Life in LinoLand

August 1, 2021 23 Comments

Tell me Lino went to school with somebody who built the basilica of the Salute, and I’d believe it. Jesting aside, the photos today have no special links to the topic at hand. Just wanted to send you a small supply of images of Venice to tide you over till you can come back.

It’s probably just me, but after years of seeing Lino run into people he knows for one reason or event or phase of life over the past eight decades, it strains belief to think that there could be people in Venice who don’t know him. In my opinion, we should probably just rename the most beautiful city in the world LinoLand.

Late one morning we were riding the bus down the Lido toward Malamocco. Lino nabbed a seat near the back — he got the aisle, and a youngish man reading a book was sitting by the window. The bus was crowded, there was the muted tension of people clumped together in the summer heat. The bus pulled up at a stop, the man closed the book and moved to get off. Climbing over Lino on his way out, he said “Ciao, Lino.”

Instant of silence; everyone was wearing masks, so recognition stalled. Then he lowered his mask and it was smiles all round. Not only had Lino collaborated for years with the man’s father on the Committee of the Festa de la Sensa, but yep — Lino taught him (man, not father of) to row when he was a lad.

Parking is a problem in the canals as much as on land. At the end of via Garibaldi on a busy morning, everybody just decides to make it work. The barge demonstrates what I’d call sufficiently parallel parking.

Change of scene: A few weeks ago we were struggling home on a Sunday evening from the regata at Murano. After the races people literally disappeared because a deluge had struck the city that had evidently swept every other humans either home or out to sea. Lino and I trudged through drenching gusts of rain (umbrella? Of course not!), and climbed aboard the vaporetto heading toward San Pietro di Castello. Cold. Soaking wet. Must mention that this is far from the first time Murano has celebrated its big day with Noye’s Fludde — two years ago it was an apocalyptic hailstorm.

Miserable, waterlogged, we were just stepping ashore on the dock at San Pietro di Castello when the vaporetto pilot pulled down his landward window, leaned halfway out, and called out “Ciao Lino!”

So, yet again, I saw that neither snow, nor rain, nor dead of night, etc., stop people from saying hi to Lino. In this case, the man was not someone Lino had taught to row — astonishing, I know — but instead is a former naval seaman at the Military Naval School F. Morosini where Lino teaches rowing, as all the world knows by now. So of course he would have seen Lino thousands of times. Lino doesn’t remember his name, but names are optional in these encounters.

There are many oases of peace and quiet out in the lagoon. So far no fish have surfaced to say hi to Lino. They’d be more likely to surface and say “You caught my grandfather’s great-uncle’s cousin’s father-in-law but you’ll never catch me.”

Speaking of Morosini, we were there one afternoon a few weeks ago, working on some of the boats. The sun was shining, the cadets had gone home for summer vacation, officers were only intermittent. Around the corner came one of the commandants with an older couple and grandon in tow, obviously a prospective student being shown around.

They all stopped for the usual brief introduction (“And yes, we also offer Venetian rowing to the students,” etc. etc.). The grandfather looked at Lino and said, “Wait. I know you. But how?” The briefest checklist of where/who/when revealed that they grew up in the same neighborhood mere streets apart. Lino was a few years older than this person, but not by much. So we all took a break to listen to them riffle through who they knew, who their relatives were, EXACTLY where their houses were located, and so forth. This was one of those rare cases where teaching somebody to row wasn’t the link. It was something better: Family! Childhood! Memories! Neighborhood!

Top row are various exemplars of the capatonda or “round clam” (*Cerastoderma glaucum*), also known as “cuore di laguna,” or “lagoon heart.” Lino says that the black item in the lineup is a very old capatonda. On the other hand, because I am not an expert, I have run aground on this because these look convincingly like *Rudicardium* *tuberculatum*. Both of these species belong to the cockle family, so I’m going to leave the subject there. Further information welcome because I have exploded my brain researching this to little avail. Bottom row: On the left is a clam “that you find all over the beach, sometimes they’re very big,” says Lino. That’s all I know. On the right, a fasolaro (*Callista chione*)

From the bottom, moving clockwise: I haven’t yet been able to identify this pale smooth creature, so let’s move on to two capetonde. Lino states that the blackish object in the center is the shell used by a hermit crab (Pagurus bernhardus). I’m in no position to argue about it, but I’d like to see one of these in the wild to understand it better. Meanwhile, it has been given pride of place amongst the mollusks. The last two in the upper right corner are a young capatonda and the twin of the unidentified clam in the first photo. It’s been a long two days on this. I may end up just ringing the person’s doorbell.

