barene | Venice: I am not making this up

Motondoso, Venetian History, Venetian Problems

get to know the mud

March 14, 2025 12 Comments

In the canals, too much mud can be a problem, but one doesn’t see it until the extreme low tides of mid-winter. When anyone asks me how deep are the canals, I usually ask “You mean at high tide? Or low tide?” The height of the water changes, but over time so does the height of the mud.

You could call it the lagoon’s base layer. There are places where there’s too much mud, mainly in the canals; it accumulates and creates problems for boats when the tide is low and, equally important, problems for buildings whose drains it has blocked, and so we have to take it away.

But there is an equal and opposite problem of there not being enough mud in places around the lagoon, where dredging has been heavy or, more frequently, where the motondoso (waves from motorboats) has loosened the soil, and the tide and waves have washed it out to sea. Waves that demolish the wetland marshes (barene) or, on the other hand, fill up channels, have been known for years to be wrecking the lagoon’s wrinkly underwater shape, smoothing it out and slowly turning it into a sort of bay of the sea. Bays of the sea are an entirely different ecosystem from lagoons, but no matter! Motors are indispensable for keeping the city going, and the lagoon is just going to have to suck up (so to speak) the consequences.

At water-level you may notice only water, but the lagoon is full of mud.

The 17th-century Venetians knew the lagoon dynamics intimately. Their survival depended on it. Fears of the lagoon silting up from the several rivers that flowed into it led them to an epic undertaking: From 1600-1604 they cut the river Po to divert it southward into the Adriatic.

In 1993 it was decided to redistribute the quantities of mud in the city and lagoon: Simple, logical, effective, positive. Dredging proceeded and the mud was deposited in various locations where it was useful, or at least not problematic. In fact, moving mud around is far from a recent phenomenon — it’s been done many times over the centuries resulting in consolidations, expansions, and entire new islands. This assortment of maps showing the Morphological Evolution of the Lagoon of Venice from the XVI Century till today is very interesting. In the 20th century Tronchetto and Sacca Sessola, to name only two, rose from the lagoon bottom created with dredgings.

And so, in the fullness of time, the dredges were at work outside our door in 2021, and they were at it again just two months ago. All seemed to be going well, but suddenly we read that things have taken an unexpected turn. The mud is unusable!

The dredger the first day of work thought it was a good idea to tie his behemoth to one of our little pilings to resist the weight of the mud he’s pulling up. He was wrong. But you can appreciate something about the mud here: It’s tenacious. Once it grabs onto something, it really doesn’t intend to let go. This went on for hours, the modest pole yanked sideways, as you can see; it simply couldn’t be dislodged, although it’s now a bit shaky. The next day he moored the monster to the metal ring on the street, and we’re trying to help our piling begin to trust people again.

The headlines have been blunt: “Unusable muds, the lagoon in crisis, the dredging has been stopped in the lagoon.” “The new Protocollo of 2023 for the sediments dug in the canals doesn’t work anymore because the parameters of ecotoxicity are too rigid.” “First they were considered clean and good for reconstructing the barene. But no more: Now there’s a risk of blocking also the dredging of the most polluted.”

This problem has come up literally in mid-dredge. It’s a little awkward to discover that the Protocollo of 2023 is invalid when the barges are full of mud, so now what? Is there a Plan B? “Strictly speaking, we don’t have one,” to quote CIA operative Gust Avrokotos in the film “Charlie Wilson’s War.” “But we’re working on it.”

So what changed all of a sudden? It’s that, as the headline noted, the standards are suddenly stricter as to what mud is classified as “ecotoxic” (either biological or chemical) and therefore where it can be dumped. (Don’t write in, I know that everything is chemical, looking at the universe. We’re roughly distinguishing here between chromium and E. coli.)

Nobody’s surprised to hear that there are toxic substances in the lagoon — just look at the Industrial Zone shoreline and draw your own conclusions. A few years ago the University of Padova and Ca’ Foscari in Venice studied some mollusks taken from the channel bordering the mainland. Researchers found that the bivalves contained a quantity of poisonous substances 120 times higher than in the rest of the lagoon.

So here we are. Where will the mud go?

Men used to do this with shovels. Not underwater, of course.

