This week we are in the run-up to the inauguration/starting gun on the Biennale, now back in full force after some Covid side-effects such as lockdown.
Our neighborhood and near environs are absolutely pullulating with people dressed in weird ways, sitting together staring at their phones, drinking lots of spritzes and laughing. If the forecast is fulfilled (never a sure thing), a fierce northeast wind and lashings of rain and low temperatures will put a crimp in the laughing and spritzing on Friday and Sunday, but Saturday, the official opening day, should be sunny and bright. I do hope it works out that way, partly because I never know how far to trust the forecast and it would be interesting to see if they nabbed it this time.
One forecast I can make with total certainty, though, is that there will be inexplicable things strewn around the city that purport to be art. You already know this from past editions. If you think they’re art, they don’t need to be explicated, or you invent your own explication, or you repeat somebody else’s. If you don’t think they’re art, you’re on your own.
Yesterday morning we came upon a piece that, while less off-putting than the phallic column of gold in campo San Vio a few years back, still made Lino and me think assorted non-artistic thoughts.
My thoughts were these: I know it’s a cube. I know it’s made of gold. I know it weighs 130 kilos (286 pounds). I know that it required several rent-a-security-guards. I’m pretty sure I know that the cube-creator (Cubist?) takes his or her work seriously; he’d have to, considering that the current price of 130 kilos of gold is $8,078,590. But I do not know if it is art. And another thing I don’t know — though not knowing will not disturb my sleep — is why?
The Golden Calf meant life and death. The Mask of Agamemnon sends chills down the spine. The Sican beakers at least were useful as well as beautiful. The Panagyurishte Treasure is a cultural symphony.
And what have we to contribute, in the year 2022, to the multi-millennial history of goldsmithing? A cube.
I wish I had grandchildren just so I could tell them I had seen it.
I had an interesting dream last night, set in Venice; nothing particular happened but I did awaken with this thought: It’s not the canals that make Venice so particular (special, different, beautiful, strange, etc.), it’s the corners.
Why is that? Because there are so incredibly many of them, and when you turn one, or two, or more, you either move ahead or you somehow find yourself pretty much back where you started.
That’s my new metaphor for Venice. As far as I can tell, after the enormous difficulties and turmoil caused by two years of Covid, somehow it seems that we’re back where we started. You might think that could be a good thing (“Back to normal!”) except that it’s not (“Back to normal!”). Things keep happening, but almost nothing really changes. Names change occasionally, but the headlines seem to be set on “replay.”
There are now fewer than 50,000 Venetians living in the historic center of Venice. (In 2021, there were 50,434). This is a threshold many people dreaded crossing, but it has been crossed nonetheless. I have no idea what this means in real life, because supermarkets continue to open. Who are their customers?
When the mayor uses the term “Venice,” he is referring to the general metropolitan entity, the preponderance of which is on the mainland. Everybody knows he really only cares about the mainland: “The future of Venice,” he said openly, “is Mestre.” Take that, Venice-lovers! The future of Milwaukee may well be Sheboygan, but to someone who thinks of the Piazza San Marco when he/she hears “Venice,” Mestre is a bit much. Still, this is how it’s going. Eight of the ten city councilors are from the mainland. The ninth is in Venice itself, the tenth lives on the Lido. And of course the mayor too is from the mainland, where he has business interests. So voices speaking up for the dwindling historic center are faint and few.
Meanwhile, daily life is made up of stores closing, stores opening. Unpredictable transit strikes and all-too-predictable wailing by ACTV, we have no money we have no money. Tourists: We want them, but they’re making us crazy. The sudden drought of Russian tourists has torn a new hole in the city’s financial fabric.
Cruises: Big ships are banished from the Bacino of San Marco. The cruise ships will enter the lagoon at Malamocco, toiling like container ships up to the raggedy docks in the commercial port zone of Marghera.
The MSC “Sinfonia” opened the season by docking at Marghera on April 9, the first of the 200 cruises scheduled for this year. Sound good? Not when you compare it to the 565 cruises that stopped (or started) in Venice in 2019. But those days are gone.
MOSE: There will never be anything new to say about this. Work stopped, problems found, money gone, problems found, money arrives, work starts again, problems found, date of completion always on the horizon.
The thing is that headlines blurt out news that any Venetian already knew years ago. Example: Barnacles. Lino mentioned the inevitability of barnacle encrustation to me back in 1994. It would be impossible to astonish anybody who has kept a boat in the water here. This is as much a fact as that water is wet.
