Venice: I am not making this up

Acqua Alta, Flooding, MOSE, Venetian Environmental Issues

MOSE: drastic surgery

June 16, 2014 No Comments

I promise that I will not transform this blog into the daily bulletin from the MOSE hecatomb.

But two days ago (June 14), at the last meeting of the council of ministers, the government did something so extreme — and indisputably necessary and long overdue — that I want at least to make it known.

They abolished the Magistrato alle Acque. An entire government agency with 500 years of history is no more. Yesterday it was, today it is not.

Beginning in October, its responsibilities will be “absorbed” by the Inter-regional Director of Public Works of the three contiguous regions of the Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia, and Trentino Alto Adige.

Of course this is good, but I feel sick at heart. Not only because of the annihilation of one of the last tiny links to the Venetian Republic, but because a gesture of this magnitude shows all too vividly the extent of the rot.

People who occasionally had to request a permit for temporary use of a certain stretch of lagoon have long been aware that the Magistrato was as swampy as Reelfoot Lake. It wouldn’t have been the first city agency whose functionaries accepted the occasional guerdon for speeding up the processing of requests. I’m not saying the employees of the Magistracy did such a thing. I’m just saying that if they did, they wouldn’t have been alone.

The MOSE work has made the tides stronger and faster, so the fish are having to work harder at their annual migrations. — The MOSE work has made the tides stronger and faster, which has affected plants, fish and, I presume, also birds. But the floods of water are nothing compared to the floods of payoffs.

The Magistracy of the Waters was established in 1501; it was specifically charged with overseeing the health and security of the lagoon, and any action required — digging, land reclamation, maintenance — had to have its approval.

Care of the lagoon required care of its tributary rivers, too. Venetian engineers diverted the Po River, for God’s sake; between 1600 and 1604, innumerable men with shovels and wheelbarrows cut Italy’s greatest river at Porto Viro and turned it southward. There were many reasons for this, some of them political, some economic, but it was also time to limit the amount of sediment that was filling up the lagoon. The Venetian Republic knew that the care of the lagoon was its primary life insurance.

“Lagoon” (laguna) is a Venetian word, by the way.

But the Magistrato was populated by many individuals who were not all of the same stripe, and in 1678, human nature having demonstrated its impressive dimensions, the Venetian Senate created a group of inquisitors to conduct the legal cases against those accused of having damaged the lagoon. There must be some diabolical hothouse somewhere that causes little tiny crook seedlings to sprout, then sells them to the Magistrato alle Acque where, in its own special microclimate, they can flourish and grow to be big tall leafy crooks.

In fact, I now learn that this is the third time that the Magistrato has been “suppressed,” as the headlines put it, though it’s the first occasion where the reason was crime.

In 1808, during the brief but eventful French domination of the city (1806-1814), the Viceroy Eugene Beauharnais put an end to it, for reasons I haven’t yet discovered. It didn’t take long for it to become evident that this was an error, the neglect having contributed to an assortment of watery damage. When the Austrians took over for the first time (1816-1848), they quickly re-established the Magistrato, reorganized it, renamed some departments, applied a coat of varnish and it was good to go again.

In 1866, when Venice and the Veneto became part of the new nation of Italy, the Magistrato was annulled again, and again a series of hydraulic disasters showed what serious consequences could come from indifference to the state of the waterways.

The Magistrato was reformulated for the third time in 1907 as part of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, and its authority expanded to cover the entire hydrological basin of northeast Italy — an enormous watershed of rivers, lakes, and other lagoons stretching from Mantova to Trieste. Total area of its authority was some 40,000 square kilometers (15,000 square miles). So when we talk about the misfeasance of the Magistrato, we’re not talking about some little local entity that turned out to have just a few bad apples.

I very sincerely hope that Cuccioletta and Piva, in their respective cells awaiting trial, are happy. Because I’m not, and neither are a whole bunch of other people.

This is a relatively recent lion, and he looks like he's had more than enough of all this. — This is a relatively recent lion, and he looks like he’s had more than enough of all this.

MOSE

MOSE: Worse than acqua alta

June 13, 2014 8 Comments

The lagoon -- so beautiful, and so abused. — The lagoon — so beautiful, and so abused.

On June 4, the dam broke.

I don’t mean the ingeniously devised dam (a/k/a “MOSE”) still under construction, which is formed by mobile barriers intended to block high water from entering Venice for a few hours every so often. I mean the dam that was the financing of the project.

No one is really surprised. Any public work budgeted at 5 billion euros (6.5 billion dollars) is a monumental petri dish for cultivating corruption. But what has stunned just about everybody is the sheer scope of it all. I’ve heard some people say they don’t believe it will ever become completely untangled — names which were given code numbers, foreign accounts, fake receipts, fake financial reports, fake banks, even. All of this created and maintained by the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the consortium which had sole power over the administration of the work, the awarding of contracts, and every detail of who and what was involved in the project. Taken altogether, some estimate that the Consorzio paid out 1 billion euros in gifts, favors and graft.

The Northeast, especially members of the Northern League, has spent years sneering at the waste and crime south of Rome, past Naples, deep into the heart of Sicily. The North wanted to secede from the feckless, blood-sucking South. Marches and vigils were held in the “fight against the mafia.”

The MOSE logo is very clever.

But no more is the voice of the sneer heard in the land, at least not in the Veneto.

News of the arrest of the mayor of Venice, Giorgio Orsoni, sped around the world, though he is just one tiny (sorry, Giorgio, but you are, in fact, very tiny) piece of the story. To spend even five seconds thinking about Orsoni is like thinking about a broken fingernail when you’ve just been diagnosed with cancer.

Orsoni resigned today, after house arrest, liberation, then plea-bargaining which got him a trifling four-month sentence. To reach this point, we had to endure the usual tedious pantomime.

Day 1: “I didn’t take even one euro.”

Day 2: “I took money but it was for my political party.”

Day 3: “I took money.” How much? 560,000 even-one-euros. Rabbit pellets! Emilio Spaziante, the number-two general of the entire Guardia di Finanza (what I call the Finance Police), was given 2,500,000 euros by the Consorzio Venezia Nuova. Vulture chow! Giancarlo Galan, the former governor of the Veneto Region, got 1,000,000 euros per year for seven years (2005 – 2011).

Back to Orsoni.

Day 4: “I’m not resigning.”

And on Day 5, “I have tendered my resignation.” Orsoni said he is bitter, disillusioned, and is going to leave the perfidious world of politics. He might as well; he already opened the Emergency Exit door himself.

Malfeasance of these dimensions requires a book, not a blog post. A mere book? “Give me a condor’s quill!” Herman Melville cried, staggering at the prospect of describing the white whale; “Give me Vesuvius’ crater as an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!”

Being a mere mortal, I can only outline a few details here, each of which is plenty.

One of the smaller barriers, with others under construction in Marghera last October. The narrow upper edge is attached to the cement base by means of a hinge.

The tunnel in the cement caissons to which the yellow floating barriers are hinged. This tunnel is 400 meters (1,300 feet) long, and 13 meters (43 feet) below the water's surface. — The tunnel in the cement caissons to which the yellow floating barriers are hinged. This tunnel is 400 meters (1,300 feet) long, and 13 meters (43 feet) below the water’s surface.

After five years of unflagging labor, 300 officers of the Guardia di Finanza had assembled enough evidence to validate — nay, require — the arrest of as many as 100 people on charges of corruption, bribes, kickbacks, fraud, influence-peddling, and every form of villainy in which money can play even so much as a walk-on role. The complexity and the dimensions of this titanic construction of crime, begun in the early Nineties, has overwhelmed this project, overwhelmed even its perpetrators.

The edifice began to crumble with the unexpected retirement, on June 28, 2013, of Giovanni Mazzacurati, who spent 30 years at the apex of the Consorzio, first as director general, then as president. He cited reasons of health. He got a 7 million dollar departure bonus. And on July 12, he was arrested for turbativa d’asta, or bid rigging.

At that point, even I knew what would come next: He wasn’t going to go down alone.

A straggling procession of degraded characters marches across the newspaper every day now, carrying the equally monotonous quantities of money — public money dedicated to the project, not private money — which they so eagerly accepted in so many forms, right down to the classic white envelope stuffed with cash.

A judge from the Court of Audit. Members of parliament. Members of the European parliament. Directors of the Magistrato alle Acque, the agency established in 1501 to safeguard the lagoon (Maria Giovanna Piva, director from 2001-2008 and Patrizio Cuccioletta, director from 2008-2011, received 400,000 euros a year to ignore what was being done in the lagoon). Eleven years of good times rolling everywhere in the world of the famous floodgates.

In its report, which runs for many hundreds of pages, the Procura — an official government watchdog entity — said that there was “total confusion in the roles of the controllers and the controlled. No obstacle, no vigilance, no important remark was made by the Magistrato alle Acque under Piva and Cuccioletta.”

Everyone knew something very fishy was up. But the haul has been beyond anyone’s capacity to imagine.