All muds are not created equal. Category A, the cleanest kind, is safe to put under the water, so it can be used “nourish” the shrinking barene. Other muds, the more toxic Category B and C, can’t be put back into the lagoon, no matter how worthy the reasons, and have to be banished to the Tresse island. And God forbid all these muds should become mixed together. Burning the mud is an interesting proposal, but it’s hard to agree on where to put the ash.

Also, the Tresse at the moment is running out of space. There have already been discussions about enlarging it, but quantity and quality, as often happens, are in conflict. Decisions lag. Bureaucratic, legal, logistical issues keep bumping into each other. Cost must be in there too, somewhere. The Morphological Plan of the lagoon was shot down in 2022 and nothing has been heard of it since.

The Isola delle Tresse began in the 1930’s as Storage Tanks island, and was expanded in 1993 with a million cubic meters of mud and other material dredged for the benefit of the Port of Venice. This raised the island by nine meters (30 feet) and doubled it in size. Now it has been proposed to deposit as much as an additional four million cubic meters of mud, which would raise the island as high as 13 meters (43 feet). May I take just a moment to recall that when UNESCO designated Venice as a World Heritage Site in 1987 it also included the lagoon? Toxic mud doesn’t sound very World Heritage Sitey.

So, back to the dredging at hand: After weeks of hardy gouging and hauling, the mud’s permission to land, so to speak, has been revoked. The Department of You Should Have Seen This Coming isn’t answering its phone.

The barene (semi-solid mud) are beautiful and crucial to the whole ecosystem. But *motondoso*, or waves caused by the anarchy of motorboats, slices away at their soft soil. This goes on all year long, but especially in the summer. Note the distance between the wooden piling and the islet. They used to be much closer together. Shrinking barene aren’t good for the health of the lagoon as a whole.

Of course the plant roots help stabilize the soil, but they only go down so far. Soon the upper layer will collapse and slide into the water, filling up the channel. We need the barene and we also need the channels, but they do not play well together. Eventually there will be too much mud in the channel, and not enough island, and dredging will be called for. And perhaps expansion afterward. Not literally inconceivable.

To resist the waves gnawing at the barene, various defenses have been tried. Above is somebody’s idea of a breakwater. The barena is clearly not reacting as the planners intended. You can see here why it was hoped that the latest batches of dredged mud could enlarge shrinking bits of land, because more and/or larger barene would be a great thing for the ecosystem. Even if you don’t care about the ecosystem — I don’t judge — more barene would serve as barriers to slow the incoming tide, the way they always did before motondoso began to tear them apart.

This construction is not destined to last long; the team behind this project seems not to have observed what happens to wooden pilings in the water.

The lagoon loses 600,000 cubic meters of sediments every year, leaving an increasing wasteland behind. You can easily see the difference between the lagoon north of Malamocco (divided by the Canale dei Petroli, about which more below), and the southern lagoon. If too much mud in one place is a problem, too little mud in another isn’t any better. Fewer barene and fewer channels mean the water can rampage around and carry even more mud away with the tide, or deposit it unhelpfully elsewhere.

1901. We see lots of squiggly channels back then (which, like the barene, slowed down the tide, and the dislodging of sediments). You also see that the shoreline was squishier and more ragged, providing more space for the water to come and go, moving more slowly in the process. But too many channels were doomed, like the little one circled in red above.

1932. Look at the little channel (*ghebo*, in Venetian) circled in red again. You see that natural processes have caused it to begin to fill in, but it was still in good shape at least ten years later because Lino remembers it well. His father would take him out fishing in their little boat and they rowed along this canal on their way to the best spot to “dig” for canestrelli, or little lagoon scallops (*Aequipecten opercularis*). Note: The different colors indicate varying depths of the water. You’ll see that change over the decades too.

In the Thirties the Industrial Zone was being built; for Venice’s post-war economy it seemed like the greatest plan ever, and in many ways it was. In their great days (now past), the chemical refineries here were the largest in Italy. Oil and chemical industries require raw materials, and those require ships, and ships require reliable channels for passage. That broad, curving channel marked in yellow on the map above that enters the lagoon from Malamocco does not look like anything a big ship would want to navigate, and of course ships also need a waterway to reach the mainland port area. And so the Canale dei Petroli (“petroleum canal,” in honor of the expected tankers) was planned.

