Motondoso: Suck it up
The dynamics of waves aren’t so hard to understand — anybody who’s ever gone to the beach remembers the thump of the wave that has just arrived. (Am I the only person who’s ever noticed how much that sound resembles the slamming of the car doors as your family arrives for a visit?).
We don’t really notice what the thump does to the sand because an infinite series of them has already created the sand. It’s not a bad idea, though, to recall that the sand was once a hefty piece of mountain.
What isn’t so obvious, and maybe is even less obviously disturbing, is the hissing sound the wave makes as it departs. It is caused by a force called “risucchio,” (ree-SOOK-yo) which literally means “re-sucking,” though I suppose “undertow” is close enough for Anglophones. And it’s the force that tears asunder what was once clearly put together by God, man, or whatever’s in between.
Even natural waves caused by the wind, aided and abetted by the retreating tide, will do some of this work of demolition. But then there are the big public boats — and I’m thinking specifically of waterbuses. They come in several versions here, but the highest number are the vaporettos.
The vaporetto is a specific type of boat, and the public-transport company, which goes by its acronym ACTV, operates 52 of them. Sometimes called “battello,” the vaporetto has a regularly scheduled cousin correctly called a “motoscafo,” though it gets called “vaporetto” too for convenience. It sits lower in the water and carries fewer people, though you might not believe it if you try to get on one at rush hour.
At this moment, the ACTV website informs us that the company operates “about 152” waterborne vehicles. (“About”? You mean you don’t know?) They break it down thus: 52 vaporettos, 55 motoscafos, 10 “single agent motoscafos,” which I can’t interpret for you just now, 16 bigger vaporettos that travel the lagoon (“vaporetti foranei”), 9 motonavi, and 8 ferryboats.
Naturally all of these vehicles cause waves, but what compounds the effect is the undertow they create when they stop at one of the 100 or so bus stops (city and lagoon) to drop and pick up passengers.
It’s pretty simple. Here is an illustration of what happens every time one of these craft comes and goes:
On September 15, 1881, the first vaporetto (“Regina Margherita”) began regular service in the Grand Canal. The imminent arrival of this creation caused tremendous distress and revolt among the gondoliers, who foresaw their doom. Their turmoil is the focus of a marvelous film, “Canal Grande” (1943), starring several then-well-known Venetian actors, such as Cesco Baseggio, plus a number of real gondoliers. Too bad it’s all in Italian.
The first vaporetto was soon followed by a fleet of eight, run by a French company, the “Compagnie des bateaux Omnibus.” Nothing against that noble nation, I merely note that Napoleon Bonaparte, who conquered and devastated Venice in 1797, was also French.
In 1890 the Societa’ Veneta Lagunare began service between Venice and assorted lagoon locations. And so it has gone.
Lino remembers when there were still very few vaporetto stops in the Grand Canal; they were at San Marco, Accademia, San Toma’, Rialto, the railway station, and probably Piazzale Roma, though he won’t swear to it. In what was still a flourishing local culture, the Venetians could find almost everything needed for daily life in their own little neighborhoods.
There are now 17 stops on the Grand Canal. They were not installed as something useful to the residents, as noted above, but for the transport of tourists. Shops have begun to close (I don’t lay this fact at the feet of the wave-and-sucking-causing public transport), so as the population has dropped, and the number of tourists has risen, the locals have had to range further afield to find forage, so to speak, and at the same time have had to use public transport which is usually overstuffed with tourists and their luggage. During Carnival, most Venetians do their utmost to stay the hell at home.
The city recognizes that there aren’t enough vaporettos most of the year; during the summer (and Carnival) extra routes and supplementary vehicles are laid on. But eventually some crisis point will be reached where the number of bodies requiring to be moved and the available space in which to do it will collide. To use a term which nobody in the navigation business wants to hear.
Zwingle’s Fifth Law states that “You can get used to anything.” You may quibble, but I can attest that you can definitely get used to this roiling and churning and sucking of many waters. This isn’t good, but neither can you travel all day in a constant state of rage and anguish.
You can give yourself an interlude of relief by going for a little stroll. Ignoring the roaring of motors and the shattering of waves, you can really relax in the city which is extolled for having no cars. I think people who say that must merely mean “no traffic.”