“Corruption” is such a compact word that we tend to lose track of its essential meaning. “Moral perversion; depravity; perversion of integrity; decay: rot; putrefaction.”

MOSE was supposed to save Venice. But nobody could save Venice from MOSE.

The first of the four gates breaks the surface. — A test of the four gates at the Lido/San Nicolo’. The first of the four breaks the surface.

A tes of the four gates that had been installed last October. They rise up one by one, and bob gently with the motion of the water. If they were rigidly fixed, or came up all at once, the force of the tide could damage (i.e., break) them, I was told. — They rise up one by one, and bob gently with the motion of the water. If they were rigidly fixed, or came up all at once, the force of the tide could damage (i.e., break) them, I was told. The gates at Malamocco are much longer because they are installed deeper below the surface.

A passerby stops to look at the political satire/cartoon that was taped on walls all around the neighborhood. Good thing I took some pictures; a day later, it was gone.

(L to R, translated by me, though the interpretation is hard to get into a small caption): THE LAST SUPPER (Let's hope). Mazzacurati: Hey guys, how much are you eating? Spaziante: Chill, Bettin (ex-councilor for the environment), we've got a secret weapon. Baita: I only wanted to facilitate. Brunetta: I declared the MOSE money I got for the election. Beppe Caccia: During the Paolo Costa government I and Paolo Cacciari were always sleeping. Costa: For me, the "No Big Ships" is enough. Massimo Cacciari (mayor before Costa and Orsoni) To deny is a categorical imperative. Orsoni: I never took one euro. Floating ballon, a riff on a Venetian song, "Georgie, get in my gondola and I'll take you to MOSE." Falconi: I only did the Passante (Mestre bypass). Galan: But if Minchillo did everything. Marchese: But if for two years I wasn't a member of the Partito Democratico anymore. Scola (ex-patriarch and founder of Marcianum, a cultural entity of the diocese using dicey contributions) But if Marcianum didn't work ("march") by itself. Minchillo: I did everything Galan ordered me to do. (Top right corner): C. Nordio : Zip it ("boca tasi" literally means "mouth keep quiet"). At the bottom, "And Venice wasn't aware of anything?" "No, the Consorzio told them "Stay serene" (a play on "Serenissima," the sobriquet of the Venetian Republic and also the name of the right-wing political faction that wants to secede from Italy). — (L to R, translated by me, though the interpretation is hard to get into a small caption. Parts are written in Venetian): THE LAST SUPPER (Let’s hope). Mazzacurati: Hey guys, how much are you eating? Spaziante: Chill, Bettin (ex-councilor for the environment), we’ve got a secret weapon. Bettin: I didn’t give the 4,130,000 euros for reclamation of the Certosa (island). Baita: I only wanted to facilitate. Brunetta: I declared the MOSE money I got for the election. Beppe Caccia: During the Paolo Costa government I and Paolo Cacciari were always sleeping. Costa: For me, the “No Big Ships” is enough. Massimo Cacciari (mayor before Costa and Orsoni) To deny is a categorical imperative. Orsoni: I never took one euro. Floating balloon, a riff on a Venetian song, “Georgie, get in my gondola and I’ll take you to MOSE.” Falconi: I only did the Passante (Mestre bypass). Galan: But if Minchillo did everything. Marchese: But if for two years I wasn’t a member of the Partito Democratico anymore. Scola (ex-patriarch and founder of Marcianum, a cultural entity of the diocese created with dicey contributions) But if Marcianum didn’t work (“march”) by itself. Minchillo: I did everything Galan ordered me to do. (Top right corner): C. Nordio : Zip it (“boca tasi” literally means “mouth keep quiet”). At the bottom, “And Venice wasn’t aware of anything?” “No, the Consorzio told them “Stay serene” (a play on “Serenissima,” the sobriquet of the Venetian Republic and also the name of the right-wing political faction that wants to secede from Italy).

Venetian Problems

Getting carried away, but on a reduced schedule

May 24, 2014 4 Comments

Last Thursday -- two days ago -- the announcement at the newsstand read: "ACTV 200 employees at the polling places vaporettos and buses at risk." This translates as: We were polite enough to warn you in time, so you could make other plans for getting around on Sunday. Like buying a boat or helicopter. — Last Thursday — two days ago — the announcement at the newsstand read: “ACTV 200 employees at the polling places vaporettos and buses at risk.” This translates as: We were polite enough to warn you in time, so you could make other plans for getting around on Sunday. Like buying a boat or helicopter.

As all the world knows — or that part of the world that reads this blog — the ACTV, or Azienda del Consorzio Trasporti Veneziano, is the local public transport company. When it’s in the mood.