1970. The triumph of the shipping. The broad, curvy yellow channel (which also slowed the force of the tide) was bypassed in 1964-1968 by the digging of the channel that is straight as an airport runway: The Canale dei Petroli. The resulting tons of mud went to the shoreline, reshaping it by the formation of three longish islands (generically called *casse di* *colmata*) that were created along the flank of the mainland. They were intended as the land for the Third Industrial Zone, which was never built. Left to their own devices, they’ve become a sort of oasis, especially for birds.

Dredging the Canale dei Petroli created a channel 18 meters (60 feet) deep, 15 km (9 miles) long and 200 meters (656 feet) wide. If you had wanted to suck the sediments out of the lagoon, you could hardly have done better. But the wakes of the cargo ships also stir up the sediments and they don’t all reach the sea. Result: More dredging is needed periodically as the channel proceeds to silt up. Further result: The tide entered faster and with more force than ever before, and before you could say “Worst flood in Venice’s history, November 4, 1966” the city went under. Venetians weren’t slow to see a connection between the canal and the flood, but what was done was done.

And this is more or less the situation today.

Moving mud means moving water. These maps were made in 2009, so the situation may well have changed yet again since then. Looking at you, effects of MOSE. (On the right panel: This map was assembled for study use of the Committee of Public Health of Venice, from the pages published on the site https://www.istitutoveneto.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/IDPagina/1. Credit and rights to this work belong to Diego Tiozzo Netti. The indications of the tidal flows are by Umberto Sartori.)

We’re looking at tide patterns, otherwise known as the hydrostatic equilibrium of the tides in the lagoon over many centuries.

LEFT PANEL: The solid red lines show the tidal pathway from the inlet at San Nicolo’. The solid green is the water entering from Malamocco (Alberoni). The thin blue line across the center of the lagoon emphasizes what we can see where the arrows meet, the point where the two incoming tides form the spartiacque, or “division of the waters.” The dotted red lines show tidal flow before the landfills created by the Austro-Hungarians (who left in 1866) and Fascists (1922-1943). The dotted green lines show the tide before the landfills made by the post-war “democratic-clientele governments.” The dotted dark-blue lines are the principal zones of sediment deposits, which makes sense considering the movement of the tides.

RIGHT PANEL: The pattern of the rising tide in 2009. The solid red line shows the pattern of the tide entering the lagoon from the inlet at San Nicolo’. The solid green line shows the tide entering from Malamocco (and, obviously, along the track of the Canale dei Petroli.) This graphic shows the effect of losing the mudbanks, natural channels and barene, smoothing out the lagoon bottom that used to be naturally uneven and knobbly.

I think the tides and the mud matter more to many other creatures than they do to mere humans. This barena that was built next to the Certosa island is a haven for flamingoes, Eurasian oystercatchers, egrets, herons, common shelducks, and the now-ubiquitous sacred ibis. And undoubtedly more that I haven’t discovered yet.

The ibis (*Threskiornis aethiopicus*) love the mud.

Snowy egrets (*Egretta thula*) don’t particularly care about mud, per se, but they like the easy fishing when the water is shallow.

Curlews (*Numenius americanis*) absolutely love the mud, digging up worms and other little submerged treats.

The plover (*Pluvialis squatarola*) is another huge fan of mud.

The oystercatcher (*Haematopus ostralegus*) is really beautiful, unless you’re an oyster, obviously. They also wade around looking for mussels and earthworms.

The grey heron (Ardea cinerea) is the apex wader. Evidently he’ll eat almost anything.

Here the lagoon bottom is fairly firm when it’s exposed at low tide, but if you walk into the water you will sink into squishy mud up to your ankles. Pause to admire the tracks of the birds who have traversed this territory, snacking to their heart’s content.

The important thing is that the lagoon bottom isn’t perfectly flat.

This is evidently the perfect place for a feast. The shore is littered with clam and oyster shells, the casings of creatures that need the mud to live.

The mud doesn’t just feed the birds. There are indeed oysters in the lagoon and they are delectable. Lino spent one Christmas Eve afternoon out in the lagoon and brought home a batch of these for our dinner. These three clutched together, though, seem to have formed a sort of Wagnerian pact or something.

We sometimes find scallops, even though they’re not as plentiful as when Lino was a boy and would go home with a bucketful.

That was a good day out — lots of different types of clams (and this isn’t all of them, by any means). They may be pondering how unmuddy the world has suddenly become.

Regard the mud. The waves from some passing boats clearly show that the mudbank is just below the surface.

