MOSE | 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, MOSE

MOSE cleaning day/year/decade, and more

October 24, 2024 10 Comments

One morning not long ago I noticed this unusual bit of traffic trundling along toward San Marco and onward to the shipyards at Porto Marghera. This grotty yellow object was instantly recognizable as one of the caissons that form the MOSE floodgate barriers.

As you may recall, they are fixed to the lagoon bottom and raised when needed — “needed” being a word now open to unexpectedly large definition.

More than ten years have passed since this caisson was installed. This is more than enough time for masses of mollusks to attach themselves to the convenient metal surfaces. This fact has been bothering the people in charge for a while, in part because the extra weight the creatures add is a potential problem to the functioning of the caissons. For lovers of statistics, this caisson is 20 meters (65.6 feet) wide, 9 meters (29.5 feet) long, 3 meters (9.8 feet) high, with a total weight of 350 tons.

The MOSE floodgate barriers were raised for the first time on October 3, 2020, to great amazement and jubilation, and have been raised 60 times in the following three years for a total cost of 10 million euros. (That’s what it cost to raise them, not to build them.)

Expensive? Not really, when we now read that cleaning and maintaining them (a process that began last year) is estimated to cost 63 million euros per year. What? It turns out that this is the sum allocated per year for cleaning; if each gate costs one million to clean, and let’s say optimistically that three could be cleaned per year, it’s unlikely those funds will be exhausted any time soon. Unless other problems were to present themselves, of course, which could totally happen.

“Maintenance of MOSE 189 million arriving for three years.” (May 6 2022). That seems to be where 63 million came from; that’s the amount that earmarked for each year. But as we see, that will never be spent per year if only one or two or even — dream on — three gates were cleaned each year.

I can’t keep up with all these numbers. “MOSE: One million to clean each gate” (Jan. 19 2023). That sounds normal, at this point. But that would mean a total of 78 million over the next 26 years. Any financial forecast stretching that far into the future is bound to be fanciful. You see how the pixie dust makes it hard to see anything clearly, much less understand it.

MOSE figures always sound extreme. All these millions of digits fall from myriad bank accounts like cosmic pixie dust on poor old spavined, rumpsprung Venice and its spavined ledgers and reports and endless requests for yet more money.

We are long since accustomed to bulletins involving millions of euros. Here’s one example: “538 million arriving to finish MOSE” (December 3, 2022). It sounds like a lot, but you can be sure it will turn out not to have been enough.

Or this: “MOSE one million in four days to defend Venice” (Nov. 25, 2022). That was an unusual period of frequent high tides, and that was still when “one million” sounded like a lot. By now it sounds like a fire-sale bargain.

“Ten million spent in two years to raise MOSE” (June 29, 2022). Okay wait — in November it cost only one million to raise MOSE four times. So this must mean that in one year it cost five million…no wait, ten million divided by 211,000 (the cost of each raising) is 45 times. But they were raised 60 times. So 60 times 211,000 is 12,660,000. Pixie dust!

But back to the repairs. The caissons languished underwater for 11 years, accumulating crud, until July 5, 2023, when the first of the 78 caissons was taken to the shipyard of Fincantieri in Marghera for spiffing and fixing. So far, though, only three have been cleaned. The work can be done only in the summer because that’s when high water is usually doesn’t occur. At this rate the last gate will go through the process in 2050. Time to start over.

As for cost, Fincantieri has estimated that cleaning and repair will cost more than twice what it cost to build them. Awkward. And of course that number will change, by which I mean increase.

But money well spent, yes? In the three years since the inaugural gate-raising, the barriers have been raised 60 times, for a cost of 10 million euros ($10,850,875). All those digits! Pixie dust!

The “mouths” are clearly visible here; they aren’t all the same width, hence the caissons aren’t all the same size. Bit of not-actually-useless trivia.