Let’s go back in time — it doesn’t matter how far, because these chance meetings have been going on forever. In fact, LinoLand is everywhere. Take Mogadishu, Somalia, just to pick a place at random. Lino was living there for four months in the mid-Sixties, with a crew from the Aeronavali which was repairing and maintaining airplanes and teaching (I think you might say that was what was happening) local mechanics how to take over when the group went back to Venice.

Lino and his colleagues were billeted at a modest hotel run by a couple from Bologna, the kind of place you’d expect to find flight crews from Alitalia on layover. And yes, one day a young man in Alitalia uniform stopped in the lobby. “Ciao Lino!” Who was he? They’d been in the Boy Scouts together. They didn’t say “So it’s here that we meet again, bwahahaha.” They said some variation on “What the heck are you doing here?” And together they could have replied, “I’m working. What are YOU doing?”

If the sun’s up, it’s time for laundry. No sun, also laundry.

Look closer. Here is a detail of what is hanging out the window, evidently supported only by whatever cables keep it alive. Air conditioner is on its own here because for probably many reasons a support has not been constructed. Guess they’ll haul it in when winter comes, like some sort of midwater longline set out for tuna.

Speaking of hanging things up to dry, out in the lagoon the fishermen hang out their nets. It’s kind of like laundry, but smells different.

And while we’re ranging far afield, let’s go to Muggia, a village on the east coast of the Adriatic just below Trieste. Lino knows it well, so we decided to take a daytrip one freezing Epiphany a few years ago. The voyage took much of the morning. We get the bus in Trieste. We get off the bus in Muggia. We walk to the small central piazza (Piazza Galileo Galilei, if you’re playing along at home) where the very economically sized duomo sits sideways. Pretty.

“Ciao Lino!” It came from behind this time. Turning around, we see one of our favorite ex-cadets from the Morosini coming toward us. Gad! We’re 176 km (109 miles) from Venice and yet even here there’s SOMEBODY WHO KNOWS LINO. Since we last saw him he’s become a naval officer, has commanded a submarine, and gotten married to a girl from Muggia, which now explains everything. It’s not like people follow Lino around by satellite tracking. It’s just that they seem to be everywhere.

You cannot convince me that they’re not talking to each other. I mean all three of them.

And in conclusion…What was probably the first of these numberless experiences was the day in Lino’s early adulthood during the five-year period when he worked at Ciampino Airport in Rome, repairing and maintaining planes.

He was riding on a bus somewhere in the central area of the city. The bus was crammed full of people, naturally. All of a sudden from the back of the bus comes the ebullient voice of a woman in the broadest possible Venetian accent: “OH VARRRRRREMENGO, VARDA CHI CHE GHE XE!” (“Good Lord have mercy” — a hopelessly bad translation but I’m trying to convey the intensity of the amazement because va a remengo is the absolute maximum Venetian exclamation.) “LOOK WHO IT IS!” These were the days before “Ciao Lino” took over.

Everybody turns to look at Lino, who has instantly gone tomato-paste red with embarrassment. She didn’t stop. “XE EL FRADELO DE LA VANDA!” (“It’s Wanda’s brother!”)

“TI SA CHI GHE SO MI?” she cheerfully demands. (“You know who I am?”)

Tiny embarrassed voice responds: “La Gegia.” The lady’s name was Teresa, but the nickname in Venetian is Gegia (JE-ja.)

That’s where the story ends; I guess he got off at the next stop, whether it was his or not. He doesn’t remember further details, but that voice has been incised in his brain. Little did he know normal all this was going to become for him. Now he just turns to me and either tells me who it is, or asks me. Me? You think I know? As they say here, I just got here tomorrow.

Somebody has just had a baby boy. Part of a new batch of people who’ll be saying “Ciao, Lino”?

Venetian Events

Just open wide….

July 10, 2018 5 Comments

Last Sunday the people of Malamocco celebrated the annual festa of the Madonna di Marina. Like a few other festivals — the one at Pellestrina on the first Sunday of August comes to mind — it is based on a legend involving a miraculous apparition of the Madonna. I’ll get to that in a moment.

What is reliably involved each year at Malamocco is a small sale of old and often eccentric stuff. I would say “antiques,” but that might be glamorizing them too much.