You see water, I see mud. The surface is smoother where the water is shallower as the tide rises or falls. If you’re out rowing and you see this, you have only yourself to blame if you run aground. You were warned.

If you want a lagoon, you have to want mud. Otherwise you might just as well look at your bathtub.

Acqua Alta

Water? Oh, that again.

November 26, 2012 19 Comments

IMG_6768 aa — We’re looking to get more of this on Wednesday. Heigh-ho.

November 11, if you’ll cast your minds back, was a day with more than the usual high water. By “usual,” I don’t mean as in “happens every day” — I mean as in “doesn’t seem strange.”

The international press took a small recess from its daily barrage of stories of bombing, war and death and swerved its attention to acqua alta. Exciting stories about high water were hurriedly written by people whose brains were sending out sparks, like old Communist-era light switches.

As I sit here this evening, I can’t help noticing that 15 days have passed without a drop of water sneaking out of place. But that’s not interesting, so nobody reports on that. It’s more fun to treat each acqua alta as if it were the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse.

So here’s a bulletin: Another high water is forecast for Wednesday, which is more than likely because a large low-pressure system is bearing down on us, and a really strong scirocco will be blowing, and the moon will be full. (There are also thunderstorms thrown in, no extra charge.) If I can know this two days in advance, so can all the people out there who keen and ululate when their stuff gets wet.

But what is really on my mind about acqua alta isn’t how normal it is, how there have always been acquas alta, ever since there was a lagoon. I’m evaluating proportions.

The lagoon covers about 212 square miles. The city of Venice covers about three square miles. The lagoon has been here for 5,000 years. The city of Venice for about 1,500, give or take.

The city and the lagoon were both designated as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO in 1987, hence were considered worthy of the same attention and concern. Not to mention all those blue ribbons awarded the lagoon by the RAMSAR Convention on Wetlands.

Yet when the tide rises, suddenly the lagoon doesn’t matter anymore. Even people who think of themselves as lovers of nature and defenders of the environment seem to blank out on the fact that the lagoon is one of the most important wetlands in Europe; that it is one of the most important coastal ecosystems in the Mediterranean Basin, that it plays a crucial role in the life of aquatic birds all over Europe. That high tide might be normal; that the lagoon might matter as much as Venice. Nope. You get a foot of water on the ground and suddenly it’s all about the city. I think that’s wrong.

IMG_6473 aa — I really love acqua alta outside the city, where all the barene get to have a deep, luxurious soak for a few hours. It makes me feel good too.

I was thinking: What if we took an enormous batch of wilderness (say, Yellowstone National Park). Then we decided to put a city there. Why? Well, just because we decided to.

Then the wilderness starts to be bothersome to the people in that city. Therefore the wilderness has to be fixed so it won’t be so bothersome. We’ve got to cut back on bears, and on wolves, and on antelope; let’s get those pesky (fill in the blank here) under control. There are too many (fill in here), so let’s send them away. There is too much (fill in here) right where we want to (fill in here), so let’s fix that. We need more space to park cars. We need more electricity. And so on. Day by day all that world that was doing fine before we got there becomes more and more of a problem.

I am not romanticizing the past, nor am I proposing that we all get in the car and drive back to Eden. I know that the Venetians did plenty of jiggering with the lagoon in the olden days. But they were actually on the lagoon’s side. They understood it, they profited by it, they needed it. Their main concern wasn’t having too much water, but too little — they diverted entire rivers, including the Po, to prevent the lagoon from silting up. They liked the water.

Of course there were occasionally extreme acqua altas which caused extreme problems (such as ruining all the freshwater wells). But no Venetian of the Great Days would have proposed anything like MOSE — inconceivably vast, and expensive, and demonstrably destructive to the lagoon, and utterly irreversible. Anyone who damaged the lagoon, according to an old declaration, ought to be compared to someone who damaged the defensive walls of their city — an enemy of the state.

Conclusion: We’ve got a city where it really doesn’t belong, though we’re all really glad it’s here. But the lagoon, not to put too fine a point on it, is just as valuable, and as irreplaceable, as the city.

So I want everybody to just get off the lagoon’s case. I’m going to get the boots out, and then I’m going to bed.

Nature, Problems, Water

Acqua alta: some plusses and minuses

March 5, 2010 2 Comments

I realize it may sound strange to refer to there being “plusses” to acqua alta. Let me just say I don’t mean “plusses” in the sense of winning a large chunk of the lottery. But there are in fact some positive aspects to it.