This photograph shows the stretch of yellow barriers raised across the northernmost of the three inlets to the lagoon. Each inlet is called a “mouth of the port” (*bocca di* *porto*), and here the “mouth of the Lido” is divided by a constructed island into two sections. The lower is referred to as Treporti and the farther is San Nicolo’. (ytali.it, unattributed image)

Perhaps this detail makes the positions clearer. We are looking south, with the Adriatic on the left.

A recent inspection — the Gazzettino reports — revealed that the condition of the 20 caissons at Treporti is “good.” But inspection has yet to take place on the 21 at San Nicolo’, the 19 at Malamocco, and the 18 at Chioggia. No telling when those inspections will be made, and there’s even less telling as to when action will be taken on whatever is found.

The simoom of pixie dust from the Accounts Payable department also blows from the zone of the jack-up. This is the rig that was built to raise and transport each caisson to the repair shop and back. It cost 53,000,000 euros ($57,000,000). But after years of construction and repairs and what-not, in 2014 it was discovered that the jack-up wasn’t yet ready for work, and it still isn’t, ten years later.

The jack-up has been living its best life for years moored by the Arsenal. At the moment, not only is it not working, it’s in the drydock by the huge crane. I made this picture in 2017. It has remained there since then, on its way to becoming another Venetian monument. In all fairness, it’s clear that if the gates weren’t scheduled to be removed for cleaning, there wasn’t anything for the jack-up to do but sit there, accumulating its own crop of mollusks and algae.

The jack-up in drydock. I took this picture a few days ago. No news about how long it will be there, or what they’re doing, or how much it will cost, or anything.

But not to worry, there is the “Cavaletta” from the Fagioli company that does the same job as the jack-up and costs less. Wait, what?

Here the “Cavaletta” lifts the detached caisson before loading it onto the platform to be towed to the mainland. This construction is ideal for the task at the Lido, but can’t be used at Malamocco because the caissons there are too long for it. So the jack-up will have to be used, whether it’s ready or … not?

When MOSE finally got to work in 2020, the authorities stated that it would be raised when the tide was forecast to reach 140 cm above mean sea level, a category listed as “exceptional” acqua alta. But after the first few times the gates went up and the water in the canals did not even reach the streets, I could sense what was going to happen. And it did.

Nobody wanted water underfoot anymore. So we heard that the gates would be raised when the forecast was for 130 cm maximum height of tide. Then when it was for 120 cm. It has just been lowered yet again to 110 cm. It’s like an auction in reverse — the prize goes to the lowest bidder.

At this point, why not just pump all the water out of the lagoon, and be done with it? Save everybody so much trouble — and money!

But doubts have always been raised, and they continue to be raised, concerning the system’s short- and long-term prospects, the effect on the lagoon, costs (of course), and also how inconveniently illegal these recent gate-raisings at lower tide levels actually are.

To summarize and give some perspective is a letter (translated by me) written on October 10, 2024 by Andreina Zitelli and re-published on ytali.it. I’m leaving the link in case you were to be interested in reading other articles/opinions by her, though they’re mostly in Italian.

“MOSE inadeguato. Come volevasi dimostrare” (MOSE inadequate. As one wanted to demonstrate)

Dear Director,

It emerges clearly from the last meeting of those responsible for its management that the Experimental Electromechanical Module (Mo.S.E.) — not by chance that the opinion of the national Environmental Impact Statement of 1998 was and remains negative — is not the system that can provide for the safeguarding of Venice. Mo.S.E. was designed to block the “exceptional high waters,” not to regulate the lower and medium high tides that progressively invade the urban areas of the islands.

The conflict between the Port and the City was also one of the critical elements at the base of the negative opinion, a conflict, for that matter, stressed also by international experts. Finally, from the environmental point of view the frequent closures are in conflict with the needs of the exchange between the sea and the lagoon. The conflict between Port, City and Lagoon can’t be resolved with Mo.S.E.