So forget the glamour, and while you’re waiting in line to pick up your plate of spaghetti alla malamocchina (with tiny clams called bevarasse), feast your eyes and your memory on this item. Anybody under the age of 50 probably has no recollection of it, but for the rest of us, I’m betting it still can bring on the shudders.

If Proust had ever sat in one of these, “Remembrance of Things Past” would have had a dramatically different beginning. Of course the column with the lamp and the small sink for endless spittings-out are not in their correct position, which I suppose means you could have bought them separately. But that would be crazy.

This sink was especially grotesquely huge when I was six, or however little I was when the dentist began his oral excavations. The sound of the water swirling around the inner edge only slightly masked the sound of the drill. End of reminiscences, you can go back to Proust now.

Speaking of Malamocco, you might want to know that the name is derived from Metamauco, by way of Medoacus, the Roman name of the Brenta River, which emptied into the Adriatic here. Could be useful on a crossword puzzle sometime?

It was originally a small settlement of families who cultivated vegetables, fished, and worked in the salt pans. The population grew in 452 A.D. with the fleeing dwellers from the lagoon shoreline seeking refuge from Attila’s Rome-bound hordes. It became the seat of the Venetian government between 742 and 811. In that year the new doge, Agnello Partecipazio, moved what was becoming Venice to the Rialto area and Malamocco returned to its earlier dimensions.

As for the Madonna di Marina herself, a legend springing from around the year 1300 tells of a certain Felice Dario, native of Malamocco, who found an enormous stump of wood lying on the beach and took it home to chop it up as firewood. (To give a more precise idea of this object, it’s called a ceppo [CHEH-po] in Italian, and while you certainly can burn it, it is more typically used as that heavy block on which you chop wood, or on which a butcher cuts meat, or on which a blacksmith places his anvil, or on which the public executioner places his customer’s head, etc.) In Venetian, the word is zoco (SOH-koh).

The ceppo disappeared three times, and three times Signor Dario found it back in its original place on the beach, at which point the Virgin appeared to him. The story ends there, though I suppose we could risk imagining miraculous cures and victories at sea and and platoons of male children and other beautiful things as a result. For the first years — no idea how many — the miracle was attributed to the “Madonna del zoco,” the “Madonna of the stump of wood used for chopping things on.” Somebody clearly thought that didn’t have the right ring to it, but I disagree.

I would tell you more about the festa, but the real point of this post isn’t the regata, or the procession, or the band, or even the (excuse me) Madonna and her chopping block. It’s the dentist’s chair. If I’d anywhere to put it, I’d have bought it and sat in it and rinsed my mouth and laughed triumphantly all day at the ghosts of all those dentists I’ve worn out.

MOSE, Problems

MOSE again, still, forever

September 13, 2017 4 Comments

If it weren’t for the lagoon, maybe people wouldn’t care quite so much about Venice. Interesting thought to ponder. But the lagoon would probably be better off without Venice, because then it wouldn’t be abused and tormented to make sure that Venice won’t have some water in the streets sometimes.

What everybody loves about Venice (among many things) is how old it is. And that is indeed a thing to love. I imagine all those amazing designers and builders and artists working away centuries ago, believing that their handiwork would last for, oh, maybe ever. And because they were first-rate craftsmen, it turns out that most of them were right.

You might say that MOSE is also going to last forever, but not in a good way. I don’t write updates on the continuing calamity that is the world’s most preposterous project because I’m bored by the mendacity, magnitude and monotony of the problems. Everything has gone, is going, and will be going, wrong with this thing until Jesus comes back, so updates are pointless. In fact, I’ve begun to suspect that the whole thing started with a bunch of drunk people sitting around one summer afternoon on some rich person’s yacht or private mountain, who decided to break the boredom by inventing a game in which the winner is the one who finds a way to waste the most money on the most pointless enterprise in the history of the world. If you can call it “winning.” Bonus points for environmental damage, or if somebody dies.

But the latest headlines have barged into my brain and made me think about it again, if only briefly, and my thoughts are not lovely. I can sum it up for you: Yet more things have been discovered to be screwed up, and fixing them will cost lots more money. This has become the refrain of the Marching Song of the MOSE Squadron, while the bass singers set the jaunty rhythm “Money for me, money for me, money for me…..” And as you read, consider (as I have) that if I had done the calculations, it’s obvious they would have come out all wrong. But I am not a civil engineer (I’m hardly civil at all) and I do not have a piece of paper from some institute which implies that I have studied how to do this work. But we must face the fact that the perpetrators of all this have such certificates.