The tide has dropped and left our street looking clean but feeling a little icky under our feet.

For instance, many Venetians have told me that acqua alta is a good thing because it washes the streets. This is true. Unfortunately, it also deposits a fine layer of silty slime. And while it does remove some of the dog poop, it also leaves detritus behind, so the general landscape isn’t much prettier than it was before the water rose. So, you know. We could go on like this, pro and con, all day.

But let me point out something that is hardly ever remarked on, in the many and varying accounts of this event: Acqua alta is actually a very good thing for the barene (the lagoon’s marshy wetland islets). If we can focus our minds briefly on something other than our own immediate convenience, it’s worth remembering that the lagoon has its own needs which are being met ever more rarely. So if it likes a good soak, I don’t see why it (by which I mean the whole ecosystem: microorganisms, plants, birds, etc.) can’t have it. Also — speaking selfishly — rowing when the water is high is magic.

A view of one of the nearly submerged barene in the northern lagoon, enjoying its bath almost as much as we're enjoying rowing around in a little Venetian sandolo.

Back in town, here are a few of the positive and less positive aspects of acqua alta, as I see them:

It doesn’t last long. Acqua alta is a tidal event. Unlike your raging rivers, it has a predictable time frame. The tide comes in for six hours, and goes out for six hours. True, sometimes it doesn’t go out as much as it should, but it eventually does go out. This coming and going means that it’s really bothersome for only about two hours.
It’s fairly tranquil. Inexorable, I grant you. Anyone who hasn’t watched the water rising near one’s front door (as we have) hasn’t fully grasped the fundamental meaning of “Time and tide wait for no man.” But the typical reports of high water in Venice make it sound as if Niagara Falls is pouring through your living-room window (CNN once referred to the “Adriatic bursting its banks.” Banks? Bursting? Are we suddenly in Holland?), when in reality it’s more like the bathtub slowly overflowing. Water in both cases, I agree, but not really the same.
It is predictable. True, raging rivers are also predictable, but some of the factors influencing acqua alta, such as the direction of the wind, can change. In addition, we get plenty of warning. If you don’t want to wait for the sirens to blare, just look at the barometer. (You do have a barometer, don’t you?) The lower the pressure, the higher the water. Check the sky: Full or new moon? There will be more pronounced highs and lows. Wind from the southeast? Not good; it will prevent (or slow) the regular retreat of the tide. We want a southwest wind (garbin) or better yet, northeast (bora). Those will settle acqua alta’s hash.

I’ll tell you what’s really annoying about acqua alta, apart from the distraught articles that keep getting published. It’s not that you have to put on boots for a few hours. It’s that:

When the tide goes out, it leaves all kinds of detritus
This is a modest example of a street not long after the tide has gone out. Clumps of eelgrass and bits of reeds are unavoidable and even not so ugly. It's the other stuff, pieces of plastic and styrofoam and general junk littering every wet street that are ugly. Unavoidable, fine. But there is no telling when, if ever, someone is going to sweep it up.

all over the sidewalks. Stuff that was just floating gently comes to rest on whatever pavement was just below it when the last inch retreated. Also, if anyone puts out a plastic bag of garbage the night before (yes, despite the warning sirens — dumb, I agree), that bag will be floating around the street and either settle on the pavement somewhere or drift out to sea. Neither case is highly desirable, though obviously the second is worse.

Once the water lifts your bag of garbage, it's not yours anymore. So hey, let it go wherever or however it wants to, who cares.

The garbage-people will be extremely slow in collecting the trash and/or — make that just “or,” they can’t seem to do both in the same day, even when the sun is shining — sweeping away the detritus, which means the streets look more or less like a slum. The garbage-people are slow because … I’ve tried to understand this… It may be because they are already so desperately overworked that high water adds an insuperable burden (you’re believing this, yes?), and because they are otherwise urgently and industriously occupied in setting up or taking down the temporary walkways over the high water (sometimes yes, mostly no). But they seem to get a special pass on their normal work when the acqua is even moderately alta. I can’t explain it, except to compare it to the mysterious sore throat which a kid who doesn’t want to go to school suddenly develops when it rains or snows.
Transport gets all scrambled up,
not only for taxis and barges but also some vaporettos and/or motoscafos. They have to change their normal routes because the high water prevents them from passing under certain bridges. There are alternatives by which they resolve this temporary dilemma, but it adds inconvenience to your own trajectory. As for heavy work boats and taxis, they either have to pick another route from A to B, or wait for the tide to turn. Tiresome, true, but hardly the stuff of calamity.
Your front door swells. If you have been so unfortunate as to have even an inch of water come inside (and for many people, this just means it has reached the edge of a staircase leading up to their apartment, not the apartment itself), and your front door is made of wood, it will soak up the water and then want to stick. It will take a while to dry out. Like, maybe weeks. You may end up having to sand it down some. Irritating. Not disastrous.