As part of the Evaluation Group that expressed the negative opinion of the national Environmental Impact Statement on the Mo.S.E. project, I feel obliged to remind those who today are concerned to safeguard Venice from the high water at or below 100 cm that:

MoS.E. isn’t the system to defend Venice from medium-low and medium-high water;
the height of 110 cm — established by the decisions taken in the political quarters — cannot be regulated by the closing of Mo.S.E. (it was one of the principal reasons for the negative opinion) for the fact that the variability of the phenomenon and the problems of the forecasts cause operative uncertainty;
The model forecast of the 110 cm height falls within a reliable interval of +/- 20 cm from the tide forecast. To shorten the time for deciding (whether to raise the gates or not, N.B.) causes false alarms and leads to discretionary operative decisions, if not even to false closures;
For these reasons it is even more unacceptable to maneuver the Mo.S.E. at tide heights even lower than 110 cm;
The height of 110 cm — as the Opinion put forward — entails such uncertainties as to render useless and damaging for more functional, environnmental and economic aspects, entrust to Mo.S.E. the defense of the City from the medium tides;
the increase in the cases of high water, connected to more frequent tides of low-medium size, aggravates the incompatibility of Mo.S.E. toward the urban, port and environmental object of Safeguarding.
The lagoon is just as complicated as Venice is. Just a thought to ponder.

There is also an aspect that’s hardly secondary to consider.

The quota of 110 cm isn’t part of — as comprehensible also just by common sense beyond the conclusions of the study of the series of the phenomenon — the category “exceptional high water” referred to by the Law 798/84….

The closings of Mo.S.E. that are not aimed at regulating exceptional high water are to be considered against the letter of the law.

Of the discretional use of Mo.S.E. beyond the purpose established by the Law 798/84 the Public Prosecutor of the Financial Court should intervene for the accounting aspects of the extra costs that are certainly not attributable to harmful situations for which is would be possible to make an exception.

I realize MOSE is supposed to help the city, but it isn’t doing anything to help the lagoon.

Further, it should be remembered that Mo.S.E. has not yet demonstrated the capacity to keep up with a real and serious exceptional high tide that could have a catastrophic result, a result that can’t be excluded.

It also remains to consider the difficulty of assuming the decision of closure in the face of extreme weather and tide conditions in the absence of procedures that define the operational limits of the maneuverability and closing of the gates of Mo.S.E. in extreme conditions.

Who will take the responsibility of closing in the absence of a defined procedure?

Other and wider actions and interventions at the territorial level were planned, beginning with the reduction of the depth of the maritime canals and the “mouths of the port,” to realize diffuse urban defenses (as proposed then by Venetian engineers and architects) to join numerous experiments of raising the ground, to regulate the water coming from floods on the mainland.” That is, as everyone knows, many other solutions were proposed to defend the city from acqua alta, but MOSE steamrolled them all.

I could go on, but that’s enough. So let’s conclude that MOSE needs to be cleaned and maintained, nobody can be sure it’s going to keep working if it continues to be raised far more often than predicted, and it will cost craptons of money forever.

A glimpse of the future? I can’t know if this person is being sarcastic or prophetic.

Uncategorized

Moving forward, backward, in circles?

April 15, 2022 13 Comments

Too many corners? This street will take you somewhere. It might be the “where” you want to be, or maybe not.

I had an interesting dream last night, set in Venice; nothing particular happened but I did awaken with this thought: It’s not the canals that make Venice so particular (special, different, beautiful, strange, etc.), it’s the corners.

Why is that? Because there are so incredibly many of them, and when you turn one, or two, or more, you either move ahead or you somehow find yourself pretty much back where you started.

That’s my new metaphor for Venice. As far as I can tell, after the enormous difficulties and turmoil caused by two years of Covid, somehow it seems that we’re back where we started. You might think that could be a good thing (“Back to normal!”) except that it’s not (“Back to normal!”). Things keep happening, but almost nothing really changes. Names change occasionally, but the headlines seem to be set on “replay.”