Is there something about water that just baffles engineers in Venice? They ought to be experts, yet somehow the smallest details are just left unfixed. One might say that the flow of the water and/or the position of the grate of this fountain don’t really HAVE to match up, but then one considers the possibility that the designer was later hired to work on MOSE.

Here’s the headline on September 7, 2017 from the story in La Nuova Venezia by Alberto Vitucci:

MOSE, the gate of the lock at Malamocco has to be redone.

I will translate the main points in this and the following article:

The gate on the lock basin (“conca“) at Malamocco has to be redone. After the 400 million euros already spent, another 20 million will have to be invested for the “lunata,” the semi-circular breakwater shaped like the moon which protects the ships from waves and current as they position themselves to enter or as they exit.

Here is the inlet between the Adriatic (to the right) and the lagoon (to the left). It’s sort of like two boxers facing off before the gong. Clockwise from “lunata” we find: The construction yard of the caissons for MOSE, the tiny hamlet of Santa Maria del Mare, the lock to permit shipping to pass when the floodgates are closed in the inlet, the nature park at the Alberoni, the inlet which will be blocked by the raised floodgates in the case of exceptional high tide, and the Alberoni seawall.

The lock, you may recall, was dug to permit the passage of ships between the Adriatic and the lagoon whenever the floodgates are raised. But evidently every good idea contains the seeds of its own destruction, if you play it right. It was constructed in 2007 by the Consorzio Venezia Nuova (by means of the mega-company Mantovani) and designed by Technital ten years ago, which Vitucci recalls as “the golden age of MOSE, when money poured in without limits and without too much control.” But even then the design was clearly flawed, for which almost everybody involved is now paying the consequences.

Inadequate. Even though the breakwater extends 1300 meters (4,265 feet), its basin is too small for the latest generation of container ships, making it too risky for the big ships to attempt to enter the lock. Other than that, the “mobile” parts of the lock — the gates — cannot function because the water exerts too much pressure. The persons making those calculations might have been interrupted by a phone call, or the arrival of a pizza; anyway, it doesn’t work. This problem was discovered in 2015 when the gate gave way in the first storm. Urgent interventions are now in the hands of a Belgian company.

But not to worry! The president of the Magistrato alle Acque, Roberto Linetti, says that fixing it will only cost 18 million euros because the foundations are still good. And meanwhile, they’ll be able to add a few meters to allow the ships to pass. So you see? In the end, it was a good thing the gate didn’t work.

Infinite. Or “unfinished.” Or “unfinishable,” perhaps. What now bears the tired title of the “MOSE scandal” consists, as Vitucci lists it, of: “Bribes and consultants, off-the-books payments and always-positive evaluations rendered by friendly experts, extra costs due to the lack of competition and the necessity of accumulating “black” (untraceable) funds to pay the bribes. But also there have been obvious errors, such as the lock. What was intended to be a structure to prevent penalizing the port activity when the floodgates were up has been shown to be, at the end, the umpteenth useless big project.

Waste. The lock is far from being the only problem — there are the collateral “major works” connected to MOSE, each one of which is its own little one-act tragedy. The “jack-up,” the large “ship” which cost 50 million euros for transporting and moving the gates constructed by Comar and Mantovani, remains anchored at the Arsenal and has never been used because it doesn’t function, despite the repairs that have been made. There is also the damage to the seawall at San Nicolo’ on the Lido, which collapsed a few days after it had been tested. Tens of millions of euros thrown into the sea, as Vitucci (and probably many others) puts it. Damages will need to be paid for all those, too, but it’s not clear by whom.

This is the “jack-up.” Big, expensive, impressive, it makes no pretense of working.

But wait! There’s more! Is anyone wondering how the various components are managing to resist encrustation and mold? I can tell you! But before I do, pause to marvel at the astonishing presence of salt in seawater, not to mention algae and all sorts of cretures which insist on attaching themselves to things. Who could possibly have known, or even guessed at random, that the Adriatic contains salt and water?

The headline in the Nuova Venezia on September 7, 2017, on a story written by Alberto Vitucci:

Mold and degradation, the MOSE gates are already blocked.

“Big works = big mafias.” I don’t usually agree with graffiti, but this sums up the situation with admirable clarity.