Acqua alta? We'll just put that lamppost up higher. This was one of the more clever responses to the big one of November 4, 1966. Also, you can see that the dogs love it.

I think if you’re going to live here you need to accept the fact that you’re sitting in the middle of a tidal lagoon. If that creates really too many problems, it might be good for you to consider moving. At least to the second floor, or maybe across the bridge to the mainland. No more worries about the tide coming ashore over there. All you have to deal with there, even as nearby as Mestre, are rivers and rain and totally inadequate storm drains. Which leads to flooded basements full of water that actually has little or no natural urge to recede. Fun.

No emotional articles about that, though. Who cares about a foot of water in somebody’s garage? Nobody — at least not until that somebody snaps a picture of a person rowing around the car or trailer.

Water

Holiday high water

December 30, 2009 1 Comment

The big present everybody got this year was acqua alta. It seems to have been reported fairly extensively in the world at large — not that people elsewhere don’t have enough drama of their own to keep up with — but there appears to be enough inherent drama, or diversion, in the phenomenon to attract attention.

The water comes up, the water goes down. Notice that the Piazza San Marco is not flat.

And they’re predicting more for today, New Year’s Eve, and also Day. Happily, these tides will peak at a decent hour, between 9:00 and 10:00 AM, so we can get some sleep. Thoughtful of them.

We spent most of Christmas Eve night listening, not for the reindeer hooves on the roof, but for the wind to veer around from the southeast to anywhere else it felt like going (or coming). But the forecasts (regular weather as well as high-water categories), which we consulted about every ten minutes, were implacable: There was going to be a strong scirocco (shih-RAWK-oh), and that meant that we were essentially destined to have “water on the ground,” as the Venetians call it in its more modest form.

The scirocco’s force pushes against the lagoon and prevents (or severely slows, but I’m going with prevents) the tide from going out in its normal way and even exacerbates the subsequent normal rising tide. The weather report specifies the direction and strength of the wind, but all we need to do is open the front door and listen: A strong scirocco causes heavy surf which in turn make a low, smooth roar, something like a distant jet preparing to taxi for take-off. And we can easily hear it, out there toward the left, where the Lido’s slim line of beach is doing what it can to keep the Adriatic where it belongs.

The tide doesn't come pouring over the battlements, but merely rises up through the storm drains. This little pool will just keep expanding till it covers the Piazza. After an hour or so, it will depart (tranquilly) by the same route. — The tide doesn't come pouring over the battlements, but merely rises up through the storm drains. This little pool will just keep expanding till it covers the Piazza. After an hour or so, it will depart by the same route.

The city’s Tide Center was predicting that the maximum height, at 4:30 AM, Christmas Morning, would be 150 cm [59 inches, or almost five feet] above average sea level. I will explain the intricacies of these measurements and their meaning in the real world on another occasion, though let me just note here that Venice does not sit precisely at sea level, but at various heights above it, so these numbers are not immediately as dramatic as they sound.

As the Tide Center explains on its website, “97 percent of the city is at about 100 cm above the average sea level. This means that the amount of water that could invade the city is always well below the maximum number predicted. For example, an exceptional tide of 140 cm corresponds in reality to about 60 cm [23 inches] in the lowest points of the city (Piazza San Marco).”

I don’t know how high our domicile happens to sit above the average sea level, but we knew that at 150 cm there would be water coming over our top step and into our house. It’s just a little hovel, true, but it’s not a boat, unfortunately — not that you want water coming into your boat, either. Venice is an excellent place in which to discover the meaning of “time and tide wait for no man.” You can slow an avalanche pretty much as easily as you can slow the tide.

