The once-terrifying snaggly old crones are becoming cuter by the year. It’s almost like a competition by now, and if it keeps up like this the Befana is going to end up looking like a golden retriever puppy.
January 6 is the Feast of the Epiphany, which puts an end to the Christmas holidays (which seem to have begun in late August) by the sugar-laden nocturnal passage of the Befana. At some point in history, someone — probably two years old — mangled the word “Epiphany” and it became Befana (beh-FAH-nah) and so she has remained.
I entertain myself in two ways during this interlude.
The first is by conducting a completely unofficial census of the Befane that I see in bars, cafe’s, even supermarkets. There are so many of them you’d think that January 7 was officially going to be Take-a-Hag-to-Work day.
Would you accept candy from these women? Of course you would.This Befana hasn’t fully evolved from her original terrifying stage. But she’s on the right track.This is what the Ur-Befana is supposed to look like. That’s what makes her generosity with candy so wonderful — she looks like somebody who’d rather leave you some barbed wire. If the Befana is softened to the point of resembling your favorite stuffed toy, the essential frisson is lost.And speaking of candy, the tradition is that if you’ve been a bad little person, she will leave coal in your stocking. Some blithe spirit, excited by having been able to make candy that looks like coal (carbone) has lost the plot because this year we now also have fake polenta and cheese. What child has ever been threatened with polenta or cheese for having been bad? If you must be creative, at least make the fake candy look like something unnerving — fried fruit bat, maybe, or jellied moose nose.
The second way in which I entertain myself in this period is by admiring the underpinnings of the lagoon, as revealed during the exceptional low tides which always occur about now. This is the completely predictable and normal phenomenon of late December-early January, and the exposed mudbanks are the seche de la marantega berola (the mudbanks of the little old Epiphany hag). The newspaper sometimes runs a big photo with an overwrought caption that leads the uninitiated to think that the world has come to an end. Venice without water in the canals? Man the lifeboats! Oh wait — there isn’t enough water to float them. While it’s easy to imagine the inconvenience caused by acqua alta, not many people (I suppose) pause to imagine the inconvenience inflicted by not enough water.
Or let’s say there’s enough water, technically speaking. But the distance between our moored boat and the edge of the fondamenta is so great that we either have to plan ahead and bring a ladder (made up, I’ve never seen this), or just schedule our activities in a different sequence. There have been plenty of times we’d have gone out rowing, but the prospect of having to disembark when the water is 21 inches below the normal mean level just spoils the whole idea.
As you see. Actually, plenty of people drive a big nail into the wall as a primitive but effective step up. We keep meaning to do it, but so far sloth has overcome good intentions.
But never fear. The tide will return to its normal levels, and the Befana will be back next year. I promise.
Even with your eyes closed you can easily tell that the tide was extremely low yesterday afternoon — all you have to do it walk up or down the gangway at the vaporetto dock. It may not look like it, but this was definitely a 45-degree angle, and if you were pushing someone in a wheelchair you’d definitely have to call for reinforcements.Up until two days ago I’d never seen mud in the Bacino Orseolo. Just pull your gondola up on the beach and have a barbecue.People sometimes ask me how deep the water is in the canals. I always inquire, “When the tide is in, or when it’s out?” You can see the range of options here on this exposed wall (the exposed bottom is also impressive, in its way. I’d certainly never seen it till two days ago). The lower, uniformly brown stretch of wall is almost always underwater. The upper layer is covered with green algae which flourishes with intermittent dunkings and dryings as the tide rises and falls.Yes, there is this moment at the turn of the year which makes one almost long for acqua alta. Do not quote me.
You can thank thousands of people for this, starting with the victims of cholera whose fate made it clear that it was time for Venice to get a real water supply.
To pick up the story more or less where we left off, Venice continued to hydrate itself with water ferried across the lagoon in boats — plus the occasional well — until 1884, when the aqueduct was finally constructed that is bringing you water even as you read this.
I’m not a connoisseur of aqueducts, though I grasp the most basic outlines of the enterprise. But when I went to the Museum of the Aqueduct (not made up) near Piazzale Roma I was amazed, impressed, and totally gobsmacked by the amount of freaking knowledge one has to have in order to construct a public water supply, knowledge that’s expressed in formulas that look like angry porcupines with square roots instead of quills.