“The encrustation is increasing; the paint is already old. And without electricity it’s impossible to raise the barriers. Mold and degradation in the corridors of the caissons beneath the lagoon. And the gates, exposed for six months to the weather and salt at Santa Marina del Mare, have to be repainted.

The installations. The latest problem is the delay in building the electric plant to raise the gates. MOSE needs energy to raise the gates because it doesn’t exploit the natural energy of the sea and waves. … Unlike the sequence of events at San Nicolo’, where the power plant was installed first, at Malamocco it was decided to position the gates on the lagoon bottom before the power plant was built. Result: For several months the gates have lain on the bottom but it’s impossible to test raising them.

Corrosion and fouling. The first inspections revealed corrosion and encrustation. The lack of electricity has prevented the correct ventilation underwater where the cables and systems pass, not to mention the workers. The walls are covered with a layer of mold 5 centimeters (2 inches) deep. MOSE is a system conceived to remain underwater, and without maintenance, the problems multiply, such as the corrosion of the hinges (of the gates) that was reported several months ago. What to do? The Consorzio Venezia Nuova announced a competition for bids on the construction of the systems. Two groups won, the Abb Comes of Taranto and the Abb Idf of Brindisi. But the proposal to realize some temporary systems to move the gates wasn’t approved. It would have cost 14 million euros, so just let the gates sit underwater, blossoming.

Several months ago, the gates underwater at Treporti began to show accumulations of barnacles, mussels, and crabs — sea-dwelling creatures which were not exactly unknown before the work started.

The paint is peeling. Because there is no electricity or apparatus to install them, the 30 gates that were supposed to be lowered into the water have been waiting for months on the construction site of the caissons. The delay is due to the non-functioning of the “jack-up.” (Some gates were constructed in Croatia and brought across the Adriatic from Split.) During these months, the workers have battled the weather and the seagulls, which have begun to nest in the gates, as follows…..

MOSE: Even the seagulls are stripping the paint.

Information from the article by Alberto Vitucci, La Nuova Venezia, 29 April 2017

It turns out that the beached (so to speak) gates sitting at the construction site are a very attractive home for nesting seagulls, sort of like LeFrak City for waterfowl. But their guano is damaging the paint, and eventually corrodes the metal too. The birds stab at the peeling paint with their beaks, trying to strip it off (boredom? sport? snacks?). Protective tarpaulins have been spread over the gates, but large spaces have been left open for work on the hinges, so ….

Bring on the scarecrows! (I mean gulls): Deafening recordings of frightening sounds. They tried an amped-up donkey braying because an ethologist said that birds are afraid of it. Birds, sure, but not gulls, who fear almost nothing anymore. Next, a high-volume dog growling. Nope. In the end, the only thing that works is a cannon firing blanks, so cannonfire is now periodically heard in the lagoon, followed by the wild flapping of hundreds and hundreds of wings of birds that soon return.

How long will all this be going on?

The timetable. According to the latest schedule — after deadlines passed from 2011 to 2014, then 2017, then 2018 — the work will be finished by 2021. Four (or five or ten?) more years of astonishing stories to come. And I haven’t even said anything about the subsidence of the lagoon bottom beneath the caissons due to the powerful force of the tides (tides? there are tides in the sea? what??) which appear to be distorting the position of the gates…..

Life on earth requires many adjustments. Shown here is a reasonable solution to a problem. I have no images of a reasonable solution to any of MOSE’s problems.

Venetian Problems

Let the New Year — or the old year — begin

January 15, 2015 5 Comments

One thing that everybody loves about Venice is that it seems so old. Of course, it is old. It’s kind of like a Byzantine/Renaissance/Baroque/Neo-Classical Lascaux Caves, except that it’s inhabited.

I pause to say that I know there are at least 14 continuously inhabited cities in the world that are far, far older than Venice. I was just making the point that many visitors are struck with astonishment at the fact that Venice was ever created, an emotion I believe the cave paintings also elicit. But I’m getting off the point.

One thing that makes it feel old when you’re living here is the endless cycle of the same old things, and when I say that I don’t mean the Befana (with its utterly predictable brief annual cluster of highly-charged articles about the dangerous effects of the air pollution caused by the bonfires’ smoke), or the feast of the Redentore, or other celebrations.

By “same things” I mean issues that just keep coming up, that continue to be transformed in a shape-shifting way by assorted groups, interested parties, and random changes of circumstance, but that never get settled. Even in the rare instances when a problem appears to have been resolved, before long we discover that it has spawned new problems. And the cycle begins again.