We knew our tidal limit because we had water in the house once before. Yes, that was one memorable moment. On December 1, 2008, we stood there at our doorstep and watched the water slip under our door — and more to the point, under the temporary barrier we had paid 400 euros for. But it wouldn’t have made any difference because only God and, perhaps, the architect has any idea what’s under our dwelling because water began to enter through a fissure in the kitchen wall, and then up from an ungrouted joint between the slabs of stone paving between the bedroom and the hallway. I can tell you that if the tide wants to come up through your floor you better just let it.

Life goes on, and so does the bread delivery.

By the way, nothing was damaged, and when the tide turned about an hour and a half later, we got out our brooms and just swept it out to sea. Then I had to wash the floor with fresh water, but it needed it anyway. (I waxed it too — I was feeling like celebrating.) Then we put all the stuff that had been thrown onto the bed back under the bed, and life went on. No death, no damage, and as I say, the floor was clean. But you can’t count on high water being so relatively minor every time, and you really don’t want water, salt or otherwise, under your refrigerator and washing machine.

So at 2:00 AM on Christmas Eve (that is, Christmas morning) we got up and began preparing for the onslaught. No wailing, no hysterical vows to the Virgin; we just began to move whatever we could to higher ground (the bathroom) or on the bed. Last year, unbelieving to the last moment, we left everything where it was, which meant that Lino accomplished what ought to be an Olympic sport — the pulling-out-stuff-and-throwing-it-all-on-bed event — in mere seconds.

Then we took out candles and flashlights. I frittered away a little time sweeping and dusting, since I was going to have to do it anyway. We stared out the front door at the water. We listened.

But we were spared. Lino, whose instincts have been honed by an entire lifetime in boats in the lagoon, sensed when the reprieve was arriving — he could tell that the tide had slowed (“gotten tired,” as they put it) at about 3:30. The tide, in fact, did begin to turn then, earlier than predicted, and lower (143 cm) than predicted. The roar of the wind was diminishing. Christmas morning was beginning to look better than we’d supposed.

Not easy to explain "Just hold it till the tide goes down" to your dog.

Turns out that this event was the fourth highest tide since the city began to record them. It also turns out — for real weather geeks — that one reason it occurred was not so much the force of the scirocco but the fact that it was constant for quite a while. In any case, nothing you can do about that; whatever the wind is doing, you just have to go along with it.

But I have to repeat what I always repeat when high tide makes the news: Nobody dies. Nothing gets especially damaged (I put in “especially” so somebody won’t say “Well what about my bookcase?”). The shopowners had to spend the night keeping vigil in their shops, which earned a few lines in the general coverage, but I say: So? We were up too and we don’t have anything we’re planning to sell. Water damage, whether it’s genuine or just labeled as such, is a great way for merchants to get rid of stock that isn’t moving anyway. I did not make that up.

Another point to consider: Whenever the news reports refer to the city being “under water,” or “flooded,” or however they term it, they never say how much of the city, nor do they say to what depth (it isn’t uniform; does one inch count as “flooded”?). Anyway, in the case of an exceptional high water, such as our Christmas Eve marvel, 56 percent of the city has water on the ground. Sound bad? Let’s do this: “44 percent of the city did not have water.” I suddenly feel better. Why don’t the newspapers ever do that? Rhetorical question.

So on to the next tide, I say, and pull out your cameras. But I think somebody should make it illegal to bring your boat into the Piazza San Marco, and doubly illegal to float around so people can snap your picture. The tide comes in, the tide goes out, all it leaves is some muddy slime

The street outside our house is like every other street when the tide goes out: damp with a fine muddy film. — The street outside our house is like every other street when the tide goes out: Damp with a fine muddy film.

The receding water as usual leaves behind eelgrass and stuff.

and bits of garbage tangled up in clumps of eelgrass and busted bits of reeds floating in from the barene, the marshy wetlands. This has been going on since the ocean was invented. If you really can’t stand it, go live somewhere more tranquil — say, Haiti in hurricane season, or Bangladesh when the typhoons come through. Or even certain parts of Tuscany the past few days, where some rivers have had nervous breakdowns under the unusually torrential rain. It’s just a suggestion.

So I’m going to stick with wishing everyone happy holidays. I’ll be back with more bulletins.

Meaning no disrespect, but this lion distinctly looks as if he's checking how alta the acqua is going to be rising. I've seen people who look almost exactly like this, though without the wings.