Still, somebody finally noticed the problem. In 2018, an article announced the discovery by an underwater drone that the MOSE barriers were rusting and encrusted with barnacles. Time passes, nothing is done. In 2022, another headline: Barnacles!! Or to be even more precise: Mussels.
Turns out that the gates that have been lying in their assigned position underwater awaiting the call to block the tide have not been receiving the required and agreed-upon maintenance. The money for maintenance was allotted some time back, but it seems to have not been spent on maintenance. If the crud was predictable, so was the fate of the maintenance money.
Years ago, the cost of annual maintenance was forecast to be some 15 million euros. Then estimates of maintenance costs rose to 80 million euros, and now they’re projected to be 200 million euros per year. Where do these numbers come from? Are they breeding in dark corners, like wire hangers? In any case, vast amounts of money can’t ever sit still long enough to be spent on what they’re supposed to be spent on. When you actually need the money, somehow it’s just not there anymore.
There’s no need to read headlines, this has been going on for generations now. The big hold-back-the-tide project began in 1973, when the Special Law for Venice allotted money for a competition for designs (held in 1975). When the first stone was laid in 2003, the end was promised for 2010. We were all so young, so innocent… Then the 2014 deadline came and went, then the middle of 2018, then the beginning of 2019. The “acqua granda” of November 2019 broke several financial logjams, and work picked up with the promise of concluding in 2021. Sorry, I meant 2023. Endless years pass of “We’ll get there! Give us more money!” Lack of funds closed the works for the entire year of 2021. Rome sends millions, then more millions. And yet, somehow there is never enough.
Tourism: They’re baaaaack. Intermittently, and more often on weekends, still more often just during the day. There were a few Carnival crush-fests in the San Marco area, but nothing noteworthy. I suppose it just wouldn’t be Venice without 100,000 or more visitors in a day. And just now, on the cusp of the Easter weekend, we are back under siege again.
This is supposed to be good (even as we see the interminable lines at the vaporetto stops for boats to Murano and Burano). Venice has got to get back in the game, seeing as it’s the only game there is.
Venice isn’t the only Italian city to take a major hit from the pandemic, but I am not seeking comparisons. There were 8,800,000 visits in 2019; 2,500,000 in 2020, and a little more than 3,200,000 in 2021. Between May and August of 2021 (peak summer season) the arrivals were 54 percent fewer than in 2019.
Last year sometime there was a brief quiver of excitement over the resurrected idea of installing turnstiles to control the flow of tourists entering the city at certain points. That idea has been mothballed. I think we don’t want to slow them down. The eternal subject of the selling a ticket to enter Venice has also been put aside. But these ideas will be back. They’re like the swallows going to Capistrano.
Biennale: Yes, it is opening this year — April 23 to November 27 — and the vibrations are palpable. The small park on the Riva dei Sette Martiri tends to host more light-hearted works. I’ll just call them “works,” because I can’t bring myself to say “art.” I honestly don’t know what they are.
So here we are, caught in the endless cycle of everything. Maybe there will be something new around the next corner (or ten), but I’m not counting on it.
Recently there have been intermittent donation drives here, as in so many places, in aid of Ukrainian refugees. (As of today, nearly 60,000 have arrived; their main destinations are Milan, Rome, Naples, and Bologna.) So far, at least in via Garibaldi, these drives have been organized by Caritas, the charitable wing of the diocese of Venice.
They needed toiletries, toiletries abounded. (Don’t forget children’s toothbrushes.) They needed clothing, we decimated our closet. Boxes have been left, meanwhile, in various churches to encourage the ongoing accumulation of goods.
But this coming Saturday there will be a big new all-day drive, and frankly, I’m kind of intimidated. This is far beyond toothpaste and socks; this effort seems to be gearing up to furnish a hundred M.A.S.H. units.
I’ve studied Amazon wish lists, I’ve pored over wedding registries, I’ve even looked occasionally at Dear Santa letters, but this cry for help beats them all.
But let us not be daunted! You can get lots of these via amazon.it. Many of them are very cheap. If you should have ever felt any desire to send scalpels or iodoformic bandages or luer-lock syringes to anybody, this is your moment. (I am addressing any local people whose hearts may be moved by this exceptional appeal.)
Otherwise, plain old donations will never go out of style.
I’m very glad to have had so many responses to my last post about seeing/not seeing the photos on my blog. There seems to be consensus on the theory I had begun to form.
In the words of one reader: “I have a simple solution, I just scroll to the bottom of your post and click on the link “Venice: I am not making this up” and it takes me to your blog page and I read your post there.”
Other readers, you’ll see in the Comments, have said the same. Would any previous non-seers let me know if this solution works for them?