In the few days since 2015 began, the Gazzettino has filled its pages with a new crop of the old. Such as:

Adriatic ("mare") to the right, the lagoon to the left. The conca, or basin, is item #4. The scogliera, or protective barrier, is #5. I had to take geometry twice in order to pass, but this still looks awkward to me. The ships' captains tend to agree. — Adriatic (“mare”) to the right, the lagoon to the left. The conca, or basin, is item #4. The scogliera, or protective barrier, is #5. I had to take geometry twice in order to pass, but this still looks awkward to me. The ships’ captains tend to agree.

MOSE: No, this time it’s not about the gates themselves, nor about the billions that were stolen to pay off its many participants, collaborators, and well-wishers. Now it’s about the conca, or basin (#4 on the image above), which was dug at the inlet of Malamocco to permit the passage of ships on the occasions when the gates are raised.

For one thing, it’s too small.

It has been designed to accommodate ships up to 280 meters (918 feet) long and 39 meters (128 feet) wide. These dimensions are already too small for the largest cruise ships, the ones that certain groups want to compel to enter the lagoon by way of Malamocco instead of by the Bacino of San Marco. So a mega-cruise ship wanting to come to Venice would have to hang around outside in the Adriatic until the tide turned and the gates were lowered, to let them continue with their plan to unload thousands of passengers and take on more. Having to delay entry sounds like a new problem has just replaced the old.

But it gets worse. The fundamental problem isn’t size. It’s the positioning of the scogliera (skoh-LYEH-ra), or protective barrier, in relation to the basin. Stick with me here, because in the world of engineering “oops!” this is kind of special. And whatever you may think about cruise ships, we now have to consider the needs of real grown-up working ships that haul containers and petroleum and grain and coal (for the power station just on the edge of the mainland); these are ships for which time really is money.

The curve and position of the barrier built to shield the basin from wild stormy water (the kind you might well have if there is an exceptional acqua alta underway) makes it difficult — in some cases, perhaps impossible — for even smaller ships to navigate themselves into a perfect straight line to enter the basin.

“About 2,000 vessels (note: That’s nearly six per day) enter and exit the lagoon each year,” said Alessandro Santi, president of Assoagenti Veneto, the maritime agents’ association. “Of these, at least 350, in the current state of things, would be prevented from entering the basin.” They’d have to wait outside till the tide turned and the MOSE gates were lowered to allow them to enter by the usual channel.

Solution! Construct an additional rubber barrier (I have no further details) against which the ships could lean — a sort of fulcrum — to help them position themselves to enter the basin. I’m referring to the ships which can, in fact, enter the basin, which as you see isn’t going to be all of them.

Projected cost: 15 million euros ($17,669,900). That’s one heck of a patch.

Speaking of cost, the news has just come out that the completion date for MOSE has yet again been postponed. It is currently predicted to be finished in mid-2017, and will cost an additional 2 billion euros ($2,355,980,000). Unless it turns out to cost more, of course.

So why is this an old subject? Because it’s yet another aspect of a project that wasn’t planned correctly, but construction just went merrily along anyway, and now everybody is having to find ways to resolve problems that didn’t ever have to exist.

Encrstations of paper to rival the pilings in the water at low tide. Here, at Rialto, but this phenomenon is all over the city. — Encrustations — paper, in this case — to rival the pilings in the water at low tide. This wall is at Rialto, but the phenomenon is all over the city.

DEGRADO: The terse but expressive and useful term degrado (deh-GRAH-do) means “degradation,” and it finds innumerable uses. And I will keep this entry short because the subject deserves a post all of its own, if I could find the strength.

Degrado is a hydra-headed monster composed of graffiti, broken pavements, disintegrating nizioleti, and now strata of aging posters stuck up all over walls. The city of Venice, and myriad individuals, put up these pieces of paper with or without permission, and these announcements of all sorts of events, needs or offers stay there because once the moment has passed, who cares?

The city says it cares, and since 2012 has spent 856,000 euros ($1,008,360) to pay a private company named A.R. Promotion to affix posters and also to strip away the accumulated crud. But evidently the announcements breed at night and produce more old posters, or somehow the private company isn’t keeping up. Or perhaps even starting, who knows?

Even the vertical pipe to the right has been pressed into service.

