Venice: I am not making this up

Giro d’Italia takes Lido hostage, part one

May 8, 2009 No Comments

I don’t follow bicycle racing that much (polite way of saying “at all”) but I do know that there is a hugely important annual Italian event which corresponds roughly to the Tour de France: The Giro d’Italia. It has to start somewhere, and this year, its centennial, it will start on the Lido of Venice.

The oddness of that fact may not strike you immediately, but I have no doubt that it was a major PR coup for Venice, even though I’m not clear on exactly what the benefits might be. But never mind. Perhaps the TV stations covering it are paying for the privilege.

(The view from Venice: The long dark strip on the horizon is the Lido.)

Why is it odd? Because you can’t get anywhere from the Lido. Your choices are to go forward till you hit water, then turn around and go forward till you hit water. However, it does have the advantage of being very flat. Also, to be fair, one could hardly be expected to race around Venice itself, and Mestre would be just as weird. And Venice, as the Most Beautiful Stage Set in the World, inevitably lends itself to big events which want to benefit in some way from the backdrop.

So how is this supposed to work? The racers will be divided into squads, and they will do a team time trial by the chronometer. Then they’ll eat and drink and get their vitamin injections and take the ferry and leave the Lido and pick up the race the next day on the mainland, where the terrain has some verticality and they can really get their teeth into each other.

(The Lido is the long narrow island on the right. Detail from the EuroCart map LAGUNA VENETA, Studio F.M.B. Bologna.)

The city has been working dangerously hard to get the island spruced up and ready for the onslaught. The positive side: Banks of flowers have been installed (usually when plants are put out to beautify a public event, such as the film festival, people begin to liberate them. We’ll see how long these last). Even better, every bump, pothole, crack, fissure, bubble, or other anomaly in the road pavement for the 20.8 km (12.7 miles) course has been filled, smoothed, buffed. The residents are thrilled about that.

The downside: The Lido is being taken hostage by this event. Residents have long since been notified that they are forbidden to use their cars tomorrow. Period. (This would be obvious, but it needs to be stated because there aren’t so many roads on the Lido which would offer other options to residents wanting to drive half a mile to do something.) Not being able to drive anywhere means that life will have completely stopped. Forced to take the bus? There will be no bus service. No taxis. No vehicles. This is officially from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, with some inconvenience tacked on at each end. For the Lido People it will suddenly be like they’re living in Brigadoon, for the 99 years and 364 days it’s invisible.

Anyone who needs to go somewhere on the Lido (Lino and me, say, if we were to want to go rowing that afternoon) tomorrow will have the option of once-hourly boat service which will make several stops along the lagoon shoreline. At which point you debark and walk inland — presuming they let you cross the road.

Well, it won’t kill me not to go to the Lido one day. Au contraire. But it’s the drama of the logistics that has overwhelmed the world- and life-view of the Lido People. Whereas citizens of other towns experiencing world-class events (Monaco comes to mind) might feel a kind of excitement and even pride, people on the Lido are thinking only of how hard life is going to be tomorrow. They are among the most provincial, isolated people I’ve ever known, and about the only thing that has any reality for them is their own little island life. (I exclude shopkeepers, who I imagine are hoping for some kind of windfall from the tornado passing through.)

I would love to have the chance to announce that Jesus is coming back tomorrow and He’s starting on the Lido, just to hear what the Lido People would say. It would either be “Will Billa [the supermarket] still stay open till 8:00?” or “So, does that mean that the vaporetto will follow the Sunday timetable?”

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Boatworld, Nature

May Day in Venice: What we did

May 5, 2009 No Comments

We ran away. We ran far, far away, out into the lagoon in a little three-oar sandolo called “Granchio” (crab) with our best friend Anzhelika.

By “running,” I mean rowing, naturally. We left the Lido about 8:00 and rowed all the way to Quarto d’Altino, on the mainland shore out beyond the airport. We got back around 6:00; it’s about 45 miles roundtrip, and we were going against the tide. Both ways. And there were also waves, in the sense that after a typhoon you might say there had been wind. I woke up the next morning feeling as if a battalion of small people with big hammers had been pounding me all night.

We’ve done this before, with various people on various types of boat, and it’s always wonderful. The reason is simply because we go out into a distant, seemingly wild part of the lagoon which is so different from the area we’re used to, near the city. We wend our way through the barene, or marshy islets, and along reed-lined channels that seem luxuriously remote (if you can ignore the sound of airplanes taking off from Marco Polo airport just a mile or two away).

This is something like what the lagoon looked like, in a broad sense, to the earliest Venetians who took refuge here from the passage of Attila and his Huns. (I say “broad sense” because most of the barene that formed much of the lagoon landscape even 50 years ago have been washed away by the motondoso, or waves from motorboats.) We had to face our share of motorboats, but what mattered was the haunting loveliness of the waterways.

As we rowed easily along (in the stretches without motorboats), listening to the musical soft sound of our oars and the answering music of the water sliding under the boat, we could also hear the crooning of turtledoves, and a few nightingales, and a distant cuckoo, which sings only in May. There were gleaming white egrets, and one stately heron that flew heavily away. The hawthorn trees were lush with clusters of creamy blossoms, and I could see some tangly bushes of pink wild roses. The surface of the water was streaked with the faint but clear wake of scattering fish, usually grey mullet, and once or twice one sprang into the air, attempting something resembling the long jump. When the breeze shifted, or the clouds let more sunshine through, the wetlands would give off a faint muddy smell which seemed oddly clean. There was a hawk wandering around overhead. And a pair of swans, not far from the fish-farms.

All of this, and much more which I haven’t yet seen, or didn’t know when I saw it, is — of course — under phenomenal pressure from all sorts of human activities. The most dangerous and, for us, the most maddening, and even painful, were the motorboats. Big honking mothers full of trippers from somewhere back in the countryside, or smaller boats roaring past with teenage boys, or even cruddy little old boats with cruddy motors carrying some sort of decrepit men with old fishing tackle.

We stopped for half an hour at the trattoria “Ai Cacciatori” at Mazzorbo, just before Burano, for the usual sopressa sandwich and plenty of water. Lino, naturally, had an ombra, a glass of white wine. Venetians call this morning refresher (or afternoon, or evening…) a “shadow.” The story goes that back in the very olden days, when the Piazza San Marco was something between a Levantine souk and the Roman Forum, there was a man who sold wine from a small stand in the shadow of the belltower. As the sun moved, he would shift with it to stay in the shadow, and so people went from saying “Let’s go have some wine in the shadow” to just suggesting, “Let’s go have a shadow.” That’s the story, which I have no plans to research further.

We got to Altino past noon, and somewhat past the time when I had begun to wish we were already there. For all the breeze, you could still feel the sun, beginning to shine back up from the water onto your face, and it was hot.

We tied up the boat in the reedy little canal that ends at the very old pumping station; there are still fields stretching out here that need to be irrigated, or drained. Altino was an important Roman town on the main road heading northeast, and farmers still turn up assorted Roman relics of metal or marble. We had lunch at the trattoria “Antica Altino”and started the row home around 3:00.

It was about the time we were passing Sant’ Erasmo that I began to feel really tired. Being tired doesn’t impress me, but I wasn’t happy because I knew what was coming up, and it would have been so much better if I hadn’t been tired: Traversing the lagoon between the island of the Certosa and the vaporetto stop on the Lido at Santa Maria Elisabetta. If I were to say “Recreating Lawrence of Arabia’s life-threatening trek across the Sun’s Anvil,” or “Sailing around Cape Horn with only a torn jib and a busted rudder,” I’d be saying about the same thing.

Of course I knew there’d be waves, but they were worse than I had anticipated, caused by the ferries, and the big motonave to and from Punta Sabbioni, and tourist launches, and taxis, and vaporettos, and all sorts of private motorboats. As far as the quantity of boats is concerned, this was one-quarter or less of what it will be on a Sunday afternoon in July. But it was enough for me. Big, heaving, confused waves came from all directions; small, invisible waves tried to suck the boat back out from under our feet; tall, curling waves surged toward the bow, threatening to send sheets of water into the boat; clustering waves just pounded the boat from all sides, with no design, no rhythm, no pauses. And did I mention we were also rowing against the tide? I believe I did. By the time we reached the tranquil home stretch of water, halfway along the Lido, my left knee was stabbing, my right shoulder felt like a hot anvil had been dropped on it, each palm had a stinging red blister, and I was pretty much at the blind staggers stage.

Of course we swore we’d never do this again. We may have sworn this last year as well. If we do this next year, I will undoubtedly swear it was for the last time. Does that mean it wasn’t punishing? Of course not. Next year it will be even worse. But by the next morning — about the time I became conscious of having been bludgeoned with crowbars — the black, fermenting rage that darkened the return had already faded to pale grey in my mind, and now all I really remember are the birds calling and the boatsong, and the scent of the watery land, and what a great thing it was that the old Venetians had diverted a couple of rivers, because otherwise by now we’d only have had fields and parking lots to row across.

Events, Tourism

May Day in Venice: What they do

May 5, 2009 No Comments

There’s so much to say about tourism in Venice I’ll have to go in easy stages, filling many pages and posts. Let’s start with last weekend, which demonstrated the rough outlines of what the term “tourism” can mean here.

The first of May is a holiday in much of Europe, its version of Labor Day in which we celebrate workers and excoriate employers.

Piazza San Marco. People having a good time. I think.

Nothing quite so simple anymore as sending armies and tanks marching across Red Square; this year saw mass demonstrations of angry workers (and ex-workers) in Greece, France, Turkey, Spain, and Germany, and even Russia, which once reveled more in its military parades than rallies of irate trade unions.

Here in Venice, it was just another day in the march of money, and in fact there are plenty of days you could label “mayday mayday,” when holidaying legions of tourists from all over Europe march across the city. So far this year the Horde-Meter has registered Carnival, followed by Easter weekend, then by April 25 (which fell on a weekend this year), and finally May 1.

There were roughly 60,000 tourists per day, instantly doubling the city’s population, shuffling along the narrow streets, overwhelming the Piazza San Marco, and turning the vaporettos (when and if you finally managed to get on one) into something from the Pushkar Camel Fair. Hundreds of tourist coaches unleashed their day-tripping multitudes onto a city whose only public space, the Piazza San Marco, is 320 times smaller than Red Square. Let’s put it another way: The Piazza covers 255 square meters, and crowd-density experts estimate that one square meter can reasonably (we’ll leave some latitude for what that means) hold 3-4 people. That means that ideally there would be no more than 1,000 people in the Piazza at any given time. Let’s say that the crowds peak at noon, and let’s say that that amounts to 40,000 people. Or even 30,000, half the daily total. Or even 20,000, one-third the daily total. Numbers aren’t my strongest point but I think I could already have guessed that there might be as much as 20 times more people in the Piazza than would be pleasant.

The ACTV added three runs per hour to its already heavy Grand Canal vaporetto schedule (reaching a total of 37 extra runs), as well as nine extra runs to Murano and Burano and 13 extra back to Venice. But it’s never enough, in the sense that “enough” would mean no waiting, no crushing, no delays. It would be an impressive spiritual exercise for anyone wanting to determine how much compassion they can feel toward their fellow humans to board the #1 local vaporetto line at Piazzale Roma on any Mayday (which amounts to virtually any day from May 1 to September 1) with their soul full of love for humankind, and then measure what’s left by the time they reach San Marco.

If you look at tourism in Venice in strictly logistical terms, you can see that it’s a fascinating little problem, which so far has defeated solution. There are approximations of functionality (more vaporettos), but essentially there is no way in which a city which covers only three square miles can prevent or neutralize the stress caused by this particular kind of mass demonstration. It can only be minimized, sort of.

I spent an hour in the Piazza and I came away with one unexpected insight: It’s entirely possible that the gondoliers at the two “stations” (stazi) there were not born crazy. I’ve always wondered about that. I believe it’s likely that they have been made to go crazy by too many days like this. And don’t think all these tourists represent wallets on the hoof. An inverse ratio between quantity and quality has been noticed by almost everyone, something I’ll go into on another occasion.

Me, I have no idea how much money you would have to pay me — in cash, even — to go to San Marco on a holiday weekend, at least any later than 7:00 AM. I need to protect what little sanity I have left.

Uncategorized

I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here: The case of the legs on the church

May 5, 2009 2 Comments

When you walk out of the train station in Venice, the Grand Canal is the first thing you see. Or ought to see. I remember that day 25 years ago; it was a bolt from the blue from which I have never recovered.

But the Grand Canal hasn’t been the first thing you see for quite a while now. Your eye goes straight to the imposing baroque church on the other side of the water, and you’ll be staring at it not because it’s a church, or baroque, or imposing. It will be because of the imposing not-even-close-to-baroque billboard covering the facade. I won’t describe it, I’ll just show it to you:

The idea of offering a sponsor a public space to promote its product in exchange for the money needed for restoration of art and architecture has become the greatest thing to hit Venice since the invention of the coffeehouse. And it is absolutely true that the billboard preceding this one was much worse, as the lady promoting a line of handbags was even less clad. This is the kind of hair-splitting you find yourself indulging in here, but “It could always be worse” doesn’t get it done in a city that is an entire work of art.

Since the city never has any money to do anything it doesn’t feel like doing (though there are weekly miracles in which funds appear for all sorts of unexpectedly necessary things, like installing turnstiles on the vaporetto docks), for some time now it has been offering vast spaces for private cash on monuments. I am not the only person who finds this ad objectionable (nor am I the only person who is wondering why this church has been condemned to Restoration Purgatory; it’s been under scaffolding since the first time I saw it, in 1985). Plenty of people have objected.

