Meanwhile, in other news….
Now that the G20 has come and gone, the surface of life that was so agitated thereby has returned to its normal level of agitation. There are plenty of things to keep track of, to one degree or another. In some cases, to many degrees.
Here are a few of them:
REDENTORE: The annual feast of the Most Holy Redeemer is tonight and Sunday — the big waterborne festivities on Saturday, the races and big religious celebration on Sunday. Last year there were no fireworks, which left a huge hole in the festivities. This year there will be fireworks, but in a serious effort to prevent the hazardous clumping-together of crowds the city has imposed a limit of 18,000 people, total, and those persons have to have made a reservation. To reach the place or area they’ve booked, they have to show their printed ticket as well as their “Green Pass,” or other certificate of vaccination, OR a document that confirms that their swab was negative within the 48 preceding hours.
Boats obviously won’t be permitted to tie up to each other: social distancing afloat. No trying to pass from boat to boat. No dancing parties aboard (take that, you big floating discotheques). The watery areas are delimited according to size and the use of boat, and you have to show a printed “ticket” from your booking (on water as on land) to be permitted to enter the area. Once your boat has entered its appointed area, it is forbidden to exit, nor will it be permitted to put people ashore. Boat captains have to keep a complete list of passengers for 14 days. Also, wear your mask.
There are regulations for people booking space along the fondamentas to watch the fireworks, or to scarf their dinner, but I’m not going to go into all that. If you’ve booked a space, you already have the rules. If you haven’t booked, you’d better hop to. Preference is being given to Venetians, it says here.
Lino and I will not be there; it’s been years since we decided we couldn’t stand the mayhem of the motorboats in the dark, with their drunk drivers. We might walk up to the fondamenta dei Sette Martiri (where I didn’t see any signs of assigned places) if it’s not too crazy.
THE BIG SHIPS: Ship-haters rejoice: As of August 1, the biggest ships will no longer be permitted to pass through the city. These ships are defined as having at least one of the following characteristics: Gross tonnage above 25,000 tons; hull at the waterline longer than 180 meters; height of ship more than 35 meters, excluding ships that are motor- and sail-driven; use of fuel in maneuvering that has a percentage of sulfur equal or superior to 0.1 per cent. Like any other cargo vessel, the big cruise ships will be routed from Malamocco to Porto Marghera, one of many solutions that have been discussed since dinosaurs roamed the earth. But this is just a stopgap. The real solution is the offshore port, and that’s not happening tomorrow.
Seeing that neither Porto Marghera nor anywhere else will be ready this year, the MSC Orchestra or Magnifica and Costa Deliziosa (the only big ships on the dance card this summer) will be departing, respectively, from Monfalcone and Trieste, up along the northern Adriatic coast. Passengers arriving in Venice will be swabbed or otherwise health-checked at the Venice Maritime area, then loaded on buses and driven a few hours to their ships. So much for the thrill of cruising from Venice.
The offshore port project is going to take some time. Phase One, send in your proposals by December 31, 2021. Make sure your design can accommodate modern container ships as well as the biggest cruise ships, and make sure the port will be safe in stormy seas because there won’t be any lagoon to protect you anymore. Phase Two, five experts evaluate the proposals. Phase Three, choose the winner. That decision will be made by June 30, 2023, if all goes as planned. That’s a pretty big “if,” I feel compelled to add.
Seeing that creating the offshore port will take at least five to six years, Porto Marghera will have to be modified fairly quickly. Building the new passenger terminal there, deepening the channels and revising the current industrial docks will cost 157 million euros — a hefty sum for a temporary set-up. Then again, “temporary” has a flexible meaning here. The Accademia Bridge was built in 37 days in 1933 as a temporary structure while proposals for the real bridge were to be evaluated, and it’s still there.
