Venice: I am not making this up

Uncategorized, Venetian-ness

Always looking

April 13, 2018 3 Comments

I’m working on a new post, but meanwhile I thought I’d share some glimpses from the past few weeks:

On the last day of March we had an invigorating ten minutes of crashing hailstones. I’d have photographed the fabulous foam they raised in hitting the canal outside, but I was afraid that my little camera would suffer from the bombardment.

There were a few workmen nearby the morning I passed, so I very approximately assumed that these apples were part of their lunch menu. Though why the fruit seemed better on the ledge than in a bag will never be explained.

The next day, two apples were gone. And so were the workmen, though they hadn’t removed the floorboards, or whatever those wooden hatches are called that cover drying street-mortar. The only theory that completely explains this is aliens. Or the mentally precarious guy who lives in the house in the background. I was tempted to ask him about the apples, then decided I’d like to continue to enjoy the day.

And speaking of things sitting all alone with no reasonable context, there’s the can placed by an occult hand out in the middle of the innocent, unoffending street. If the Biennale had opened I’d know it was art. As it is, no telling.

Down a very short and narrow side street far across town I discovered a bolt that puts the average lock to shame. Count of Monte Cristo, anyone?

And why have I never noticed this unusual script before? One reason: I rarely pass through Campo San Zan Degola’. But this jumped out at me the other day. Gosh – the year the Order of Alexander Nevsky was founded.

Fog creates problems if you need to get to where the vaporetto isn’t going, but when the sun comes out there are all sorts of lovely surprises.

Venetian-ness

There are so many aspects to life in Venice — past, present, future — that it can be pretty challenging to separate what used to be true, what isn’t so true anymore, what we wish were true but never was… We, including the undersigned, so often want our fantasies about this amazing place to be reality, but one of those fantasies hit a wall a few days ago and disintegrated forever.

The “wall” was the house on the Calle del Cristo in the Santa Marta zone, and the fantasy — one of our very favorites — was that everybody in this very small town knows each other and keeps up with each other and knows what time you put on your socks every Saturday morning and what your spouse did to the teacher the day before Christmas vacation in second grade.

But everybody doesn’t notice everybody else anymore, and as the number of residents continues to drop the links of acquaintance weaken and break. (Ignore mixed metaphor.) People move away, people go into the hospital or nursing home and are never heard of again, relatives are who knows where, children grow up and leave. The people who are left don’t sit outside so much anymore, they tend to sit inside and watch TV.

This may be more the way Venice appeared to Lelio Baschetti.

So what happened? On that unremarkable calle a man lived, died, and lay on his bed for seven years, surrounded by trash and old food and foraging rats, until last Saturday night a random burglar broke in, discovered the mummy that once was the man, and left the door open as he fled in terror. On Sunday a neighbor noticed the open door, peeked inside with his flashlight, and in two shakes the Carabinieri were there and on the case. So were the reporters, and the story has stunned readers in many different ways. How could this happen?

Setting aside the admittedly sensational aspects of the event, the most important thing isn’t that he was A MUMMY. It’s that he was a person who died alone and nobody knew it, not even his sister who lives on the Lido. (We’ll get back to that.) Seven years’ worth of bills lying on the floor; seven years of his bank account accumulating his monthly pension with no withdrawals since September 2011; seven years of the utilities having been shut off with not even a squeak of protest in response. “Hey, you turned off the lights/heat/water! I’m freezing!” And nobody noticed.

True, the shutters were always closed, the house number 2216 flaked away, the mailbox broken, the name on the doorbell illegible, all signs that would lead one to assume there was nobody inside.

In 2011 the city conducted a census and never received the completed questionnaire from him. After various bureaucratic cross-checks, in 2013 a city employee was sent to investigate, but no one answered the doorbell, and so he was eliminated from the database of the Office of Vital Statistics. Forgotten, but not, in fact, gone.

The only portrait published of him so far (Corriere del Veneto Corriere della Sera).

His name was Lelio Baschetti; he was born in Rimini in 1943. He graduated with a degree in astronomy, but went on to teach mathematics and some science subjects at the state high school “Duca degli Abruzzi” in Treviso. He moved to Venice at the end of the Nineties to teach at the Liceo Artistico not far from the Accademia Gallery.