That little doorway in the corner next to the church of Sant’ Andrea de la Zirada is the entrance to the water-supply complex. No photos allowed in the grounds, which is too bad because they have two charming fountains I’d love to have shown you.The entrance to the complex — the museum is in a building inside the walls. “Sportelli” are the desks where staff help you resolve your problems with bills, service, or anything in between. Only open in the morning from Monday to Friday, 8:30 – 12:30. No charge for the museum. However, everything is written in Italian. Though you do get to hear the soothing hum of the pumps at work.
Here is the network of pipes in Venice today (I regret the uneven background color; the lighting in the museum was just that way):
The system now serves the historic center, Giudecca, Murano, Lido, Pellestrina, Vignole, Sant’ Erasmo and the “minor islands” of the lagoon. The Veritas laboratory conducts 800 analyses per day on 17,000 samples.In case you think you’ve never seen the aqueduct, water pipes are easy to detect on a summer morning.
Also to be detected under bridges, because that’s how the pipes get across the canals.And the opposite is dependably visible in the winter.
This rendering shows the position of the pipe along the original Ponte degli Scalzi (1854).
According to VERITAS (Venezia Energia Risorse Idriche Territorio Ambiente Servizi), the latest edition of the water-and-trash-collection entity, the water system of the 44-town province of Venice is respectably vast. Let me say that statistics quoted by Veritas tend to vary according to assorted parameters, so I’ve taken the more modest numbers available in an effort to keep as close to the facts for the historic center as I can.
The distribution network of the aqueduct is more than 1,150 km (714 miles), 300 km (186 miles) of which are in the historic center. These pipes provide the Comune of Venice (261,321 inhabitants, including Mestre) with more than 45 million cubic meters of water a year, or 11,887,742,356.116679 gallons. Eighty-six per cent of this ocean of H2O is groundwater drawn from 49 wells (another source says 60 wells) between Venice, Padua and Treviso, and a small part from the Sile river which is made potable at Ca’ Solaro (Favaro). But it was a long, arduous, and costly path that brought us to this shining moment.
At the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, the population was about 150,000; the following two decades saw an intense depopulation at an average rate of 21 per cent per year. By 1820 there were only 100,000 people in Venice; after the cholera epidemic of 1838 only 93,500 inhabitants. Then began a gradual recovery and by 1857 the population was 120,414.
It was long since obvious that the hygienic/sanitary situation of the city had become extremely precarious. Water was still being brought from the mainland, but it wasn’t sufficient, and the once-glorious wells had been left to die. Veritas explains this by saying that the wells were at risk of infiltration of salt water via acqua alta and the necessary maintenance was difficult and expensive. I take that to mean “Nobody wanted to bother,” because the Venetian Republic didn’t seem to have any trouble maintaining them.
In any case, the situation was becoming dire. A survey commissioned by the city government in 1873 revealed that of a total of 4,329 wells, 2,620 were “mediocre,” 340 “muddy,” and 461 were “fetid.” And lack of any sewage treatment system only made everything worse.
EPIDEMIOLOGICAL INTERLUDE #1
To appreciate the importance — even urgency — of building an aqueduct for Venice, some context is necessary. In the 19th century, Venice (and most cities in Italy) (and Europe) was a hotbed of infectious diseases. Sorry to ruin your images of glamour, but parts of Venice more closely resembled Dickensian London than the refulgent Serenissima.
Cholera, unknown in Europe before the 1800’s, began to work its way across the continent. Major epidemics struck Venice in 1835-36, 1848-49, 1855, 1873, interspersed with smallpox, measles, and typhoid, terrifying diseases that flourished in poverty-stricken, cramped, feculent cities and which were vaguely battled by bewildered doctors and exploitative folk healers. Descriptions of the streets and smells in the most degraded neighborhoods will not be transcribed here — you’re welcome — but a city having more than 100,000 inhabitants with a lugubrious water supply and no sewage disposal other than the nearest canal basically describes itself. Venice wasn’t alone; in most Italian cities of the 19th century, sufficient potable water and adequate sewers simply did not exist. “Deadly pathogens,” as one writer put it, “led a very public existence here.”
The cholera epidemic of 1836 killed 2,066 persons in Venice; in 1849 cholera carried away 3,839 victims. Unable to keep up with burials, the city simply stacked the cadavers in the stifling August heat in the area in front of the church of San Pietro in Castello.