There are now fewer than 50,000 Venetians living in the historic center of Venice. (In 2021, there were 50,434). This is a threshold many people dreaded crossing, but it has been crossed nonetheless. I have no idea what this means in real life, because supermarkets continue to open. Who are their customers?

This place was a furniture and upholstery shop when we moved here. Then it became a bar/cafe/slot machine parlor. Then the “acqua granda” decimated it in 2019 and it has remained this way till now.

Then, just a week or so ago, suddenly there was activity.

It’s going to be a very large supermarket dedicated to shampoo, detergent, cosmetics, also potato chips and beer. Just what we few who live here were needing? We already have two supermarkets and a shampoo/detergent shop. Stand by for the struggle for survival of the smaller, family-run detergent emporium and this megalodon.

This store is already separating itself from the family-run shop several doors down: It will be open continually (no mid-day closing for lunch or a nap or anything like that), and it will be open on Sunday, when the family is at home taking a break like normal people. I am not happy.

Here’s a wonderful sight, though: Imagine my delight at seeing a truly useful shop open up. A barber named Mohammed took over the space of the defunct laundromat, victim of the acqua granda. The space sat empty for two years, then suddenly the classic rotating barber-pole appeared. I really hope Mohammed makes it. There must be at least one tourist who’ll need a haircut between spritzes.

When the mayor uses the term “Venice,” he is referring to the general metropolitan entity, the preponderance of which is on the mainland. Everybody knows he really only cares about the mainland: “The future of Venice,” he said openly, “is Mestre.” Take that, Venice-lovers! The future of Milwaukee may well be Sheboygan, but to someone who thinks of the Piazza San Marco when he/she hears “Venice,” Mestre is a bit much. Still, this is how it’s going. Eight of the ten city councilors are from the mainland. The ninth is in Venice itself, the tenth lives on the Lido. And of course the mayor too is from the mainland, where he has business interests. So voices speaking up for the dwindling historic center are faint and few.

Meanwhile, daily life is made up of stores closing, stores opening. Unpredictable transit strikes and all-too-predictable wailing by ACTV, we have no money we have no money. Tourists: We want them, but they’re making us crazy. The sudden drought of Russian tourists has torn a new hole in the city’s financial fabric.

Cruises: Big ships are banished from the Bacino of San Marco. The cruise ships will enter the lagoon at Malamocco, toiling like container ships up to the raggedy docks in the commercial port zone of Marghera.

The MSC “Sinfonia” opened the season by docking at Marghera on April 9, the first of the 200 cruises scheduled for this year. Sound good? Not when you compare it to the 565 cruises that stopped (or started) in Venice in 2019. But those days are gone.

MOSE: There will never be anything new to say about this. Work stopped, problems found, money gone, problems found, money arrives, work starts again, problems found, date of completion always on the horizon.

The thing is that headlines blurt out news that any Venetian already knew years ago. Example: Barnacles. Lino mentioned the inevitability of barnacle encrustation to me back in 1994. It would be impossible to astonish anybody who has kept a boat in the water here. This is as much a fact as that water is wet.

Still, somebody finally noticed the problem. In 2018, an article announced the discovery by an underwater drone that the MOSE barriers were rusting and encrusted with barnacles. Time passes, nothing is done. In 2022, another headline: Barnacles!! Or to be even more precise: Mussels.

The Guardia di Finanza disseminated a brief video showing this little voyage of discovery a few days ago. I can’t estimate how many tons of mollusks have attached themselves to the gates, but I can tell you that their weight is going to have a very serious effect on the gates’ functioning.

Turns out that the gates that have been lying in their assigned position underwater awaiting the call to block the tide have not been receiving the required and agreed-upon maintenance. The money for maintenance was allotted some time back, but it seems to have not been spent on maintenance. If the crud was predictable, so was the fate of the maintenance money.

