Venice: I am not making this up

History, Problems, Tourism, Venetian-ness

Crybabies?

September 1, 2009 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice way to get out of the monoculture of tourism.

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

Boatworld, Events, History, Tourism

See you in September

August 31, 2009 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

Fangs and claws. Now we're getting somewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And on we go.

History, Nature, Water

The power of the Po

August 27, 2009 9 Comments

“Every river is compelled to flow toward the sea, and it also carries tears with it.”

I don’t know who wrote that, but it is the perfect epigraph for the Po River. And nearly 60 years ago, there were many, many tears.

Those two words — Po River — are tremendously evocative to millions, especially those living near it, or in some way depending on it. It’s the longest river in Italy, and although it isn’t much compared to the Nile or the Congo, it is Italy’s mythic mass of water.

The Po valley comprises some of the richest and most heavily cultivated land in Europe.

The Po flows 405 miles [652 kilometers] from Monviso, a dazzling mountain in the Cottian Alps, to the Adriatic, through the core of the north Italian Padania Plain and drains an area of 28,946 square miles [74,970 square kilometers].

Some people think it’s monotonous and boring, but that’s when it’s just rolling along like Ol’ Man River. Then every once in a while it floods, and turns into something cataclysmic, and suddenly people are praying to God to make it boring again. You can read more in the article I wrote for National Geographic in the May, 2002 issue.

I’m talking about all this because of my chronic curiosity about a statue stuck off by itself amid a few trees near the Giardini vaporetto stop.

It’s dramatic yet curiously detached; nevertheless, you realize something serious is underway. A rescue, obviously, but it isn’t immediately clear what the danger is. It’s the Po.

Catastrophic floods have occurred many times, but in November of 1951 there was a confluence of factors which spelled doom for man, beast, buildings, crops, bridges, soil, and anything else that was in, on, or near the river. People seem to get all worked up about high tide in Venice, but that’s a Gilbert and Sullivan ditty compared to the Wagnerian devastation the Po visited on 200,000 people, nearly 1,000 of whom lost their lives.

I’m not going to try to describe it; the numbers can do it for me. But I do remember what a friend of mine in Cremona told me about the Po in the major flood of 2000: “The river under the bridge sounded like a waterfall.” In 1951, the volume of water was measured at Cremona at 399,055 cubic feet per second [11,300 cubic meters per second] — it must have sounded like the Last Judgment.

That autumn was especially rainy, not only in Italy but elsewhere in Europe and also in the United States. From November 7-13, two weather fronts — one from the Atlantic, the other from Africa — brought rain that wasn’t particularly intense, but it was continuous. In fact, due to the nature and extent of the catchment basin, it’s long rains, rather than intense ones, that create serious floods.

Before long, the ground was saturated, unable to absorb any more water. Then the rain intensified. A hot southeast wind hit the snow that was falling in the Alps, and melted it. More water.

In the five days between November 8-12, 600 billion cubic feet [17 billion cubic meters] of water fell on the Po Plain, the amount which would normally fall in six months.

The Po’s average discharge is 48,400 cubic feet per second [1,370 cubic meters]; at its flood peak in 1951, the Po’s discharge was estimated at almost ten times that, or 424,000 cubic feet [12,000 cubit meters] per second. That would be Niagara Falls doubled, thundering horizontally toward the sea.

The river was rising because many of its 141 tributaries were also rising, obviously. But when some of these smaller rivers tried to empty into the Po, the power of its flow actually forced them back, where they began to flood their own immediate surrounding territory. That southeast wind wasn’t merely melting snow, it was preventing the Po from emptying into the sea.

Nov. 13: During the night, the church bells in Casalmaggiore (Cremona) and Sabbioneta (Mantova) and all the bells in the surrounding towns and villages begin to ring, to summon the men to try to block the rising water. Urgent requests go out for sandbags.

Nov. 14: The Po exceeds 14 feet [4.30 meters]. At 7:00 pm the river bursts its embankments at Paviole di Canaro. An hour later, it breaks through at Bosco and Malcantone at the rate of 211,883 cubic feet [6,000 cubic meters] of water per second. In a few hours 156 square miles [404 square kilometers] are flooded.

When the flood crest reaches the Po Delta, the area also called Polesine, the level is higher at Rovigo — 15.7 feet [4.8 meters] — than any recorded flood ever.

Nov. 15: An emergency truck evacuating people is caught by the water at Frassinelle Polesine; 84 people, including women and children, die in what is remembered as the “death lorry.”

At 2:00 pm the river bursts the banks at Arqua’ Polesine and the water spreads toward Adria.