The campo in front of the church of San Pietro in Castello is much happier during the annual festa in late June.
Naturally the desperate quarantines and fruitless cordons sanitaires that were imposed across Italy meant that commerce was strangled, and when the cholera relented, Venice was on its knees economically as well. After the epidemic of 1854-55, the price of every type of food in the city had doubled. The Swiss had collection boxes marked For the cholera victims among Venice’s poor installed in hotels in Ticino (a region in Switzerland neighboring Italy), a well-meaning gesture that infuriated the Italians.
These calamities led to predictable battles among the city’s politicians, while the distraught common people, having noticed the similarities between this new disease and poisoning, began to spread panicky rumors that the State was deliberately trying to kill them. In Calabria, according to a government minister writing later, “widespread rioting had broken out after the vast majority of cholera cases had occurred among the poor,
who … accused the rich of being directly responsible for the cholera outbreak. The government, it was believed, had dispersed poisoned powder in an attempt to kill off a sizeable portion of the region’s poor … Cholera riots were as widely feared as they were common.”
By the time cholera struck again in 1873, “build an aqueduct” was at the top of the municipal must-do list.
End of interlude.
In July, 1874, at the conclusion of the latest cholera epidemic, the city administrators put out a call for bids on an aqueduct. Six projects were submitted; the winning bid was from L.A. Ritterbandt and D. Croll Dalgairns of London. The plan was this: The water would come from the Brenta canal between Stra and Dolo (this sounds familiar); at Moranzani there would be filters, tanks and pumps (ditto); and a duct beneath the lagoon would ultimately reach Venice at the Maritime Station (Sant’ Andrea) where the water would fill a huge cistern. Here steam-powered pumps would send the water to private users, 111 public wells, and to boats assigned to supply the islands. The contract was signed on June 26, 1876 (two years after the call for bids…) but something must have gone askew because three years later there was still no sign of an aqueduct; a French company acquired the concession and the right to build it.
On March 15, 1880 the Minister of Public Works stipulated that the Veneta Society for Ventures and Public Construction (sub-contractor for the French company) must complete the work within three years. Cost: 1,100,000 gold French francs ($14,300,000 at current value) and 2,506,100 Italian lire (current value not found).
More pipe had to be laid in 1913-1915, according to the date on this photograph. But the scene couldn’t have changed much from the original aqueduct. Sections of pipes brought on wagons drawn by horses, loaded onto boats called peatas (here in the Canal Salso between the lagoon and Mestre), and then rowed to the work site.1882: Laying Duct 800 across the lagoon. First, they had to build walls and pump out the lagoon water, then dig the trench — men with shovels — and so on from there. Thirty per cent of the original iron pipes are still in use.I’d never reflected on the amount of lumber required for building an aqueduct.This structure, called a cassera, is essentially horizontal scaffolding whose primary duty is to brace the walls against the pressure of the surrounding lagoon. It’s also very useful for walking from here to there.
And, as you see, the work proceeded to a happy conclusion.
On June 23, 1884, let there be water! Ten years after the big decision was made, a jet of water from a magnificent temporary fountain in the Piazza San Marco leapt skyward to mark the inauguration of the new public water supply. Abundant! Clean! Glittering! Expensive! Before long, they had to adjust the ratio between number of users and number of coins per cubic meter because people weren’t signing up as predicted.
That taken care of, before long yet more water was needed, so some springs on the mainland at Sant’ Ambrogio (near Trebaseleghe) were tapped and more kilometers of pipe were laid.
On March 7, 1898 the network reached Murano, where the first spurt was celebrated with lights, stands (food, undoubtedly), a charity raffle, and a regata.
On October 1, 1900 the network reached the Giudecca.
On August 5 1901 the network reached the Lido. This must have been more than welcome, considering that the first sea-bathing establishments had begun to appear in 1857. The luxurious Grand Hotel des Bains had opened in 1900; I have no idea how their guests had been supplied with water. Maybe they bathed in prosecco.
July 18 1911: The aqueduct suffered a rupture which left the city, the islands and the estuary without water for eight days (in summer, of course). The investigation concluded that a boat probably ran over it. To avoid future inconvenience, the city approved construction of two additional ducts from the mainland to Sant’ Andrea.