Motondoso, Part 3: The How
“Motondoso” has very clear, and essentially simple, causes and effects. Anything moving in water, even eels, will create some kind of wake. The wake is the visible, surface part of the turbulence made by whatever is moving — in the present case, the motor’s propellers. The waves spread out in two directions until they dissipate.
In the case of motorboats in Venice, this fact is exacerbated by:
The number of boats: There are thousands of registered boats in the city of Venice. There are also many which are unregistered. This number spikes every year in the summer when trippers from the hinterland come into the lagoon to spend their weekends roaming around, often at high speed but always with many horsepower, in motorboats of every shape and tonnage. Teenage boys, particularly from the islands (by which we mean Sant’ Erasmo, Burano, Murano, are especially addicted to roaming at high speed at all hours with their girlfriends and boomboxes.
On a Sunday in July a few years ago, a squad of volunteers from the Venice Project Center spread out at observation posts across the lagoon, from Chioggia to Burano. Their mission was to count the number and type of boats that passed their station. Whether it was a million boats passing once or one boat a million times, it didn’t matter. They came home with quite a list: every kind of small-to-smallish boat with motors ranging from 15 to 150 hp, hulking great Zodiacs, large cabin cruisers, ferries, vaporettos, tourist mega-launches, hydrofoils from Croatia, taxis, and more. After 11 hours, from 8:30 AM to 7:30 PM, they analyzed their data. Result: A motorboat had passed somewhere, on the average, every one and a half seconds.
And if weekday traffic is heavy, weekend traffic is three times greater.
The types of boats: In the last 20 years, motor-powered traffic has doubled; at last count 30,000 trips are made in the city every day; 97 percent of these trips are in boats with motors. (There are currently 12 projects in the works for marinas which will add 8,000 more berths.) Of these 30,000 trips, a little over half are made by some sort of working boat.
More than 10,000 daily trips are by taxis or mega-launches, and more than 8,000 are by barges carrying some kind of goods (bricks, plumbing supplies, cream puffs, etc.). Studies have shown that if there is one category that over time causes the most damage, it’s not the taxi (I would have bet money on that). It’s barges. And they are everywhere. It’s all barges, all the time.
- I know they’re heavy, but all this boat to carry a few watermelons?
Traffic patterns: The problem isn’t merely the number and type of boats, but where they are. Obviously, the more boats you have, the more waves they will create, and where space is limited (most canals in Venice) these waves quickly accumulate into a roiling mass that dissipates with extreme difficulty. They are forced to go back and forth, hitting anything they come into contact with, until they finally wear themselves out and die.
There are canals where the waves don’t expire for hours: the Grand Canal (unfortunately), the Rio Novo, the Rio di Noale, the Canale di Tessera toward the airport, the Canale delle Fondamente Nuove, and above all, the Canale della Giudecca.
This broad, deep channel has become Venice’s Cape Horn. It is a stretch of water 1.5 miles long [2 km] and 1,581 feet [482 m] wide, and is the shortest and fastest way to get from the Maritime Zone (cruise ship passengers, tourist groups from buses at Tronchetto, barges delivering goods of every sort) to the Bacino of San Marco. One study revealed that the biggest waves in the Lagoon are here; an even more recent survey, conducted with a new telecamera system installed by the Capitaneria di Porto, provided some specific numbers: 1,000 boats an hour transit here, or 10,000 in an ordinary workday. In the summer, there are undoubtedly more, seeing that an “ordinary workday” includes masses of tourists.
One reason there are so many boats is due to the large number of barges, rendered necessary by an exotic system for distributing goods. If you are a restaurant and need paper products, they come on a barge. If you need tomato paste, it comes on another barge. If you need wine, it comes on another barge. In one especially busy internal canal, the amount of cargo and number of barges was analyzed, and it turns out that the stuff on 96 barges could have fit onto three. But never forget the fundamental philosophy: “Io devo lavorare” (I have to work).
The types of boats: Their weight and length. The shape of their hulls. Their motors (horsepower and propeller shape). All these factors influence the waves that they create.
A number of intelligent and effective changes have been proposed over time, most of which that would not be particularly complicated, but which would cost money. So far no one has shown that they consider these changes to be a worthwhile investment.
Example: The original motor taxis (c. 1930), apart from being smaller than those of today, positioned their motors in the center of the boat. When the hulls (and motors) became larger, everyone moved the motor to the stern, which immediately creates bigger waves. But subsequent improvement in motors and their fuels means that today it would be feasible to maintain the current size of the taxi while moving the motor to the center once again, thereby immediately minimizing its waves. Feasible, but no one is interested.