The ACTV is an apex predator, which means it can do anything it wants. Strike? Bring it on. Send boats to the shop for repairs on a holiday weekend? You bet. Raise ticket prices again? Great idea. Do we regret any possible inconvenience? With all our hearts.

People in other human settlements might regard public transport as a public service. The administrators of the ACTV seem to regard transport as a favor, an onerous, tiresome, inconvenient and irritating sort of favor they’re compelled to grant the traveling public, like having to take your mother-in-law to the gynecologist on Saturday morning because you promised five months ago.

I can almost hear the murmuring soundtrack in the administrators’ brains. It says: “If only we didn’t have to haul all those people around every day, and repair boats, and go out in unpleasant weather, running a transport company could be so much fun. But no.”

I bring all this up not because two days ago the Gazzettino reported that two ticket-sellers have been fired for having recycled vaporetto tickets, pocketing large amounts of free money. That is a non-story because there will always be more. I say this because there always are more.

No, I bring it up because this weekend is election time all over Europe, in which the citizens of the EU are voting for their representatives in the European Parliament. Sunday will be election day in Italy. Yes, Italians vote on Sunday.

And who will be working the polling places? Employees of the ACTV. Why does this matter? Because bus and vaporetto service on Sunday is almost certainly going to be curtailed for lack of drivers, ticket-sellers, and so forth. The agency is alerting us to this already.

Sunday, you may recall, is a peak day for day-tripping tourists, especially when the weather is sunny, which it is expected to be. Just another example of how thoughtless people are regarding the ACTV’s convenience, to want to come to Venice on a Sunday.

Here is how the long-suffering officers of the ACTV phrase it, on the company’s website (translated by me):

“…seeing the experience of the past years…we estimate that an increased and unpredictable number of employees could be called to serve at the polling places… in past years, the phenomenon was so pronounced as to oblige the company to suppress some runs, whether of boats or of buses.

“Therefore the same risk may be run this year, and given the unpredictability of the absences, the possibility can’t be excluded that the agency could be constrained to apply reductions of service (vaporetto and bus) without being able to indicate in advance the lines or the precise runs that could be involved.”

I dwell with incredulous eyes on the lavish phrases of warning and exculpation. Why are the absences unpredictable? Why would the agency be constrained to limit service? Do they not have enough employees to go around? Why can’t you indicate in advance the lines and times that could be involved? And why, now that I’m busy asking questions, can’t you prepared to call in replacements? This election was scheduled months ago. It’s not like the fog.

If you would like to ask something, you might inquire as to what kind of idea of public service this might be. It’s the “We can do whatever we want because you have no alternative” idea.

Two vaporettos -- technically, they're called motoscafos -- at the Lido. We might not be getting the one we need on Sunday because of forces far beyond the control of any known human. At the ACTV. — Two vaporettos — technically, they’re called motoscafos — at the Lido. We might not be getting the one we need on Sunday because of forces far beyond the control of any known human.

And as long as there are questions in the air, you may further ask why ACTV employees have been given this assignment — and why they will get time off with pay to provide this manpower, especially considering that the people working the polling places also get paid. The answer is simple: Because getting money twice to do virtually nothing is a wonderful way to spend the day.

You may then ask (as I did) why ACTV employees enjoy this little perk, and not, say, members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, or the Red Cross, or the World Wildlife Fund, or someone else.

Because the ACTV contracts stipulate that their members will be allowed time off with pay for providing this service.

This is a marvelous clause, and if their contract were to contain similarly marvelous clauses, it would only make me more astonished that they ever bother to go on strike. It’s a wonderful life on Planet ACTV.

But I noticed that, at least as Lino explained it to me, the contract doesn’t stipulate that ACTV employees must be called. So why doesn’t the Board of Elections ring up the grain millers, or the Red Cross, etc., and just tell the ACTV employees “Sorry, but you’re going to have to go to work today. The panda-counters will supervise the voting. You’re going to have to do your job carrying thousands of people around the lagoon. Bummer.”

I don’t know why. But all this makes me think disagreeable thoughts. The ACTV is eager to take money by fining a passenger who hasn’t beeped his ticket before boarding, even if the ticket is a monthly pass which obviously has been paid in full. They demand this immaterial beeping, and punish non-compliers. We demand a boat every 12 or 20 or 30 minutes, or whatever the timetable is at the moment, and we get “Sorry, we can’t guarantee service because we’ve been constrained, obliged, and otherwise compelled to suspend runs by forces beyond our control, beyond even our ability to predict, which causes us to feel distress at the plight we have inflicted on you totally against our will, even though we’re inflicting it anyway.”