Baschetti was shy, introverted, a solitary unmarried man who loved to paint evanescent scenes in pale pastel tones and whose pictures were exhibited in 2000 in the Benvenuti gallery at San Marco.

“That was a little unusual at our school,” commented the vice-principal of the Liceo, “an instructor of mathematics who painted. Usually it’s the art professors who paint and exhibit. Perhaps his paintings helped him to communicate, to overcome his nature. I went to see his show and I remember he was so happy that I was interested, he really appreciated it. He wasn’t difficult or peevish, but closed, turned in on himself.”

His solitude intensified. His students remembered that when school started in the fall he would say “Excuse me if I struggle to speak, but I haven’t talked with anybody all summer.”

“He was a thin man of medium height, a little hunchbacked,” recalled a school custodian; “I don’t know how he was in class, but certainly he was a very introverted person, silent. He didn’t answer me when I said hello and so after a little while I just stopped.”

“He was polite, but reserved,” recalled the vice-principal. “He was a man who had put a wall between himself and others. As a teacher he was neither too strict nor too soft, we never had any complaints about him from anyone.” Now, 15 years after he retired, hardly anyone is left who ever knew him.

“Perhaps the choice of teaching mathematics at the artistic high school was because he felt himself to be an artist,” mused an architect who knew him since 1975 at Treviso and later in Venice. “I remember I once complimented him on a painting and he looked at me as if I’d offended him. But when he was at Treviso he was very likeable, even though he was always a little ‘orso’ (bear) as they say here, but not as much as he became in Venice. When I ran across him later he had become very closed.” When his colleagues thought about organizing a retirement party for him, with a cake and toasts, he took it in very bad spirit and simply left.

I wonder if he would have liked these colors.

Baschetti lived for many years with his sister and mother on the Lido, but when his mother passed away ten years ago he bought a two-level house of about 60 square meters (645 square feet) at Santa Marta and moved away. Perhaps there was some sort of falling-out. The sister has not confided in the Gazzettino.

He lived frugally and quietly, unhindered by intrusive neighbors because most of the inhabitants nearby are students at the nearby University of Architecture and the faculty of Environmental Sciences of Ca’ Foscari, the University of Venice, and students continually come and go. Also, as is so often the case now, many of the dwellings in his street were empty, so it wasn’t until three months ago that a student moved in to the house next door, someone who might have noticed him (or at least a terrible odor) if he hadn’t already long since departed. No friends, no Christmas or Easter or birthday phone calls from anybody. He just disappeared.

His sister and her husband heard about his death from the Carabinieri. The specific cause of death has yet to be determined. What is also being determined is the inheritance. His bank account contained some 80,000 euros of his pension which will probably be returned to the state, but he also had a savings account of some 100,000 euros. And there is the house, which once it’s fixed up ought to be worth a comfortable sum. If no other relative is located, all that will go to the sister, of course. That’s too ironic for me.

But it turns out that grown-up Lelio wasn’t the only one there ever was. Some of his boyhood friends remember someone who was very different, and they wrote a letter to the Gazzettino (translated by me):

“The beautiful youth of Prof. Baschetti:

We are writing in the name of numerous friends: We knew Prof. Lelio Baschetti in our and his youth and it’s right and fitting in this moment of sadness to give a portrait of the man in all of his facets. Lelio was a studious boy, cultured: the Seventies in Padova saw him a passionate student of physics, a kind and friendly classmate.

“We were part of the same group of young university students from Venice and the Lido. We want to remember his cheerfulness, the summer days we spent at the beach on the Lido, the evenings in the pizzeria, always ready for jokes and fun, but also in discussions and deep analysis. How can we forget the parties at the Circolo Ufficiali (Officers’ Club) of Venice, the New Year’s Eves: tireless dancer, and carefree companion.

Life has carried us all elsewhere, and sometimes far away, it has changed us and changed him, but this is the Lelio that we remember. We thank you if you want to publish this memory.”

When all the excitement is over, I hope that that is how he will be remembered. And not as a mummy.

Frames enclosing other frames, and in the center is a mirror reflecting a curtain. I suppose everybody’s like this.

Water

Drink up: The aqueducts then

March 19, 2018 2 Comments

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.

Uncategorized, Water

Drink up: Artesian wells and fountains

March 10, 2018 4 Comments

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.

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Always looking

The man who disappeared

Drink up: The aqueducts then

Drink up: Artesian wells and fountains