Giancarlo Galan | Venice: I am not making this up

October 28, 2015 4 Comments

A sailor awaits the sunset signal to lower the flag on the sail-training ship "Palinuro." — A sailor awaits the sunset signal to lower the flag on the sail-training ship “Palinuro.” This has no relation to anything that follows, it’s just here to remind us of why we love Venice.

As has become hugely evident, I am temporarily (I trust) slowing down on not making things up.

I discover that it isn’t easy to find new topics that interest me (“new” and “interest” don’t always coincide). Two decades into my life here, a certain amount of repetition in daily or annual events can make it difficult to whip up enthusiasm to address them again.

Also, as I may have hinted not long ago, I am somewhat worn down by the relentless stream of bad, crazy, incomprehensible, infuriating news that steamrolls over the city every day, and if it depresses me to read these stories, it would depress me even more to write about them. I used to find it sort of entertaining, and imagined that examining the entrails of Venetian life could be interesting to people who don’t live here but who care about the city. Examining entrails used to be one way of predicting the future, and the technique still works extremely well — but the future I glimpse is even less appealing than the entrails themselves. (Full disclosure: I happen to like tripe, which is prepared in various ways here. But I’m not sure if tripe qualifies as entrails.) End of metaphor.

There are the infinite variations on the theme of corruption. If I wanted to focus on that, I’d have to change the name of my blog — there’s just too much material. It appears that just about the only person who hasn’t been stealing money from the city, the region, the nation, her employer (which I don’t have, but that’s a detail), or her clients and customers or suppliers, is me. When a general of the Guardia di Finanza AND a platoon of his troops are found with their hands plunged deeply, up to the shoulder, into the municipal pot, it does make you wonder what this world is coming to.

But what now fascinates me is the ever-increasing number of projects that are living demonstrations of a phenomenon we all know too well and for which the Germans have even invented a word: Verschlimmbesserung, a supposed improvement that makes things worse.

Beauty is the keyword here. Don't forget it. — Beauty is the keyword here. Keep this at the forefront of your brain.

These are projects devised by professionals, remember, but perhaps being a professional is becoming a handicap, because so many seem to lose their way in their professional brain-thickets and forget the simplest, common-sense details that are obvious to any user — amateurs! — of their projects.

The two most recent examples, and then I’m finished for today:

The tram. I’ve already mentioned the hideous installation at its terminus at Piazzale Roma. But you don’t have to look at it, so let’s consider that issue settled. What I’m talking about are the almost daily discoveries of inexplicably stupid mistakes. I define a mistake as “inexplicable” if it was performed by a professional.

From the day of fanfare in which the tram made its maiden voyage from the mainland to Venice, there have been technical problems (losing electrical power, often, for assorted reasons; a nexus where the tracks just didn’t switch the way they were supposed to, etc.). But these, theoretically, can be fixed.

But the other day a car broke down on the bridge from the mainland to Venice, thereby blocking all traffic behind it (normal! there’s no breakdown lane!) including the tram (wait — what?). Yes, the tram’s track was installed in the same lane as the wheeled traffic. A normal old bus can just groan, downshift, and inch around a stalled car or truck. The tram can only sit there until it’s all cleared up. The bridge is 4 km/2.5 miles long, and all the passengers had to pile out and walk the rest of the way to Venice, thereby easily making their healthy daily quota of 10,000 steps. And making hash of their morning schedule, doctor appointments, business meetings, Scout jamborees, whatever was on.

These are the two lanes available for wheeled vehicles to reach the city (or depart from it). The concrete center barrier is moveable, so part of the excellent experiment is going to be shifting it to make a temporary extra lane when needed. Thereby reducing the other side to just one lane. — These are the two lanes available for wheeled vehicles to reach the city (or in this case, depart from it). The concrete center barrier is moveable, so part of the excellent experiment will be to see if shifting the center barrier to create a temporary extra lane when needed will work out, even though even I, sitting at my desk, realize that doing so will thereby reduce the other side to just one lane. Creating a problem by solving another — hasn’t that already been tried? (Photo: Davide Dalla Mora, Facebook.)

Never fear — an excellent experiment will begin in November. For three months (note: containing all the high-traffic holidays), the tram lane will be reserved only for public-service vehicles, which I suppose are considered less prone to breaking down. Did I mention there is no breakdown lane? The bridge has only two lanes in each direction, therefore creating a temporary one by moving into space on the opposite side will crush all the private vehicles into one lane.

If that doesn’t sound especially shudderworthy, consider that about 1,700 vehicles per hour cross the bridge. In 2014 there were 162 cases of stalled vehicles — one every other day, essentially.

So bring on the tram! And bring your hiking boots and Nordic-walking sticks! And just think: You still have to pay for a ticket. The Casino says people aren’t gambling so much anymore, but they’re obviously not thinking of the thousands of people who play Tram Roulette on the bridge every day.

I don’t think an advanced degree in engineering is necessary to help you understand how to keep people’s feet dry getting from the platform to the temporary walkways (neatly stacked in the background). Or maybe it is. All they needed to do was to ask Mr. Canestrelli before it was too late.

Let’s move on to the Rialto area.

The subject is the platforms to which the vaporetto docks are attached. The past few months have seen a mammoth undertaking to build new ones, bigger ones, more efficient ones.

But now that high water has come calling, it has been discovered that these improvements have un-improved the necessary space to set up the temporary walkways. I have disembarked at Rialto when there was very high water, and without the walkways I’d have had water up to and even past my knees. Walkways at Rialto are not some crazy new idea.

And yet the new platforms haven’t taken the walkways into account, and it was suddenly discovered (cue sound of sloshing water) that the spaces involved don’t work anymore. The temporary walkways can’t reach all the way to the fixed platform, so there will be a gap between the platform and the walkway which will be full of water.

Unhappily, the large brains designing the new docks didn’t think to contact anybody, least of all the steadfast but shot-riddled Paolo Canestrelli, director of the Tide Center, to discuss anything so trivial as height of water, need to calculate for.

To raise the fixed platforms at this point will require another huge undertaking. Just think, everyone had so enjoyed the big inauguration ceremony.

Much of the most beautiful city in the world is beginning to resemble those municipal offices where the employees have to adapt by attaching things with rubber bands, hand-writing signs and labels with Sharpie pens, sticky-notes everywhere. Just make it work somehow.

But now I’m going to make you laugh. It’s only fair. I mean, I laughed, even though on paper (this is paper) it isn’t so funny.

Giancarlo Galan, the former president of the Veneto Region, has been sucked deeply into the MOSE corruption scandal, the details of which will be oozing out even after the trumpet call to the Last Judgment. Among other things, he was convicted of having taken 15,000,000 euros in bribes.

He has done some token jail time (he was sentenced to two years and ten months, of which he spent only 78 days in prison and much of the rest at home in his luxurious villa on the mainland). And the state confiscated this villa, worth some 2 1/2 million euros, to pay off part of his debt. The rules said he had to vacate the premises and leave it in habitable condition.

He did vacate the premises, but the next people to go in discovered that there were no more bathrooms. Workmen, presumably not on their own initiative, had torn out all the radiators, toilets, bidets, and sinks in the place.

So now he has added to his list of misdeeds the formal accusation of having damaged state property. And of not having honored the agreement to leave the villa in useable condition.

His lawyer immediately said that this had been an “error,” and of course everything is going to be put back, right away. How anyone could make such an error baffles and perplexes me.

You see? I don’t have to make anything up. It’s all right there in front of me.

One just keeps on making the best of things. — One just keeps making the best of things.

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

On June 4, the dam broke.

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

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

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

The MOSE logo is very clever.

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

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

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

Day 1: “I didn’t take even one euro.”

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

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

Back to Orsoni.

Day 4: “I’m not resigning.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relentless brilliance

MOSE: Worse than acqua alta