I also find it objectionable that half of the Doge’s Palace is covered with publicity for Chopard (it started last September, with ads for Lancia), and most of the Marciana Library is concealed by silliness by Swatch. By the way, there is a national law which requires that the scaffolding covering a public monument under restoration must show a perfect replica of the concealed facade. A mere detail, obviously. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And I mustn’t let myself stop now to talk about how the city had stamped all the waivers needed to allow a Maltese business to put five mothers-of-all-Jumbotrons in the Piazza San Marco, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in exchange for millions of euros to restore the buildings they would be defacing. This plan seems to have been halted, at least for now. One can never be sure if these shenanigans are really dead, or just in hibernation.

Don’t imagine that there are no rules for the safeguarding of Venice’s monuments. There are metric tons of them. But here is how the Doge’s Palace became, overnight, the most beautiful billboard in the world:

The palace needed restoration; among other things, bits of marble were falling off it and barely missing passing tourists. The work would cost 2 million euros, which the city doesn’t have. So the Dottor Group, a massive company specializing in architectural and historic restoration, got the job and put up the money, and so they get to rent out the billboard space of the gods. Then they installed the scaffolding (of course there are also laws limiting the square-footage allowed for publicity on public monuments, which these exceed) by driving iron hooks between the 500-year-old blocks of Istrian stone, hooks which will be there for at least three years.

Suddenly the legs-on-the-church don’t look quite so bad? That’s how you begin to lose your bearings here. But never mind your taste in legs, or churches. There are so many other facets to the plight of San Simeon Piccolo that I can’t organize them for you; I’ll just give them as they come to me.

Nobody knows how much money is needed for the restoration
Nobody can say how much money has been found so far for the restoration
Nobody knows how many hours a day that SACAIM, the restoration company, is working at the site, or whether the contract is being honored
SACAIM won’t make any statement on whether or not the work has been stopped because it hasn’t been paid all the money it’s due
Nobody knows what criteria are involved in deciding what is considered acceptable publicity
The Curia (the church administration) has stated many times that seeking pelf through publicity is “squalid” (there goes most of Western civilization). But this point is especially tricky because church buildings aren’t technically the responsibility of the Church in Italy anymore, but are wards of the state and depend on federal money which is allocated by an assortment of Superintendencies (for architecture, archaeology, “cultural goods,” and so on).
The Municipal Police (as with the Superintendencies, there is a variety of forces of public order, with varying responsibilities) says that it has done its job as far as paperwork is concerned, the array of official permissions required for work on public buildings, or on public spaces. So technically it has no authority to remove the poster.

The Superintendency of Architectonic Treasures has already stated (as with the handbag-lady poster) that the publicity has to come down. The Curia is against it, but the Superintendency says that the Curia has the power of reviewing all publicity before it goes up. But wait — in the controversy of the Jumbotrons, the Superintendent herself, Renata Codello, stated that every piece of publicity put up during restoration work is regularly approved or rejected by the Superintendency. So who gave the permission for this poster to be put up in the first place? Nobody knows.

So here we are: Nobody decided to put it up, and now nobody can decide whether or how to get it down. But this sudden flurry of discussion is making the Superintendent a little testy.

Yesterday Monsignor Antonio Meneguolo pushed his advantage a little too far by stating that this whole thing is “monstrous and immoral.” Superintendent Codello shot back that even though she never gave permission for this poster (that ought to be an embarrassing thing for a superintendent to admit, but let’s keep going), the Curia hasn’t got much to be proud of either. “We’re all for publicity,” she told the Gazzettino, “it’s the only way which allows us to be able to restore buildings. If the Curia were to put up some money, we’d take the publicity down.”

Furthermore, “It’s not as if we could have just left the church to fall to pieces, abandoned by the Curia. The patriarchate has never put up a single euro.” So there.

But what about how hideous it is? She’s ready: “The churches of the city are full of examples of really bad interventions.” Presumably not approved by the superintendent. Though one doesn’t know why.

This bickering only shows that here in the Cradle of the Renaissance people still defend themselves by saying “Yes, I did it, but he did worse.” Which comes right after you say “Well he started it.”

Let’s imagine that I understand most of what has been going on. What I really don’t understand is why this horrible thing has become an issue right now. It was out there for months and months and nobody said anything. Now, all of a sudden, it’s a huge problem.

In fact, the only thing that both the Superintendent and the Monsignor agree on is that they are shocked, shocked to find that there is a vulgar and immoral billboard on a church.

(I acknowledge the excellent reporting of Davide Scalzotto).

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