I have the impression that the sudden decision on dealing with the big ships is linked somehow to the fact that UNESCO recently decided to designate the water entrance to Venice — Bacino of San Marco, Canale of San Marco and the Giudecca Canal a national monument. This is surprising in that UNESCO, when it listed Venice as a World Heritage Site in 1987, specifically included the lagoon. You wouldn’t know that by the savaging of the environment that has gone on since then, but anyway, I’d have considered the Bacino, etc. as part of the lagoon. Now it’s a national monument. Okay then.
Spare a thought, though, for the humans — 1,260 direct workers and 4,000 indirect workers — involved in what will be a radical restructuring of the whole shipping enterprise here. Many are fearing for their jobs.
Almost no workers believed that this decree would come so fast, and right in the middle of the season. The maritime agencies are also worried. Every shipping company is required by law to engage a maritime agency, but, says Michele Gallo, head of two agencies, “You can’t even think of having the same ships as before coming to the docks at Porto Marghera, using the same places as the commercial ships. This is a devastating decree.” Organizing the entry, passage and departure of so many ships through the inlet at Malamocco and along the Petroleum Canal (Canale dei Petroli) is going to be a job worthy of an air traffic controller.
The 46-year-old Venetian businessman, well-known and loved by many, has been in prison in Sudan for three months. He is the owner of a company that produces electric transformers that has been doing business in Sudan for years. He has been accused by a Sudanese company of fraud, but the situation is an utter tangle of claims and characters. However, the photograph of the cell in which he was kept for two months with 30 other men, at temperatures of 114 degrees F., was all too comprehensible. Yes, the Italian government has attempted to intervene; yes, money has been paid, but turns out someone wants still more.
Now he is on house arrest in a Sudanese hotel, awaiting the next hearing (August 9) in the string of court appearances that may finally resolve the problem. He has already been absolved of two accusations, but it’s hard to know who wants what at this point. Of course money is at the core of this. Marco is well-known in the Venetian world of sport — Venetian rowing, for one thing, as well as rugby. As it happens, Lino has known him since he (Marco) was a boy. Also, Lino taught his mother how to row.
MOSE:
Mose worked last winter (except for one time), so you might think all is well? You would think wrong. I’m starting to dread the winter again.
The plan was to complete all the work by June 30, and declare the project finished on December 31, 2021. But that timetable is now in tatters for various reasons, primarily money problems (as always). The refusal of some suppliers to continue without payment also slowed things down, and the work was officially suspended yesterday, July 16, even though it actually had been stopped for three months already.
Without regular tests, without personnel from the companies involved, without some degree of ongoing maintenance, it’s not certain the gates will even rise when needed. Broken elements haven’t been replaced, parts are deteriorating because there is still no air conditioning in the underground gallery. There is severe corrosion that has been reported for years, to the frames of the underwater tensioners as well as the hinges of the gates. Encrustation of barnacles and other crud will certainly make the gates heavier. The gates at San Nicolo’ have been underwater for eight years now.
Bids have been solicited for a maintenance program budgeted at 64 million euros, even though some estimates maintain that at least 100 million euros will be needed for this every year. (Personal note: Lino has never batted an eye at the titanic construction costs. His refrain has always been simply “And the cost of the maintenance?”)
A Venetian deputy in Parliament, Orietta Vanin, has written to Enrico Giovannini, the Minister of Public Works, saying “A plan is missing for the launch of the work and the completion of the machinery. When is Mose going to be tested? What is the risk to the city in view of autumn? At what point are the interventions for the security of the Piazza San Marco? We’ve asked several times but have never had a response.”
TOURISM:
The infamous hordes are not yet swarming the streets; tourists there are, many of them still day-trippers, but not insupportable numbers, by any means. We could probably use a good horde or two right now. Happily for everyone, American travelers are finally permitted to fly to Venice (I presume also to the rest of Italy). Delta Airlines has non-stop flights from Atlanta and New York, and the other day 200 passengers from the USA disembarked to great, if silent, applause. That’s just a drop, however, as the Venice airport is currently handling 15,000 “passages” a day, a mere third of their daily pre-pandemic total.