May, 1911: Cholera strikes again. As it happened, German author Thomas Mann was visiting Venice during this period, so cholera became a major element of “Death in Venice,” published in 1912. I’ve never thought about how a tourist board might judge the relative value of a novel featuring a particularly repellent local epidemic if written by a Nobel laureate. Must have been awkward.
It’s interesting to note that, among some other factors I’ll write about elsewhere, these epidemics contributed to the 19th-century Romantic vision of Venice as sad, melancholic, somber, doleful. I’ve always wondered where that idea came from — you can’t blame everything on the fog — but it stands to reason that the general atmosphere (I don’t mean the olfactory) in 19th-century Venice often was not the most jovial.
EPIDEMIOLOGICAL INTERLUDE #2
So, I hear you ask — fancy new aqueduct and there’s still cholera? Certainly; not everybody was immediately hooked up to the system. You not only had to pay for the water, but for the connection and the meter. Lots of families couldn’t afford it.
Second, running water from the faucets did not automatically mean plumbing and flush toilets. Yes, drinking and washing with clean water is a huge step forward in public health, but most families continued with chamber pots or the occasional bucket and the nearest canal for quite a while. Naming no names, but someone I know extremely well reports that his family continued till at least the Fifties to use the chute in the kitchen (yes, in the kitchen) which went down into the canal. The opening was covered by a heavy stone which had a handle on it, which was convenient and mostly blocked out the odor.
I have now finally understood the deeper meaning of a common phrase everybody uses when they want to cut short a disagreement: “Metemo na piera sora.” “Let’s just put a stone on it.” I’d been imagining a tombstone, which connotes finality as well as anything else I can think of. But now the image of covering the toilet seems ever so much more powerful.
End of interlude. Also, end of story. I used to be fascinated by the lagoon, and still am, but I have to say that water pouring out of any faucet here has come to fill me with admiration and awe.
A very eccentric and overstuffed shop in Cannaregio has antique appurtenances of various types, including old faucets. Think of the pleasure each one of these brought, back then when people hadn’t quite begun to take running water for granted.You can design faucets with every material and in every way your brain can contrive, but somehow now they don’t impress me anywhere as much as the fact that water comes out of them.
Yes, there has been more than one aqueduct. There is the current one, which was inaugurated in 1884 and is still functioning with 30 percent of its original cast iron pipes. And there was the first one, begun in 1425 and working until 1884. This is the one that in my opinion deserves our astonishment and admiration, seeing that the duct for the aqua was boats, buckets and men.
A view of Fusina, watery gateway to the Venetian hinterland a mere 4.4 km / 2.7 miles from Venice.Let me set the scene. This is a view of what the Venetians accomplished in order to get their water supply from the Brenta River. The yellow line is the Brenta today. The red line is its original, natural riverbed, which empties into the lagoon at Fusina (anciently called “Lizzafusina”). The Brenta couldn’t be permitted to rampage all the way into the lagoon along its original path (red) because of the difficulty in managing a wild river, and because it presented a clear danger of silting up the lagoon in that area. So the Venetians re-routed the Brenta southward to get it out of the way, essentially, and used the old watercourse as a more domesticated and manageable stream, naming it the Naviglio del Brenta, or navigable Brenta. As if that weren’t enough rockstar water wrangling, they later cut another channel (fuchsia) called the “canale Novissimo” (super-new canal) in order to manage the waterflow in the Naviglio. But by the early 1600’s it was clear that the water in the Naviglio wasn’t reliably clean enough for continued drinking, so in 1609 the “Seriola” channel (teal) was cut. It debouched at Fusina just as the Naviglio did (and still does), but this stretch of water was stringently checked for any possible sources of pollution (soap from laundry, farm runoff, trash, etc.). Today the Seriola is reduced to a dribbly little stream that disappears along the way, not even a shadow of its former glory. Zoom in on google maps and you can follow these channels as they are today.
First, some background: At the beginning of the 14th century, Venice was one of the most populous cities in Europe, with some 200,000 inhabitants. Which meant that when the plague struck in 1348, there were plenty of victims. On the positive side, this reduction of thirsty mouths meant that the survivors now had plenty of water on hand in the wells. On the negative side, a comprehensible terror of contamination had set in which made people reluctant to use them. Supplementary water had been brought for years from nearby rivers but now that, too, had become suspect.