Nov. 18: Rovigo is evacuated.

Nov. 19: Adria, Cavarzere, Loreo are completely flooded. The cities are evacuated.

Nov. 20: The embankments at Ceserolo are cut to save Rovigo.

Nov. 25: The crest reaches the sea, and the water begins to recede. After three months, toward the end of February, only about one third of the flooded land is still submerged.

In all, some 425 square miles [1,100 square kilometers] were flooded.

The rescue efforts were massive: The Army, Navy, Air Force, firemen, police, Red Cross, Scouts, and volunteers descended on the stricken towns, working continuously with the help of some 2,000 boatmen. People spent days trapped on the roofs of their isolated houses, hoping someone would come by.

The damage in Polesine: 900 houses destroyed, 300 houses damaged, 38 communities flooded, 160,000 people forced to evacuate, 113,000 hectares of farmland flooded, and 300 hectares of land covered by a layer of sand 6 feet [2 meters] deep.

4500 cattle, 150 horses, 7800 pigs, 700 sheep and goats, and one million quintals [220 million pounds] of fodder, all lost.

37 miles [60 kilometers] of embankments and 52 bridges destroyed.

Of course no one had insurance. What was lost was gone forever. It was Biblical.

Contributions poured — excuse the expression — in, from 65 countries, including Uruguay, Tunisia, Haiti, Indonesia, Lebanon, Costa Rica, Somaliland (as it was known), and Albania, as well as NATO.

Lino remembers the effect it had on people in Venice who, like people for miles around, responded by bringing mattresses, clothes, shoes, blankets, and more to collection points around the city. My friend Roberto, from Milan, was just a tyke at the time, but he still remembers his mother telling him he had to donate one of his toys to the children in Polesine, and not just any toy. She decreed, “Your favorite toy.'”

“It was my favorite teddy bear,” he told me, “but I sent it away.”

"To the soldiers of land and sea TKTK" and below it, "To the memory of Alberto Vio, symbol of the generous impulse of Venice for the brothers of Polesine." — "To the soldiers of land and sea Venice salutes the Italians" and below it, "To the memory of Alberto Vio, symbol of the generous impulse of Venice for the brothers of Polesine." On the right side of the pedestal is incised MARZO MDCCCLXXXV and below it, NOVEMBRE MCMLI. The plot thickens.

Many improvements were attempted to prevent anything like this happening again. One of the measures taken was to build ever higher embankments, often (in the cities) walled with concrete. You know how water behaves when it’s forced into a tighter channel or tube? Think of turning on your faucet very hard. Yes. That’s what the Po does now when it floods.

Therefore, when the river floods in spring (melting snow) or autumn (rains), as it will do until snow and rain cease from the earth, it inevitably gains force as it races seaward.

So floods continue — not much anyone can do about that — but the effects are still, if not as catastrophic as in 1951, expensive and distressing. Because houses and fields and poplar forests planted for cellulose keep increasing, and always closer to the river’s edge.

Oh, and some 30 million cubic yards of sand and gravel are illegally dug out of the riverbed for construction every year. Not good if you were looking for ways to minimize flooding, which if you’re a gravel-robber you probably aren’t.

In 1994, the Po flood caused 70 deaths and 10,000 people lost their homes, due mainly to failures in the flood warning system. The human element — always the wild card.

In 2000, the Po flood caused 25 deaths and 40,000 were evacuated.

And so it goes. The Po. Majestic. Magnificent. But I’d never call it monotonous.

NOTE: About the statue with the double inscription: Everyone but me will already have figured it out — it was originally made to commemorate the heroic efforts of the Army to help the victims of the Po flood in the spring of 1882. (I know that the inscription reads 1885, but I am trusting my source, the immortal Giulio Lorenzetti, for this information.) After the inundation of 1951, the statue was recycled to commemorate the equally heroic rescue work (hence the noticeably non-1951 garb of the figures depicted).

Alberto Vio, Lino tells me, was “famous” for having provided boats for the rescue efforts. I don’t know any more than that just now, but it explains why he is mentioned on the plinth. I can tell you, though, that the statue was made by Augusto Benvenuti in 1885, and that it used to stand in Campo San Biagio, the small area in front of the Naval Museum and church of San Biagio. Lino remembers seeing it there when he was a lad. Then someone decided it should move out and they found this anonymous little spot for it by the Giardini. Kind of a modest end to a work that was entitled “Monument to the Italian Army.” But if everybody’s fine with this, so am I.

Problems, Tourism

“Besieged”: tourism update

August 27, 2009 3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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