Still, no coherent plans for managing the eventual masses have yet been proposed. The secretary of the artisans’ association, Gianni De Cecchi, says “The pandemic has passed in vain.” So stand by for the usual complaints, protests, and laments to come forth again. Probably toward the end of next summer, if forecasts can be trusted. Stay tuned.
Redentore: the shore report
After all the mutterings on and about the eve of the big feast day (the eve, as you know, being at least as big as the day itself), here is how it all came out. I’ve waited a few days because I needed to let all the post-festa hot air, super-heated words, pumice dust, and floating cinders all burn out from the assorted arguments about what did and didn’t happen.
Here goes:
Good:
The wind dropped. The rain did not fall. There were something like 90,000 spectators/participants that evening, according to the Comune. (The firemen and the gondoliers at the Molo at Piazza San Marco estimated many fewer.) Whatever the number, I guess that’s good — anyway, people didn’t stay home in front of the TV eating soggy pizza.
Also good, though not a Good Sign: We didn’t go out in a boat, a decision we spent all evening congratulating ourselves on having made. We’d have been rammed to splinters, then sunk. And anyway, it wouldn’t have been any fun to be in a small wooden boat in the midst of the masses of floating migrating mammoths. We also discovered that being on shore meant you could see lots of other things going on, which was more diverting than settling for what you can see from a boat tied to a piling for hours on end.
Not so good:
We didn’t go out in a boat. Like almost everybody else who has hung on to the Old Way, who even accepted the gracious concession a few years ago of a tiny patch of water dedicated to boats with oars where we could feel safe, we finally faced the fact that a motorless boat is a suicide boat. I don’t believe anyone went out in a craft powered by fewer than 40 horses.
There were very few topomotori and pescherecci, as far as I could see and rumor can report. The Gazzettino said that there were estimates of some 800 fewer boats than usual. In fact, they were almost completely absent. That’s a lot of no-shows.This has been interpreted as precisely the result desired by….. I don’t know who. “They.” “They don’t want Venetians anymore.” “They only want tourists who come and spend money.”
The waterfront which has customarily been left free for the pescherecci to tie up to was occupied by yachts.
In any case, the threats from the Capitaneria di Porto evidently had a powerful effect. Only 6-10 topomotori braved the hazardous waters of the Bacino supposed mined with fines.
I add, for the record, that the newspaper states that the Comune had repeatedly denied that there were going to be massive document-checks — the mayor says it was a mysterious rumor accumulated via the internet that created all the tsuris. But the mayor also made clear that the Comune wasn’t in charge of the waters patrolled by the Capitaneria. This is akin to saying “I didn’t forbid you to get married, but I’m not a Justice of the Peace.” The mayor also denied that the threat of fines had any effect on the decision of people to come in topi or fishing boats. Next he’ll be telling us that gravity isn’t really what keeps everything stuck to the surface of the earth.
The sub-mayor for Tourism cheerfully said the absence of boats was probably due to the discouraging weather forecast, and that the absence of the working boats (full of Venetian families, I note) made the departure of smaller boats safer. My own experience of nearly 20 years out on the tumultuous waters of the Bacino after the last firework fades leads me to doubt this. The most hazardous boats aren’t the topomotori, but the big shiny craft loaded with people from the hinterland. It was noted that most of these craft were visibly overloaded, but nobody in uniform pulled up to demand to see their license and registration and lifejackets and safety flares and on and on and on.
Here is a summary of the no-working-boats-or-you’ll-be-fined situation. A mere 40 penalties were imposed, and that was for “viability violations,” which I take to mean parking in the middle of the road, so to speak.
The mayor said “The campaign spread (about the checking of working boats) turned out to be a boomerang. I myself denied many times any intention to turn the screws on the boats during the festa, but they preferred not to listen and now everybody can see who was right and who was wrong.”