You may have noticed that Venetians were not, generally speaking, an easily daunted people. They built palaces on mudflats awash in brackish tides, to take an example at random. So a problem presented itself: Need more fresh water. A solution was born: Pick one river, keep it clean, harvest the water and bring it from there to the city.
That decision made, in 1425 the health department decreed that the Brenta would be the only river to be used for drinking water. (Among its many fine points was its nearness to the city.) Laws and regulations were enacted to protect its purity, and a system devised by which river water was loaded onto boats that were rowed, of course, or sailed, if possible, to Venice; there the water was transferred into smaller boats and then finally into the wells, public and private. (Not directly into the wells, of course, but down the gatoli so that the water would benefit from the same filtering process as rainwater.) After which it was paid for, naturally. This is Venice, where money is king.
The Brenta River rises in the lake of Caldonazzo inland 144 km (89 miles) toward the Alps, here shown at Carpane’-Valstagna in the Sugana valley. True, that day it had rained heavily in the mountains so the river was fairly unruly, but rain and snow are what one hopes for if one is waiting for water downstream. I think it’s clear that a river that looked even somewhat like this at the lagoon edge would not be anyone’s first choice, even apart from the question of how much soil it’s carrying. On that day it was carrying a lot.The Naviglio is the domesticated branch of the Brenta reduced to manageable dimensions, here hosting the “Riviera Fiorita,” an annual day-long boat procession from Stra to Moranzani. Notice the remains of the towpath along the right-hand bank.
And so the acquaroli (acquaioli in Venetian) or watermen, once minor figures in the drama of Venetian water supply, became lead players, and formed their own guild in 1471. They rowed (I keep stressing that, but they also sailed) thousands of liters of water to Venice in enormous cargo boats still called burci (singular: burcio). If they carried only water, it was poured into the burcio itself, indubitably into compartments; if any enterprising acquaroli used their boat on off days to haul garbage away, they were required to carry the water in specially designed tubs. (As if that needed to be specified?)
This is a burcio in 1948, which as you see was rigged for sailing whenever possible. The crew lived aboard in the spaces beneath the bow and stern. The cargo here was sand. (Photo: nauticautile.altervista.org). And yes, they rowed them when necessary. Lino says that they always had a smaller boat tied astern.The burci were riverboats, definitely not designed for the sea. This is the port of Noventa on the Piave river; Lino remembers when burci like these would be moored in the same way along the Zattere.A burcio entering the lock at Moranzani, the last one on the Naviglio before reaching Fusina. Boats here typically were towed along a towpath by animals — oxen, mules, horses, or if there was nothing else, by men. The boatmen would often have a dog, and you can imagine it; what we might call a “junkyard dog” comes out, even today, as calling something or someone a “can da burcio” — a burcio dog.
Given the importance of their cargo, the guild of the acquaroli was overseen by not one, but several government agencies: The “Giustizieri Vechi,” “Provedadori sora la Giustizia Vechia,” “Magistrato a la Sanità” (health) and “Colegio a la Milizia da Mar.” The men were also required to make various payments to the noble families which had been granted the concession to maintain what became an impressive industrial complex.
The acquaroli had to keep a sharp eye on their product, because there were laws forbidding the use of public water for private gain. There were many water-intensive crafts in Venice — dyeing, wool-washing, laundry-washing, glass-making, to pick a few, and they were required to buy their own water. The acquaroli were authorized to stand guard on the public wells to make sure any private entrepreneurs didn’t treacherously attempt to steal the water for which the city had paid. They watched the wells out of the goodness of their hearts? Not really. Water in the public wells was paid at a lower rate than the private wells, so the acquaroli had a vested interest in making sure the cheap water wasn’t being removed by the expensive-water customers.
There was also a subset of some additional 100 acquaroli who didn’t belong to the guild. They were illegal but that didn’t bother anybody; they had their own waterboats and were permitted, for an annual fee of 20 soldi paid to the guild, to sell their water retail to any customer standing there with a bucket or pot.
When the burcio arrived at its established destination in the city, the water would be offloaded onto smaller boats which were then rowed to whatever wells were on the schedule to be filled that day.
Two acquaroli pouring the fresh water from their smaller boat down a wooden trough which emptied into the gatoli of whatever well they were hired to fill. Unhappily I haven’t found any other illustrations of this process. This pen-and-ink- plus-watercolor depiction is by Giovanni Grevembroch (1753).
How the water got to Venice is one thing, but how the water got to the burci is an even more impressive tale.
A drawing of Lizzafusina in 1500 by Nicolo’ Dal Cortivo. The “chanaleto de Lizafoxine” leads to the right (eastward) and was the channel by which any and all boats arrived at Fusina.This was the set-up at what was originally called Lizzafusina, but now is simply Fusina. We’re looking upstream, obviously. This and the following four historical drawings are from a PowerPoint presentation by A.A.T.O. Consiglio di Bacino Laguna di Venezia prepared by engineer Tullio Cambruzzi. (Caption translated by me): “The ‘carro’ (wagon) of Lizzafusina. In the old days the zone was called Lizzafusina or Issa Fusina or also Zafusina: Issa signifies … an urging to raise something heavy” (as in “haul away!”); “Fusina indicates an ‘officina’ (workshop). Therefore we can affirm that Fusina signifies the entire “water building” that served to make the carro function. Lissa or Issa could signify also “slitta” (sled), because the carro made the boats slide from the lagoon at the Brenta.” Evidently this system functioned to raise (and presumably lower) boats between the lagoon and the Naviglio until the lock was dug slightly upstream at Moranzani about 1613. The fees for maintaining this installation, the duties and excise fees paid by commercial traffic passing from the mainland to the lagoon went to a part of the Pesaro family, who were usefully nicknamed the “Pesaro del Caro,” or “of the carro.” When the lock was built it put the “carro” out of business, and the Pesaros were given the operation at the lock at Moranzani instead; in 1649 alone it earned them 1530 ducats.A close-up of the red-roofed building that housed the “carro,” into which the burci entered from Venice (direction lower right).“The machines to raise the water –These machines were used at Lizzafusina in the second half of the 1500’s before the construction of the Seriola. The purpose was to make the operation of loading the burci more efficient. The wheel (A) was fitted out with triangular boxes which were made to turn by a system of gears moved by animal power.” The water is being discharged into a trough leading to the waiting burcio (far left).
The system itself worked well, but by the early 1600’s the Venetian government had to admit that despite efforts to ensure its potability, the water from the Brenta was not always of the most limpid. So Cristoforo Sabbadino, a hydraulic engineer, was engaged as the head of a team to build a better system. (Let it be noted that the idea was totally his, and he’d been proposing it for years before the government finally agreed to undertake the project.)
Between 1609 and 1611 Sabbadino cut a channel, the “Seriola,” from the Brenta upriver at Dolo. This was now to be the official drinking-water supply for Venice and was so marked at that point by a marble tablet inscribed “HINC URBIS POTUS (“this is the potable water for the city”). The Seriola was 13.5 km long and one meter wide (8.3 miles and 3.2 feet), and brought the water downstream to the lagoon edge at Moranzani, having been passed through a series of filtering tanks. The Seriola’s quality was overseen by the Savi Esecutori alle Acque, and anyone caught besmirching its crystal depths was subject to heavy fines.
This historic marker still exists, but one source says it’s on via Garibaldi in Dolo, and another says it’s in the Dolo city hall. Anyway, it’s somewhere. Someday I’ll get to the bottom of this. “Seriola,” or Ceriola, was an ancient Venetian term meaning a small or narrow watercourse.
Here is the scheme for the Seriola:
Note that the top of the image is east. (“Alveo” means riverbed.) Working from the top clockwise we see “Riverbed called the Soprabondante” (“super-abundant,” known today simply as the Bondante); Brenta Novissima, which is the fuchsia line on the map at the beginning of this post and now called the “super-new canal”; the Muson Novo, or new Muson River clearly dug between the Seriola and the Muson Vecchio,” or old Muson, and riverbed of the Bottenigo River. The “Brenta Morta” or “dead Brenta” indicates the Naviglio which has been sidelined from the water-supply game.
So the water flows down the Seriola until it nears the lagoon’s edge.
“The Seriola arrived at Moranzani. Here there were burci always ready to carry the potable water to Venice where, according to the orders of the Senate, it was sold in the various districts. A branch of the Seriola went to the Bucca, where in the winter ice was produced and conserved in the nearby “giazzara” to be carried to Venice in the summer.” I don’t see either of those components on this map, so we will just have to imagine it.
Trust me, this post contains only the most minuscule part of the water-management system devised and maintained by the Venetians, and if I had time I’d have read more and basically kept the story going indefinitely. But anyone who might be even momentarily tempted to consider the construction of MOSE something impressive should pause to reflect on what was involved in moving all these rivers around. Which had become something of a Venetian specialty; in the same period (1600-1604) they also cut the Po River at Porto Viro and detoured it in a similar way to avoid imminent silting-up of the lagoon near Chioggia. The Po is the largest river in Italy. But as I may have mentioned, the Venetians were virtually impossible to daunt.
Let’s return to the subject of the public water supply. Even with thousands of rain-collecting wells in the city, Venice needed more water. (Bear in mind that in the 1600’s Venice had some 200,000 inhabitants). And they were thirsty, needed to wash their clothes, needed to dye their wool and silk, and so on.
I do not know how many artesian wells have ever been drilled here, so please do not ask me. But they were precious, obviously, especially when there was a drought. Or when bombs began to fall in the 20th century, threatening the aqueduct.
This trusty artesian well is in the Campo dei Ognissanti in Dorsoduro. Like many fountains here it lacks any sort of basin, no matter how small, for animals to drink from. I do not understand this.A restoration a few years ago added the official inscription…“Prof.ta M 209.75 ” means “Profondita’ (profundity, depth) 209.75 meters,” or 688.15 feet.This artesian well in Campo San Basso, otherwise known as the Piazzetta dei Leoncini, has been bubbling up for centuries. It is said to be the deepest in the city. I know no more, but if it’s deeper than the one at Ognissanti it deserves more respect than it ever gets.There are always pigeons splashing around here, it must be something like a spa for them.The upwelling water is easy to discern here. Curiously, while this pool must be a godsend to the pigeons and passing dogs, there is absolutely no provision here for supplying water to parched passersby. It’s the opposite of the fountain at the Ognissanti (and elsewhere). What is so hard about the notion of supplying water to everybody/thing?Do you see a well in Campazzo San Sebastiano? Look closer.This metal cap covers the pipe which once carried the artesian water, and presumably could still carry it. This is near Lino’s childhood neighborhood, and he walked by here on the way to elementary school every day. He remembers that this well was open during the Second World War, with a big tank set up to collect the water. Considering the bombs falling on Mestre (crucial railway node and near the industrial zone), the risk of losing water from the aqueduct was not to be taken lightly. I think it would be an excellent idea to open this again. There are plenty of dehydrated people who pass by here every day.This is a very rough sketch of the water-tank-and-faucets set up on the artesian well in Campazzo San Sebastiano. As Lino recalls it, the tank was sitting on sawhorses, or some supporting structure (not shown). The tank was filled by means of a tube attached to the fountain, and the water from the tank filled two long, closed metal tubes extending from both sides. Faucets were punched into these tubes. There was an overflow trough below the faucets, and an overflow tube from the top of the tank emptied the excess water into the trough. The excess water flowed away toward one of the still-open “gatoli,” or drains, that once conveyed rainwater to a subterranean cistern, as written about in my earlier post. Women brought their cooking pots, buckets, whatever container was called for, and filled up.One is strangely tempted to bring a set of strong pliers…One is strangely not tempted to be arrested and hauled away.Campo Sant’Agnese has a real, if decommissioned, well (background), and the scar of something (foreground) that looks very like a well. Perhaps this was one of those described by Tassini (translated by me): “In the 1500’s a well was drilled of the type called artesian. Marin Sanuto writes that ‘on July 8, 1533 there came to the Colegio sier Vincenzo Zorzi, sier Polo Loredan, sier Almoro’ Morexini Proveditori de Comun saying that following the orders of the Serenissimo and the most illustrious Signoria, they went to see the well in the district of Sant’ Agnese…'” He goes on to say that the engineers had dug to a depth of 16 “passi,” and had found fresh water. (A Venetian “passo” was equivalent to 1.738 meters, or 5.7 feet. Therefore they hit the water table at 91.2 feet down.) There’s more.Campo Sant’ Agnese on a tranquil summer day. It wasn’t so tranquil on an unspecified day in 1866 when a crew was digging a well in a little garden attached to a brewery here and they hit water. Tassini: “A column of mud and sand, freed by the water and gas from the turbid strata pierced by the drill, hurled itself 40 meters (131 feet) in the air, deluging this material on the church as well as the nearby buildings and damaging them because of the collapse of the underlying terrain.” No report on the effect on the beer.
Most of the fountains that we see today around the city running day and night are supplied by the city aqueduct. My next post will reveal the dazzling engineering of the historic — pre-20th century — Venetian aqueduct, but at the moment I want to acknowledge the burbling municipal H2O that has revived countless tourists.
As here. Filling up your own bottle is an excellent way to avoid paying the exorbitant prices for bottled water.Thirsty dogs just have to figure out how to drink from a falling jet of water. It’s not that hard, but if I had a dog I’d definitely carry around a collapsible bowl. I mean, come on.But certainly we’re all grateful for the running water. At least when the water IS running.There is a number of fountains that are permanently dry, turned off, extinguished, whatever the correct term is. If you’re thirsty, seeing a fountain with no water appears to be something between a mirage and a deliberate affront.However, there are some fountains, such as this one near SS. Giovanni and Paolo, that flow more or less briskly during the summer. The reason for closing some fountains between December and March is precisely to save water, seeing that the need for water isn’t as urgent when it’s freezing cold and there are relatively few tourists around, and those that are around aren’t perishing of thirst.Then there are fountains which have been closed summer and winter. This was running just fine till a few years ago, and even though I live nearby, and could easily run home for a drink, you have no idea how often on a sweltering summer day I would gladly avail myself of some water. But no. It must be part of the group of 70 fountains which have been closed because they weren’t in high-traffic tourist areas (a statistic dating from 2008). Since then, enough of the city has become a high-traffic tourist area, especially when the sun is at its broilingest, to nullify that exception. Open the dang fountain already!The entire world seems to have given up on this fountain, just two steps from our house in an unimportant little courtyard. Until recently it was running (well, dripping) just fine, minding its own business. Then it was sealed, and now this.
Many people have asked me the obvious question: All that water running all the time, isn’t it a tremendous waste? Veritas, the water company, says that it isn’t. I suppose they would. I haven’t found a contrasting opinion to that, but I have had to suspend more research because life is short.
The logical solution, as people occasionally suggest, is to install faucets so that only the water that’s needed at the moment comes pouring out. Simple? Of course not!
An Italian member of an online political forum, who goes by the name “gava,” wrote (translation by me): “My project to install faucets to eliminate waste of precious drinkable water from the fountains is not easy to realize.
“In Venice there are about 200 fountains which consume about 800 cubic meters of water a day (800,000 liters, or 211,337 US gallons). A considerable amount, there’s no doubt. But let’s think for a moment, the water comes directly from the spring at Scorze’, it has no costs for pumping or purification, they only add some chlorine.
“Furthermore, the installation of a switch would increase the bacterial load in the first stretch of pipe, and the controls made by ASL (the local health department) demonstrate this. Practically speaking, to install faucets would give a tiny economic advantage and many disadvantages, from the maintenance of the pushbuttons (of the faucet) which are subject to frequent breaks, to the presence of bacteria in the first tract of water. (I think he means where the water exits from the faucet, which when the faucet is closed would promote buildup of bacteria.)
“Over the past five years, I’ve seen a maximum of 30 functioning fountains in Venice (note: VeniceWiki has made a map but a quick check shows it is incomplete). Those that have been closed for years may have something more than simple bacteria in the pipes, up to real encrustation. In any case, I still think that the system of filtering and taps could be improved, I don’t want it to be an excuse for throwing water away.”
An unnamed ex-member of this forum replied: “I remember that some time back they started to install pushbuttons but the main problem was that they break really easily, and so a good number of fountains were put back to the old system.”
To complicate matters, Veritas is responsible only for the fountains in the public parks; the others are maintained by “other organs,” which I have not identified. But the fact that all the fountains aren’t managed by the same company means that of course there will be administrative and/or bureaucratic problems involved in any change.
So while we’re all waiting for simplicity and conservation to reign on earth, I suggest you drink the fountain water as much as you can. After all, it’s there for you.