Speed: This is utterly fundamental. Speed limits were introduced in 2002 to confront the already serious problem of the waves; the average legal range, depending on what canal you’re in, is between 5-7 km/h. But tourist mega-launches, barges, taxis — almost every motorized boat in Venice has the same need: To get where they’re going as quickly as possible.
This need has been imposed by the demands of mass tourism, which involves moving the maximum amount of cargo (people, laundry, bottled water, etc.) often many times during the day. Everyone makes up a timetable which suits them and then makes it work.
Studies by the Venice Project Center have revealed several speedy facts in crisp detail.
- The height of the waves increases exponentially as speed increases. A small barge traveling at 5 km/h would produce a wake about 2 cm high. The same boat going at 10 km/h produces a wake of nearly 15 cm. (Multiply the speed by 2, multiply the wake by 7.)
- Virtually all boats exceed the speed limit. The average speed on all boats in all canals was 12 km/h, which is more than 7 km/h over the maximum speed limit.
- Therefore, reducing the speed of the boats would drastically decrease the size of their wakes.
Speed limits would have a positive effect (if they were obeyed) but only if certain laws of hydrodynamics were taken into account, such as the one governing the wake produced relative to the weight of the boat. Here the speed limits have been adjusted to permit the vaporettos (waterbuses), among the heaviest daily craft, to go — not slower, which would be correct — but as fast as the timetable requires.
You can change the laws on speed limits all you want — you’ll never change the laws of physics.
Oh yes: there will be waves.
Next: Part Four: The lagoon experience
Oh let’s just all go on strike, about everything
I know we all — or most of us — are all tangled up in the world’s problems, but while you’re thinking about everything that’s going wrong on either side of your front door, spare a thought for Italy.
Tomorrow, October 23, there is going to be a national strike. By which I don’t mean that the nation itself is going to strike — however one would manage that — but the nation will be dramatically affected by a very big general strike organized and imposed by three large unions for a batch of different reasons. The strike was announced on August 4, so if you haven’t come up with an alternate plan for the day, it’s not their fault.
Their stated grievance is that the government has not dealt with their requests on a number of issues. They are against workers being fired (not a theoretical concern, in the current economic situation) — in fact, they want the government to block firings — and they are also against reducing the penalties for those who cause fatal accidents, or severe injury or illness, in the workplace. They’re in favor of reducing the work-week, increasing raises and pensions, establishing a minimum wage, attaching cost-of-living increases to pay scales, and making workplaces, schools, and transport safer. Could anyone disagree with any of this? It would be like quibbling over the Ten Commandments, or the Boy Scout Oath.
The categories which will be affected by the strike are:
- Public administration (no problem there, as only five people seem to ever be working in the country at any given time, and then mostly unintentionally); the whole day. Convenient, it being a Friday.
- Schools and universities. Professors and students jubilant, parents not so much.
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One can only hope and presume that at least one of these ambulances will be in service tomorrow. Public health (nurses, orderlies, ambulance drivers, perhaps even doctors); so far, no guarantee of minimum services has been given. Something will be cobbled together at the last minute, it always is.
- Firemen. Those actively scheduled to be on call at airports and elsewhere will strike only from 10 – 2 PM. Not bad, unless your fire starts during those four hours. Office people: Out all day.
- Airlines: No planes flying between 12 and 4 PM. Sorry about that connection.
- Ports: from 8 AM Friday – 8 AM Saturday. Office people: Out all day. Absolutely no ferries connecting small islands to the mainland or to each other for 24 hours. Deal with it. Read a book. Call your mom.
- Trains: There is conflicting information here. One report says that personnel assigned to actively working with the trains will strike from 11 – 3 PM (office people: out, naturally). On the other hand, the railway company says that normal service will be maintained, but considering what “normal” tends to mean in an ordinary week, it’s hard to say if the effect of a strike will even be noticed. Or if service will appear to have improved during the strike.
- And above all, PUBLIC TRANSPORT. Venice is one place where lack of buses makes a major dent in your day. Here’s what life will look like here from midnight Thursday to midnight Friday:
Transport will be cut to the very bone, which means that there will be hardly any vaporettos except during the morning and evening rush hours. Which means that if you have to get to the train station (except between 11-3) with your luggage, you’ll be walking or taking a dazzlingly expensive taxi. Need to get to the airport? Dazzlingly expensive taxi, but remember, don’t bother going between 12 – 4.