“We took the warning seriously,” said Giovanni Grandesso, representing the working boats that belong to the artisans’ association. “The people were afraid. But what we were supposed to do? The vigili (local police) told us this in the presence of the sub-mayor for waterborne traffic. If this is said in an official meeting and the sub-mayor keeps quiet, what were we supposed to do? They also said, ‘You know perfectly well you’re not allowed to carry people.’ And this made us think. We then asked for a meeting with the office of the sub-mayor, but it was all too late. All that was needed was to have clarified this at the beginning — it’s too easy to tell us now that we misunderstood.”
As you see, all the fireworks don’t explode in the sky.
And speaking of fireworks:
The fireworks: Quantity: The show was curtailed from 45 minutes to 32. (Lest we might be tempted to forget that “no ghe xe schei.”)
The fireworks: Quality: What we saw was evidently culled from the “factory seconds,” “slightly defective,” “previously owned” barrel because they were possibly the most boring pyrotechnics I’ve ever seen. I am a fireworks fanatic, so it actually takes very little to please me. But these were so generic, so predictable, so perfunctory that even ten minutes of stale rocketry seemed like 45. Lino and I (we discovered later) were both standing there thinking, “Can we go home now?” Of course we could have gone home, but we each thought the other wanted to stay, so we said nothing in order to be good sports. That shows how much difference it made for me to learn to speak Italian: None. You might know 15,000 words and be able to conjugate every verb down to the remote past imperfect, but in order to communicate you’ve got to actually say something.
Terrifyingly Not Good: While everybody was getting themselves worked into a lather about what could happen to somebody out there in a boat, nobody gave any thought to what could happen to somebody on a packed-solid vaporetto dock at 1:30 in the morning.
Because the dock was mobbed — and mobs tend to think in big simple terms like “Me! First! Now!” and not in terms like “Watch your step” or “After you, my dear Alphonse” — somebody almost got crushed between the arriving vaporetto and the dock.
As the vaporetto (also overloaded with people thinking in big simple terms) began to pull up to the dock to tie up and let people on and off, the heavy waves caused by the departing mammoths in the darkness made the equally heavy and bulky vehicle leap and plunge. The mob on the dock began to push forward get nearer the edge to be ready to get on (“Me! First!”). The girl slipped and fell between the dock and the boat.
She managed to grab onto the edge, thanks to her backpack snagging on something on the way down, so she didn’t fall completely in the water. It’s not clear how the vaporetto managed to avoid performing one of its famous plunges against her, the kind that even on a normal day make the dock shake and the metal of the boat’s hull reverberate.
Somehow she got dragged up and out before she was reduced to kindling. The ambulance took her to the hospital, where the doctors stated that she’d been “miracled,” as the Italian verb so neatly puts it. If the waves had been bigger she’d have had at least a shattered pelvis.
Solution: Station pontonieri on every dock all night. These are the individuals at work on certain busy docks who keep the chain stretched that prevents the public from moving toward the boat till it’s stopped and the passengers have gotten off. The fact that evidently human instinct doesn’t lead you naturally toward this behavior means that a person has to be paid to stand directly in your way with a chain. But it works.
My conclusion, based on nothing remotely resembling scientific calculations, is that the truly Venetian festa has already begun to move ashore. It’s a hell of a note, but it was more fun to be with the families and dogs on the street than out on the water surrounded by drunken disco dancing outlanders. The mayor would probably disagree.
America’s Cup hits Venice
I’ve noticed that there are people who don’t like to change their minds, but I do. It generally means I’ve learned something. Here follows my most recent advance.
For the past two weeks or so, there were intermittent and increasing signs of the arrival of a Very Big Time sailing race to be held last weekend: Catamarans battling it out for a title belonging to something known as the World Series of the America’s Cup. There were to be races in the Adriatic just off the Lido, and races in the Bacino of San Marco. The idea of a boat race in what amounts to the center of downtown struck me as extremely strange, possibly not appropriate, probably not very successful. This reaction wasn’t the result of actual thought, just the force of habit.
Essentially, it sounded like it was going to be Just Another Thing. Specifically, just another of those many things which exploit Venice as a stage set, but which have nothing to do with the city and which only create problems for everybody.
