 meters from a vaporetto stop, and fortunately consequences were avoided that could have been disastrous and unimaginable. Now we must take rapid measures, more than one, and very detailed, that eliminate the danger of finding, one day, a ship in the Piazza San Marco. Because everything which today is at risk in the Bacino of San Marco isn’t something that can be protected only probably, but certainly, and with safety.”
Eight years have passed, two mayors have succeeded him, Costa is now President of the Port of Venice, and those “rapid measures” are still being fervently invoked.
The Port of Venice may be protected from potentially dangerous winds, but there seems to be no way to protect it from hurricanes of hot air.
A big ship leaving Venice. These proportions once shocked and dismayed me. But you can get used to almost anything.
The departure board at Venice's Marco Polo Airport. The first flight left at 6:35. followed by 20 others before this list came up at 10:07.
I went to the airport one morning two weeks ago, and there I discovered that there is a dark side to cruising. The only thing surprising about that is that I was surprised.
Going home from vacation is never very much fun, but it would seem that Marco Polo airport was designed to get you accustomed really fast to the fact that the fun is seriously over.
As I have often mentioned — sorry if I’m becoming repetitive, maybe I should set some of this material to music and we could all join in on the chorus — Venice has become a mega-major passenger port.
The wall on the right is where the line of check-in counters is placed. The left edge of this photograph is where the line at each counter ends.
Cruise traffic in the last ten years has quadrupled. Expressed in bodies, that comes to 1,420,980 in 2009, which represented a 16.9 per cent increase over the previous year. Venice is now the fourth busiest port in Europe, and the first in the Mediterranean.
The first ship on the dance card this year was the Costa “Deliziosa,” which arrived on January 30 (I don’t know from where — maybe there’s a cruise-ship launching platform somewhere around Queen Maud Land). The last one scheduled this year is the MSC “Magnifica,” which will depart on December 27. The word “season” has taken on new meaning: It’s every month of the year except January.
But until last Sunday, I hadn’t really given any thought to what these numbers might portend, not so much to the ships as to the airport.
The space from the man in the yellow shirt on the right and the red suitcase on the left is the space allotted to walking to your check-in counter, or wandering aimlessly.
After all, passengers mostly arrive by air. I’ve often seen the young women who serve as cruise-passenger wranglers waiting in the Arrivals area at Marco Polo airport, holding up their signs for Princess or Costa or whatever the cruise line might be, to help them gather their arriving clients, each of whom appears to bring about ten metric tons of luggage. The common idea about cruises is that people go on them in order to eat constantly, like blue whales (daily requirement: about 1.5 million calories). But when I look at their bags, I think their main plan must be to pass the time changing clothes.
Anyway, it’s obvious that extraordinary machinery has been developed to keep these ships and their passengers and their supplies coming in and going out, doing a turnaround in the space of a day, for 11 months a year.
It doesn’t appear, however, that the same efficiency has been devoted to the airport phase of the experience. Because when six or seven cruise ships come into Venice on a Sunday morning to finish their dreamy voyages, most of those people head for the airport. Where the party is definitively over.
Venice airport is the third busiest in Italy, preceded only by Rome and Milan. This makes the airport people very proud, as well it should. But while their annual numbers might be impressive on the page, they’re not nearly as impressive as the struggle all those thousands of people have to make in order to leave Venice in something like a four-hour window of time. Certainly there are early flights where the density of humans is less — the first departs at 6:35 AM. But no cruise company in the world would put its passengers on the airport bus at 4:30 AM, unless it were docking in Murmansk.
Another glimpse of the space for walking around, or staring at the Departures board, or trying to figure out what to do next. The width of the area is theoretically compensated for by the fact that it extends for 60 check-in counters. Doesn't feel like quite enough, though.
So as I say, I went to the airport on a Sunday morning to meet some friends who had disembarked from their cruise and were flying out that night. When I slid off the escalator on the Departures level, what greeted me was an appalling combination of the last day at summer camp (when all the kids are milling around being picked up by parents) and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West featuring Annie Oakley.
That morning there were 20 flights scheduled between 9:50 AM and 12:15 PM; that’s one every six minutes. And three of those flights were to major US destinations, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and New York. I mention that only because I presume that one flight to Atlanta involves more passengers than three flights to Palermo.