Breakdown of payments made: At the end of 2012 A.R. Promotion won the bid to do this work for one and a half years for 456,000 euros. A few years later, the same company got the job for about two years for 400,000 euros. The age of some of the posters indicates that in either one or other of these periods, the company somehow didn’t catch everything.

Let me say that having to hack away layers of gummy paper over a period of years does not speak well for the paper-hangers. Because while one could criticize the ability of A.R. Promotion to remove paper, one could much more justly criticize the cretins who put up the pieces of paper in the first place.

But back to the subject of payment for services rendered, or not: Cecilia Tonon, president of the volunteer group Masegni e Nizioleti, has raised her hand to ask why the city is paying for a service which evidently isn’t provided, when squadrons of members have turned out more than once to do a large amount of this very work for free. (I participated in one clean-up project, which I’ll write about another time.)

No answer has yet forthcome.

Intermission: News from the trial of the Indian couple who murdered their Iranian roommate, Mahtab Ahadsavoji, and dumped her body in the lagoon. The Indian girl has been identified as the culprit, and has been sentenced to 17 years in prison. Her boyfriend got a smaller sentence because he merely helped dispose of the evidence. Appeals will drag on.

BUDGET: For years now we’ve had to listen to the municipal choir singing the Anvil Chorus, financial version, whose refrain is “No ghe xe schei” (there is no money).

We found out last year that the reason there was no money was because it had all been gift-wrapped and given to politicians and businessmen involved in the MOSE project.

So now there really is no money.

After working his way upstream through heavy fire from outraged city employees facing drastic cuts, attempting to make the budget balance in some miraculous way (“miraculous” meaning “money from Rome”), the emergency governor, Vittorio Zappalorto, has had to say it isn’t working. The city is 60 million euros ($70,855,800) in the hole.

“The situation is unsustainable,” he said. “We’ve reached a point of no return, The next mayor is going to have” (I freely translate) “one hell of a hideous job.” The Casino’, once an endless font of funds, is also now crouching over its begging bowls. The sale of palaces is almost the only option for raising money, but so far they are being sold at slashed, fire-sale prices, or not being sold at all.

The island of Poveglia (www.verdieuropei.it)

POVEGLIA: Remember the popular groundswell, funded by citizen contributions, to acquire the island and restore it for the use of the Venetians rather than let it be sold to one of those terrible foreign companies which would transform it into a hotel?

All stuck in lawyer-land. The city put the island up for bids; the highest bid, from a private businessman, was snubbed by the city as being ridiculously low. To which the bidder has replied, “But you had no higher bids in this auction. So?”

In any case, the groundswell of Venice-for-the-Venetians emotion hasn’t been heard from in quite some time, considering that since last June 4, when the sky fell on Venice, much bigger problems have overcome everybody. It would be extremely difficult, in the current climate, to get anybody excited about an abandoned island.

BIG CRUISE SHIPS: This is an issue that’s so photogenic that it cauterizes people brains, rendering them incapable of thought. In battling to ban the ships from passing in the Bacino of San Marco, the enthusiasts have created a much larger problem, which is how to keep the port economy going when some cruise lines have already canceled their plans to come to Venice in 2015.

The no-big-ships people haven’t given any sign of caring much about the port itself, but they are baffled as to how to they feel about the digging of the Contorta Canal (officially named the Canale Contorta S. Angelo). But it seems clear to almost everybody that deepening the canal will create so many more problems than it solves that it makes my teeth grind all by themselves.

The tug of war about approving the Contorta canal is going to continue for an unspecified time. Another year, anyway, I have no doubt. There will be flourishing crops of claims, counter-claims, and recriminations.

Meanwhile, due to the canceled cruises, 300,000 fewer passengers are expected this year. This means people may very well be laid off or fired, and all the rest of the ripple effect that doesn’t need describing. There is also the loss of income from the taxes paid by the ship companies to be considered. Nice.

But what I don’t understand is why the ships are vilified as ugly, and therefore deserving of death, when everyday ugliness like graffiti just keeps rolling along, singing a song.

Old? New? Is there a difference?

Singer_Sargent,_John_-_Hercules_-_1921.jpg hydra blog misc mose 1921 goodart.org — In case you’re wondering what a “hydra-headed monster” might look like, here is an image of the mythological Hydra being demolished by Hercules. For every head that was cut off, two grew in its place. It’s kind of a metaphor. (“Hercules,” by John Singer Sargent, 1921. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

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