The world belongs to the ACTV, in the same way that it belongs to killer whales, Nile crocodiles, Harpy eagles. Because although you can kill these creatures, if you really try, you can’t possibly make them afraid. Or even vaguely apprehensive.

If you don’t think this could be a correct assessment, you should know that the ACTV has announced a 24-hour strike for May 30.

Venetian History

What was your name again?

May 21, 2014 4 Comments

Walking home the other day, I cast my eye, as usual, on the building corner which Lino refers to as “The Wailing Wall.” Meaning no disrespect to the original place of that name, our little angle is the perfect spot to tape up death notices. I’ve mentioned on other occasions that the cost to publish such a notice in the Gazzettino is totally fantastical, so these rectangles of plastic are extremely useful in keeping people up to date on for whom the bell is tolling.

But I don’t usually expect to see names I recognize, mainly because the number of people I know who might be likely to demise is very limited. And although some surnames are a little unusual, there are very few which hurl one back 700 years into one of the most complicated and desperate conspiracies ever formed to attempt the overthrow of the Venetian Republic.

So I was unprepared to see a new notice stuck on the wall, complete with photo of the deceased, announcing the death of Baiamonte Tiepolo.

This name may not connote much to you, but anyone who has skimmed Venetian history knows it as the name of one of the most audacious revolutionaries who ever tried to scuttle somebody’s government.

It was like seeing a notice for some innocuous little person who just happened to be named Benedict Arnold, or Oliver Cromwell, or Ernesto Guevara, or Gregory Rasputin.

As for someone bearing the name of a renowned Venetian noble family, this isn’t quite so startling. I interviewed a descendant of doge Jacopo Tiepolo some years ago, and I know that there are Grimanis and Zorzis and Da Mosto’s still roaming the city. I have also met a young woman carrying forward the storied name of Bragadin.

But it’s one thing to bear the last name; if you were a Bragadin, I think it would be cruel to name your son Marcantonio. The name is certainly worthy of remembrance, but the boy’s life would be hell. There are only so many witty remarks you can make to someone whose forebear was flayed alive after an epic siege that lasted almost a year, and the lad would have to hear all of them.

On the same note, the Venice phone book lists two men named Marco Polo. They must have been doomed to a life of a steady drizzle of really funny remarks. “Hey, Marco — back so soon?” “Give my regards to the Khan, next time you see him.” “Did you really invent pasta?” And so on.

For the late Baiamonte, the drollery would have had to be more erudite, and I won’t risk any here because life is short, and by the time one (that is, me) has related as much as possible of his ancestor’s spectacular, if also scurrilous, story, the potential for humor would have dried up and blown away in the wind. But I feel safe in saying that, thanks to his namesake and his cohorts, the year 1310 stands out in Venetian history as much as 1492 or 1776 stands out in the American annals.

Here is the drastically condensed version of his story. The plot was foiled, he was exiled for four years, and his palace was torn down. He spent those years traveling, visiting Venice’s enemies (Padova, Treviso, Rovigo, and some very powerful families therein) doing everything conceivable to convince them to join him in another conspiracy. He just wouldn’t give up.

Not amused, Venice changed the sentence to perpetual exile. He wandered around Dalmatia seeking new collaborators. He was imprisoned. He escaped. The Venetian government forbade anybody to have anything to do with him. Finally, in 1329, the Council of Ten decreed that he had to be eliminated, by any means.

The details of Baiamonte’s death are uncertain, which is not surprising when a person has to be eliminated. (The “Caught a cold and stopped breathing” explanation has often been sufficient.) As for location, at least one historian states that he was in Croatia, staying with relatives, when his last day came and went.

For the Tiepolos of Lower Castello, maybe it was a point of pride to name their son Baiamonte. It couldn’t have been inadvertent. I can’t imagine somebody saying “Heavenly days, it never crossed my mind that somebody would think of the old subversive of blackened fame.”

I notice, though, that he named his son Andrea. Maybe he had had enough.

The great conspirator's palace was razed, and a "column of infamy" detailing his crimes was erected in its place. Eventually the column was broken up, and this abbreviated summary placed on the pavement: "Location of column of Baiamonte Tiepolo 1310." — The great conspirator’s palace at Campo Sant’ Agostin was razed, and a “column of infamy” detailing his crimes was erected in its place. Eventually the column was broken up, and this abbreviated summary placed on the pavement: “Location of column of Baiamonte Tiepolo 1310.”

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