When I think back on the previous facility 15 years ago (a nostalgic reminder of the Oneida County airport at Utica, New York in 1968), the shiny new version is something of an improvement. But one has to ask oneself (I’ll stand in for “one,” in this scene), what they were thinking when they designed an airport that has more space for the planes than for the people.
Take the check-in area on the Departures level. It is beautifully long, but ludicrously narrow. There are 60 check-in counters, and the designer(s) evidently assumed that each check-in counter would serve a line of no more than 25 calm, lucid, well-organized passengers with no luggage or children. Then they left just a smidge of space at the end of the line so that people could get through who needed to go somewhere else — another counter, or the newsstand or the bar.
But wait. It turns out there are more than 25 people who need to line up at each counter, so they begin to clump together. And hold on — we actually need lots and lots of space for the people who are walking from here to there because many of them got here the necessary two (or more) hours before departure but whose flight isn’t open for check-in yet. So they wander (mill around, actually) or they sit, if they can find a place among the very designy but not very numerous seats.
Let’s talk about other things people need besides enough space to stand in a check-in line, or to sit and check their tickets and yell at their kids and or maybe take a snooze.
People need to go the bathroom. There are two obvious bathrooms on the Departures level and one hidden away down a hallway. I don’t know about the men’s room (men don’t care, anyway), but each ladies’ room has two (2) toilets. That makes four stalls for women on a floor that is pullulating with hundreds and hundreds of people. There are two ladies’ rooms on the Arrivals floor, too, so make that another four stalls on the ground level. Eight stalls — I mean ten, if you count the hidden facility — for women in an airport that operates an average of 80 flights a day, or an average of one every 12 minutes. (There must be a handicapped-accessible bathroom somewhere, it just doesn’t come to mind.)
Lest you think I am unreasonably obsessed with physiological needs (like, say, space to move around in and yes, to relieve oneself), I have some data from Robert Davis, an architect friend of mine. He writes: “We have a rule of thumb for theaters which is ’30 seats per seat.’ … So a 600-seat facility should have 20 fixtures, evenly divided male/female.”
Assuming that airport design is not radically different from theater design (some people spend more time in airports than they do in theaters, after all), if you have 600 people in the airport you would need ten stalls for the women. So we see that the Venice airport is already in a bathroom deficit situation. Because let’s assume there are more than 600 people in the airport at a given time, a pretty safe assumption based on the evidence of the other morning. The people keep swarming in, but there are still only eight stalls. Just deal with it.
At the other end of the alimentary canal, there are two (2) bar/sandwich counters (one upstairs with no seating and one downstairs with some tables), and one multi-station buffet with very little space to move around in with your tray, and a batch of cramped tables and extremely little space for your luggage, assuming you’re snacking before checking in, or you feel like doing something other than wander and look for a place to sit. The line for this facility stretches out to collide with the lines of people checking in at counters 59 and 60.
Then there's the way people come up the one escalator and then just stop -- to think, to look around, to consider the Departures board which is facing them on the other wall. Perhaps an up escalator and a Departures board shouldn't be in front of each other.
I have to say, pretty slim pickings for passengers at an airport which claims to be ready to handle 15 million passengers a year. Especially considering that it is currently handling only about 8 million.
I’m not saying Venice’s aerodrome has to be like Frankfurt or Amsterdam airports, though I wouldn’t mind. All I’m saying is that while everyone has been working night and day to increase cruise traffic, it doesn’t appear that anyone has been attending to how they will be accommodated (I mean wrangled) on the day they leave. So far, Skytrax has not awarded any stars at all to Venice airport. I wonder what that means.
So what advice could I give someone leaving their dream cruise and flying out of Venice airport in the summer? Bring a book. Your own food. A folding chair. A portable toilet. Think of it as camping, in the middle of Times Square. You’ll be fine.
The joy of cruising ends right about here. No looking back, no going forward, either.
Take the check-in area on the Departures level. It is beautifully long, but ludicrously narrow. There are 60 check-in counters, and the designer(s) evidently assumed that each check-in counter would serve a line of no more than 25 calm, lucid, well-organized passengers with no luggage or children. Then they left just a smidge of space at the end of the line so that people could get through who needed to go somewhere else — another counter, or the newsstand or the bar.