For those of us staying on home territory, anyone wanting to go to or from the Lido from anywhere will be waiting a lo-o-o-o-o-ong time for a vaporetto to appear (or taking a dazzlingly expensive taxi). On the mainland, the fact of buses going on strike can be somewhat mitigated by car-pooling. In Venice, you don’t see anyone in their personal motorboat carrying friends or stranded people around.
In Rome, though, to help deal with the masses of protesters, the trains and subways will strike only between 8 PM and midnight. Am I the only person who finds this odd?
The forecast for tomorrow is also for fog. Fun. Though I suppose if there aren’t any vaporettos or ferries, it doesn’t make much difference.
It’s true that in Venice you can reach almost anywhere fairly conveniently (if you’re not in a huge rush) on foot. Unless you’re a shaky little old person on two canes, say, trying to get to the hospital for your knee X-ray which you scheduled six months ago, or a tourist with lots of bags. No vaporettos is not amusing.
Naturally I’m totally in favor of everything the unions want, and don’t want, and so on. But there isn’t any union that I know of which would muster its troops to demand changes that would make life any easier for me.
So I’m going to protest on my own. After all, in the middle of everyone else, who’ll notice? I’ll just stand next to some disaffected welder and let fly.
So here’s what I’m against: Unscrupulous people deliberately doing cruel and ignorant things to other people; anything that costs more than $1.50; dog-owners who let their dogs poop wherever they want and don’t clean up; kids who scream, and their parents who either make them scream or don’t make them stop; chocolate-chip cookies with more than 20 calories. The people upstairs who throw their cigarette butts on the street in front of our door, and the unstable person who leaves his/her bag of garbage at the corner of our apartment.
Also: I’m against unprofessional, obtuse, malicious, devious behavior of any sort by anyone at any time; cheating and lying. Incompetence. Hypocrisy. My list could go on but I’ll stop here.
Here’s what I’m for: Kids that laugh, dogs that don’t poop, lots of money paid for hard work done well, and music of almost any type except that car-crash-torture-dungeon-hand-grenade music, whatever it’s called. A pat on the head/back/cheek for any and no reason — the person receiving it will know what it’s for.
I’m off to prepare my placard now. Will report back from the barricades or whenever it gets dark and I have to come home.
“Besieged” — a word about tourism
Most of the journalism about Venice, either print or TV, points out tourism as Venice’s main defining characteristic, which is about as simple a discovery to make as that water fills the canals. Apparently the appeal is eternal to the average journalist and editor looking for a story which is immediately sensational and not at all hard to do. A story on tourism here practically writes and photographs itself.
In doing so the reporters universally bewail it, to one degree or another, in the same way one would bewail any uncontrollable natural disaster such as grasshopper swarms, tornadoes, avalanches. You’d almost think that tourists come to Venice deliberately to wreak havoc on an innocent, helpless, unsuspecting, undeserving victim. The lines in these stories are usually pretty clear: City Good, Tourist Bad.
Pictures of mass tourism at its most intense are the easiest images in the world to take, the journalistic equivalent of hitting the bull’s-eye from one foot away. Anybody can do it — I’ve done it myself. You don’t even have to open your eyes to take impressive pictures of the worst aspects of mass tourism. In fact it’s probably better if you don’t.
But there is much more to the situation than the simple outlines sketched by the just-passing-through journalists.
I am not defending the behavior of large segments of the mass tourist population. These are generically labeled “turisti da culo,” which literally means ass-tourists, but generally conveys a wide range of rude, thoughtless, generally sub-civilized behavior. There is never any lack of examples, especially in the summer. This race of tourist is horrifying, demoralizing, offensive, depressing. I could tell you stories. And yes, of course there are too many of them.
But I want to pause for a moment in mid-cliche’ to regard the situation from two important points of view which are rarely addressed as everyone is busy wailing and gnashing their teeth.
First, the city officials who have been assigned the role of City Councilor for Tourism over the years are politicians. They are not trained in the industry of tourism, an industry as demanding and complex as making steel or developing drugs. Further, it is the nature of the political breed to be cautious and easily swayed by conflicting demands, which makes planning, and then executing any plan, hugely difficult. And unappealing. Politicians on the whole tend to avoid “difficult” and “unappealing.” So a lot of tiny, disconnected actions are undertaken to minimize, if not solve, whatever is the most pressing problem of the moment.