Wrong again.
Yes, I had observed intriguing new elements, such as the various crews walking around the neighborhood (the boats were kept in the Arsenal). These were men of various sizes who seemed to have been hewn from oak: All young, all strong, all superbly confident. I don’t mean confident of winning, I mean confident of existing.
It was also announced, in what seemed to me to be a cute sort of “go team” spirit, that a prize would be awarded to the shop on via Garibaldi which was deemed to have created the most imaginative window display with a nautical theme.
That’s as far as I’d gone with tuning into this event.
Then, on my way home Friday afternoon about 5:00, tired and cranky, I found myself at San Marco, stuck because the vaporettos had been suspended because of the races. First reaction: Oh swell.
Second reaction: My God, that’s a lot of helicopter racket from overhead (there were four). As I began my inevitable walk home, plod plod, I looked out at the water. Then I stopped.
Maybe those people on dark Kentucky back roads who find themselves in front of a UFO feel something like what I felt. Because the Bacino had suddenly been transformed from its usual condition of resembling the Wal-Mart parking lot on the last Saturday before school starts into an arena that could only be described as epic.
The Bacino had been taken over by majestic beings skimming with a speed and precision that made it hard to believe they were even touching the water.
It was thrilling.
On your average day/week/era, Venice makes it far too clear that however much it wants to bill itself as a world-class city (credible only because it once was), today it’s essentially a small town in Ohio. And nothing could have made this clearer than to suddenly find the city in the throes of what was in fact a truly world-class event.
I don’t especially care about catamarans and I don’t spend much energy on the America’s Cup. Of course I’m vastly proud of it and know that it’s a huge deal, but I suppose if everybody said, “oh well, let’s not do this anymore,” it wouldn’t have much effect on the fate of the world.
But this was beyond dazzling. The sheer magnitude and splendor of these creations, the diabolical skill of their creators and their sailors (not to mention their owners), the stunning effect of seeing something this important here in little old Venice — I literally stopped in my tracks. And beyond the beauty and strangeness and scope of it all, behind the roaring of the helicopters, you could also hear the roar of the cataract of money which had created all this, which, in a strange way, also added to its fascination. It was like standing under an Iguazu Falls of dollars. Euros. South Korean wons.
It was too much. Venice, which spends most of its time plinking out the same drab little melodies (“We have no money, there are too many tourists, we hate/love/hate/love the big cruise ships, we don’t know what to do about anything…….”) was suddenly on center stage in the middle of the Ride of the Valkyries.
And she pulled it off. There were thousands and thousands of spectators for the finals over the weekend, the hotels were full, and the weather exceptional (except for Sunday afternoon, when the wind wore out). All told, a spectacular success. In fact, it may have been the first time that I glimpsed some sliver of the sheer magnificence which used to be the order of the day here, the grandeur which overwhelmed every visitor who ever got within eyeshot of the place.
That’s where my mind changed. Ideas here, however good and even expensive they may be, are usually left only partially realized, or fully realized and then abandoned, or briefly put aside and then forgotten.
But this was brilliant. Which brought to mind my high school choir director. The first time we managed to do something exactly the way he wanted, he’d stop. “Now you’re in trouble,” he’d say. “Because now I know you can do it.”
Venice, over to you.
PS: Many photographs will be coming as soon as a technical seizure is resolved.
By the way, all this increased traffic will make it even more important to keep the aforementioned channel dredged. However, the deeper the channel, the faster the tide enters and exits, and already this action removes millions of cubic meters of sediment from the lagoon every year. Everyone knows that the Canale dei Petroli has thus caused incalculable damage to the lagoon and its extraordinary ecosystems. Ironic that UNESCO decided to designate part of the lagoon as a national monument with the notion of protecting it, but they seem not to have taken into account the effect so much extra traffic will have in a channel that essentially behaves as if it were a water vacuum sucking the soil from the lagoon.
FREE MARCO ZENNARO: