Maybe you remember that in April there was an international wave of publicity/curiosity/dread/disbelief at the announcement that the city government — after nine years of dithering — was ready to start a 29-day program that imposed what was vulgarly called an “entrance ticket” on visitors to the city. (The city, attempting elegance, called it a five-euro “contribution for access.”) To lessen the unpleasant connotations, the plan was termed “experimental,” which means that no matter what happened, everything would be fine. That being the nature of experiments. You want to see what happens.
Many, including your correspondent, were perplexed as to what this project was intended to accomplish. Theories abounded. Mayor Luigi Brugnaro said it was to slow the flow of tourists that was swamping the city. I myself doubted it, because if five euros were a sufficient deterrent to a prospective day-tripper, that person should be spending those five euros on food and shelter instead of lollygagging around the most beautiful city in the world.
Also, the ticket was only required on weekends and holidays, from 8:00 AM – 4:30 PM. So the flow could easily shift to other days, and other times of day, too. Finally, there were so many exemptions almost nobody, it seemed, was going to have to pony up. Resident Venetians, Veneto citizens, anybody with a job here, tourists who overnight in hotels/apartments, temporary residents, children under 14, students, persons with disabilities, persons participating in a sports event, persons with medical appointments…You get the idea. My favorite: “Going to visit a friend.” You fill out the exemption request on the city’s website naming some Venetian you met once standing in line at the supermarket cash register, and you’re all set. Not saying it ever happened, I’m just saying it could.
Some more cynical people theorized that this was a cleverly mislabeled method for the city to make some money. Crass! The city denied this, of course, saying that the expenses of administering the program (and staff and other stuff) far outweighed any potential profit. I’m confused. Why is the city pretending to be so bashful about wanting money? We’re already completely accustomed to the tourist tax on overnight visitors. Why wouldn’t there be more fees popping up?
Interestingly, the whole scheme depended on the honor system, which seems like a shaky way either to limit traffic or make money. If you arrived at 7:30 and just walked into the city, there wasn’t a dangerously high probability of being stopped during the day by somebody in uniform asking to see your ticket. It could happen, but as I say, the odds were pretty much on your side.
On the city’s side, however, was the fact that there was no limit to the number of visitors, so simply pull out a crisp crackling fiver and you were in.
100,000 tourists arrived on the first day, and 8,000 paid. I’m no good with numbers, but those didn’t seem to indicate much of a deterrent, much less a slot machine pouring out cash. If the system worked as planned, there should have been fewer visitors and therefore less income. How wrong I was.
Deterrent it clearly was not, and the term cash-flow took on exciting new meaning. The city had estimated that in the 29 days of “limited access” there would be 140,000 paying visitors providing 700,000 euros total income. Yet the numbers up to the last two days revealed that there had been 440,000 paying visitors.
And as for those mournful remarks about how much it cost the city to run the program? The earliest report says that 2.2 million euros came in, three times the projected sum.
So we are all left with a huge question mark hanging over our heads (“we” meaning those who care, which I do not). What was all that?
At the beginning, the mayor stated that the ticket was “the first step to a plan to regulate the access of day-visitors.” In another interview, he said that “Our objective has always been to put a brake on those who come to Venice just for the day.”
So now, faced with the realization that the five-euro ticket hadn’t slowed the traffic at all, but that in some weird way had actually accelerated the situation, what is the next logical step? Already mooted: Raise the price to ten euros! That’ll keep ’em at bay! Or if not, it’ll bring us cataracts of cash. Either way, the city wins!
There are 20,000 entries under “Venice” on amazon.com. (I’d have thought there were more, actually.) But that’s only the English-language site. Amazon Japan lists “over 6,000.” In any case, whatever your language, Venice is going to be there somehow. Histories, novels, travel guides, poetry, cookbooks, memoirs and, for all I know, limericks and postcards and old flight boarding cards.
Add to that mighty flood the tributary streams of academic studies and research and theses, the reports from national and international committees, the torrents of daily news and opinion pieces and blogs. Anyone during the past millennium with a brain and a pencil seems to have written something about Venice and there is no end in sight. It would appear that you cannot be a warm-blooded, live-young-bearing creature that is alive who has not written something about Venice.
But within this Humboldt Current of ideas and facts and fantasies there are plenty of other thoughts and feelings that flow through daily life here. Letters to the editor are fine, but it’s much simpler (and cheaper) for the vox populi to make itself heard through signs. These come in all sorts of ways, but they’re everywhere.
There are the personal messages from the heart. The heart above is in wonderful shape, but there are many that aren’t.
Neighborhoods bubble with exasperated reminders of some basic rules of civility, in varying degrees of sharpness. One eternal theme is dog poop.
On to the hazards of maintaining a small earthly garden in the street.
On a happier note, there is a little old man named Valerio who continued to work in his carpentry shop for decades, or perhaps eons, considering how extremely old he looks. But he kept at it until one day…
Not many days later, a sign appeared on the workshop door:
Tourists do not pass unobserved.
So much for signs for tourists. For locals, almost no details are necessary for communication:
On a similar neighborhoodly note:
Moving into the realm of city government, or lack thereof, the Venetians in our neighborhood (and others, I can assure you) have plenty to say. The comments tend to run along the following lines (and I’m not referring to clotheslines):
Continuing with the runic messages delivered by T-shirt: “Venice is an embroidered bedspread.” This one is complicated and I have no hope of clarifying its evidently metaphorical significance. I do know that there is a song that begins “Il cielo e’ una coperta ricamata” — the sky is an embroidered cover, which is lovely. Is the intention to say that Venice is as beautiful as an embroidered cover? I think there is some irony here, but it eludes me. Maybe I’ll run into this person again (I saw him at the fruit-vendor one afternoon) and I can just ask him. Meanwhile, on we go.
“Venice is a casin thanks politicians.” A casin (kah-ZEEN) is a brothel, where gambling also went on, and sooner or later tumult ensued. And not tumult of any polite, Marquess of Queensberry sort. It’s now the usual word for any situation that entails chaos, perhaps danger, racket and rudeness. It appears to many that Venice is speeding downhill with no brakes (again, motondoso comes to mind) and nobody at the wheel. Some people also refer to the city as “no-man’s land.” Literally everybody is doing whatever they want, and the result is pure casin.
Lastly, “Venezia is dead Thanks politicians and Gigio.”
While we’re talking about citizens’ discontent….
And this handwritten cri de coeur summarizing the profound crisis in the public health system. The people of lower Castello are persevering in their apparently hopeless struggle to obtain a reasonable supply of doctors:
There are also signs without words that hint at approaching events or persons.
An approaching event I never thought I’d see. The city’s greatest housewares/hardware store having its final sale before closing. They tried to keep going after Covid. They stayed open all day (as opposed to closing in the early afternoon, like every reasonable store used to do). Then they stayed open all week. Unheard-of. It wasn’t enough. I can’t tell you how bad this is. I haven’t gone by recently to see what’s taking its physical place; not much can replace something so great. It used to be that useful stores (butcher shop, fruit and vegetables, etc.) would suddenly begin to sell masks or Murano glass. Now they will be either a restaurant or bar/cafe’. That’s my bet for the once-great Ratti.
The arrival of certain foods are reliable harbingers of seasons or events, though seeing clementines for sale in October is not normal. But this is absolutely the moment for torboin (tor-bo-EEN).
In a class by itself is this astoundingly inappropriate offer of a room with perhaps an undesirable view.
Above the chorus of voices on the walls there come a few magical notes from mysterious poetic souls.
So by all means stroll through Venice looking at palaces and canals. Just don’t forget the walls.
Here’s something I learned today: Electric surfboards exist. They don’t literally go in the surf, but are big rectangles of plastic with a battery-powered motor and a cord to hang onto, and you just zoom away having the water-skiing time of your life without having to bother with attaching yourself to a motorboat. I guess it could be compared to an electric scooter, but on the water. Or a jet-ski that you stand on. Or a turbo-charged paddle board without the paddle.
This much is news to me. What isn’t news is that somebody (two somebodies, actually) decided to bring their toys to Venice and try them out on the Grand Canal. It happened this morning (Wednesday, August 17). What also isn’t news is that imbeciles have some primitive instinct that compels them to come to Venice in the summer, like the wildebeest have to surge across the Serengeti in May. If you are an imbecile with money, you will get there before all the ordinary, common-garden-variety idiot tourists who do mundane little stupid things like jumping off the Rialto Bridge, or cooking your lunch hunkered down around your camp stove in the Piazza San Marco.
Two men aboard these entertaining vehicles suddenly appeared in the Grand Canal, as I said, and after zooming from Rialto to the Salute they somehow managed to disappear before anybody had means, money, or opportunity to nab them. Mayor Luigi Brugnaro was livid and posted this on Twitter (translated by me): “Here are two overbearing imbeciles who are making a joke of the city … I ask everybody to help us identify them and punish them even if our weapons are blunt … there is urgent need for mayors to have more power to ensure public safety! To whomever identifies them I offer dinner!”
Well, they got caught, and it didn’t take more than a few hours. Bulletins didn’t name who gets the credit — and the dinner — for tracking them down, but it may be a while before these two bright sparks will be feeling that rush of adrenaline and endorphins and serotonin and oxytocin and dopamine they were savoring this morning.
They are two Australians who now, at nightfall, have had their boards confiscated (total worth 25,000 euros, or 36,662 Australian dollars), and been fined 1,500 euros each (2,344 Australian dollars). It’s only money and they almost certainly can afford it, but the mayor has initiated legal proceedings against them for “damage to the city’s image.” I don’t know what that is likely to add up to, but I can see lots of lawyers’ fees and whole lots of time being spent on making an example of them.
Naturally I’m as glad as the next person to know that they have been hauled away in chains and leg shackles, but my gladness is curdled by the thought that if it seems incredible that somebody would do this, it is equally, if not more, incredible that they weren’t stopped in flagrante. Along the entire stretch of the Grand Canal (3,800 meters or half a mile) there was not one carabinere, state police, local police, lagoon police, firefighter, dogcatcher, anybody at all with a badge and a walkie-talkie who was on the scene, ready to intervene.
I know it’s an old joke to say that you never see one when you need one, but if I were the mayor I’d be spending less time dudgeoning about these two cretins, and instead be chairing a serious meeting to find out where the hell everybody was. It’s invigorating to want — what was his phrase? — “mayors to have more power,” but it seems to me that if people were on their assigned jobs at their assigned times and places, the mayor wouldn’t need more power. The mayor’s supposed to make the system work, not BE the system.
I can imagine scenarios more serious than electric surfboards that would have had urgent need for a rapid intervention (baby falling into the water comes to mind), and yet, nobody’s on hand. “Please leave a message at the tone….”
Oh wait. The shell-game shysters have returned to their traditional places to pluck the unwary tourists ready to gamble. Maybe that’s where the police were. If not there, they must have been out patrolling the myriad motorboats causing extreme motondoso this year, though the waves make me doubt it. If not there, maybe they’re going around checking store-owners’ certificates of fire inspection.
The Grand Canal is Fifth Avenue! It’s the Champs Elysees! You can’t have Fifth Avenue with no police officer in sight. Something goes wrong on the Champs Elysees — there must be at least one policeman patrolling. But here in Venice we have the Grand Canal with nitwits running wild in broad daylight and the mayor has to turn to Twitter to ask for help finding them. Am I wrong, or is that just a little bit dumber than speed-surfing on Main Street?
This just in: The bridge is already under construction, and I’m sure the fireworks are already on the way, but like a launch at Cape Canaveral, mayor Luigi Brugnaro has scrubbed the mission.
This year, there will be no fireworks for the Redentore (July 19). No fireworks, no party boats, no “notte famosissima.” It’s a blow, but there were already signs that caution was going to rule, beginning with the new regulation that spaces along the fondamente were going to be assigned only by booking. But in the end, it was obvious that safe social distancing was going to be impossible to plan, much less maintain, on water or on land.
Here is the mayor’s announcement (translated by me):
“I do not have good news. I have been awake all night, but unfortunately I’m forced to tell you that we are annulling the fireworks for the Redentore. I can’t bring myself to make it work, I have tried everything. In conscience I just don’t feel like it, for me it’s the most beautiful festa of the year. We set up an incredible system for booking for the boats, we even invented a series of plans for limiting the flow. It’s my decision, I take responsibility for it, but I cannot bring the city to risk it. This is a safe city.”
No news at this moment as to whether the races will be held on Sunday afternoon, or the mass.