The current Councilor for Tourism, a native Venetian lawyer named Augusto Salvadori, is famous for his impassioned oratory on behalf of his beloved city, the need to protect her and defend her and nourish and cherish her. It’s like the wedding vow. He is often on the verge of weeping before he finishes. People have come to expect it.
But he has no program, he has only little temporary fixettes. My favorite was the recent day to promote Decorum (yes, that’s the word they use for clean, tidy and polite), one of whose more publicized aspects was that the city offered to donate geraniums to anybody who wanted them, in order to brighten up the windowsills. If he had thought of donating the same number of large trash bins to be distributed far and wide to mitigate the incessant leaving of garbage on said windowsills because no alternative is to be found, the city wouldn’t need flowers in order to look better. You can walk from the vaporetto stop at San Pietro di Castello as far as the Bridge of the Veneta Marina (a straight shot of about 20 minutes, if you dawdle) without finding one (1) trash bin of any size whatsoever.
There aren’t many people who are willing to walk around town indefinitely with their empty soda can, beer bottle, or plastic ice-cream cup in their hand, searching for a place to dispose of it.
So: Point One is that the persons in charge of tourism here are unprepared for anything other than Making Suggestions. Which isn’t the same as Having Ideas.
Tourism is Venice’s only source of income. Yet it is inexplicably and profoundly — even stubbornly — even proudly, it sometimes seems — mishandled. The individuals charged with managing this important, complicated, potentially destructive resource could be compared to a person hired as director of a mercury mine whose previous job had been, say, as the Judges and Stewards Commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.
“We need some truly visionary people,” professor Fabio Carrera told me the other evening. “There’s no long-range thinking. It’s very short-range.” A few months ago there was tremendous blowing of trumpets and waving of banners to publicize “VeniceConnected,” the next big step in tourism management here: One-stop online booking. Carrera snorts. “All these ideas that were good maybe five years ago, like VeniceConnected online. We should be doing ten times better in the future. But they think ‘We’re innovating’ by doing this crap.”
The fact that there is chaos at the top naturally leads to chaos all the way down to the poor bastard trying to find a place in the shade to have some kind of lunch that won’t cost a fortune. Bathrooms — can’t find them. Open late, close early. Vaporettos — confusing. Signage — random and often homemade. 
Street vendors — insistent and vaguely disturbing. Which leads to Point Two.
Point Two: Nobody ever takes the trouble to report on what is demanded of a tourist here. I see it every day and even as it repels me it also inspires something like pity. It must be the vacation equivalent of the Ranger Assessment Phase at Fort Benning, especially if you’ve got kids. I once stopped to help a family of three standing at the foot of a bridge with their eight suitcases (I counted them), unable to figure out where they were, much less how to get to their hotel. They had been standing there for a while.
Visiting Venice in the summer will almost certainly be hot, tiring, baffling, occasionally even upsetting, and it can cost far too much. A one-ride ticket on the vaporetto costing 6.50 euros ($9) is far too much. Two euros ($2.80) for a half-liter (two cups) bottle of water is far too much. Disposing of the result of the water you drank, if you avail yourself of one of the few but very clean municipal bathrooms costs 1.50 euros ($2), which is far too much. But cheaper than the original bottle of water, true.
I am not defending or excusing the type of tourist of which one sees way too many here: Oblivious, rude, loud, and often, yes, ugly. The garb, the behavior, the everything is impossible to defend. When people leave home, many evidently leave their manners at the kennel with the dog. (The fact that there can also be rude, loud, ugly Venetians is noted by the court, but doesn’t have any bearing on this case.) But to be a tourist here, enchanting as the city is, must be debilitating.
Still, that doesn’t explain why they have to shuffle around the narrow streets like wounded water buffalo, stopping with no warning and blocking your passage, or to ride the vaporetto with 60-pound packs on their backs, nonchalantly laying waste to everyone around them as they turn this way and that, admiring the view.
So let’s sum up the situation: The city puts up with aggravations and discourtesies and even damage, large and small, all day, every day, and also at night, but it gets money. And the tourist struggles around a bewildering, overloaded bunch of Baroque/Renaissance/Veneto-Byzantine-laden islands, but gets lots of pictures of canals and belltowers.
I don’t know. Something is definitely missing from these equations.