Years ago, the cost of annual maintenance was forecast to be some 15 million euros. Then estimates of maintenance costs rose to 80 million euros, and now they’re projected to be 200 million euros per year. Where do these numbers come from? Are they breeding in dark corners, like wire hangers? In any case, vast amounts of money can’t ever sit still long enough to be spent on what they’re supposed to be spent on. When you actually need the money, somehow it’s just not there anymore.

There’s no need to read headlines, this has been going on for generations now. The big hold-back-the-tide project began in 1973, when the Special Law for Venice allotted money for a competition for designs (held in 1975). When the first stone was laid in 2003, the end was promised for 2010. We were all so young, so innocent… Then the 2014 deadline came and went, then the middle of 2018, then the beginning of 2019. The “acqua granda” of November 2019 broke several financial logjams, and work picked up with the promise of concluding in 2021. Sorry, I meant 2023. Endless years pass of “We’ll get there! Give us more money!” Lack of funds closed the works for the entire year of 2021. Rome sends millions, then more millions. And yet, somehow there is never enough.

Tourism: They’re baaaaack. Intermittently, and more often on weekends, still more often just during the day. There were a few Carnival crush-fests in the San Marco area, but nothing noteworthy. I suppose it just wouldn’t be Venice without 100,000 or more visitors in a day. And just now, on the cusp of the Easter weekend, we are back under siege again.

This is supposed to be good (even as we see the interminable lines at the vaporetto stops for boats to Murano and Burano). Venice has got to get back in the game, seeing as it’s the only game there is.

Venice isn’t the only Italian city to take a major hit from the pandemic, but I am not seeking comparisons. There were 8,800,000 visits in 2019; 2,500,000 in 2020, and a little more than 3,200,000 in 2021. Between May and August of 2021 (peak summer season) the arrivals were 54 percent fewer than in 2019.

Last January I glimpsed that a return to normal tourist business was imminent when I passed the dry cleaning shop and saw piles of hotel-room drapes.

Now vaporettos are back to being jammed with people and luggage. True, this is a holiday weekend, but the crush has become more noticeable over the past two months.

Fancy bags from fancy stores show that some of the tourists with money are returning. Too bad the Russians are gone; they’d been increasing over the years to be among the top spenders in the tourist cavalcade (fourth after Japanese, Chinese, and Canadians), spending an average of 145 euros per person per day in 2018. And they loved the many-starred hotels; almost 40 per cent of Russians stayed in the fancy hostelries.

Italian tourists are forecast to increase by 35 percent over last year, and foreign tourists will be up 43 percent. If they all went to Dior, how great would that be.

Maybe these bottles were prepared for the now-missing Russians? Stunned by a wine that costs 900 euros ($972), I discover that Solaia is produced in the Chianti Classico area and is considered “among the most influential wines in the history of Italian viticulture.” The other two bottles suddenly seem so much more approachable. Yet if there is one thing — or three — that say “tourist,” it has to be these. Have them delivered to my yacht.

And speaking of bottles, there are these little containers of unknown substances. Of course there ought to be something on sale for everybody, but the city is promising to clamp down on the shops selling the cheap tchotchkes aimed at the average yobbo. I doubt that this item will make it onto their radar, though. They’re on the lookout for cheap masks and little bobbing battery-run gondolas for your bookshelf.

Suddenly the now-reopening businesses and hotels are scrambling to find staff. The Bar Torino in Campo San Luca is looking for a woman or man to work the bar — experience required.

Waiters!! “We are seeking personnel for the (dining) room. Send your CV via email….or leave it inside! Age between 20 and 30 years old.” Evidently age requirements aren’t forbidden by law; if they were, I don’t suppose the proprietor would be so upfront about how much he prefers people in their 20s.

“Lacking chambermaids, war breaks out between hotels.” I say “chambermaid,” though maybe there are men who also clean and set up hotel rooms. But 70 percent of workers associated with tourism are women.

Unloading bags of flour at the bread bakery is another sign of the touristic return. People buy bread, sure, but restaurants and bars buy more.

Last year sometime there was a brief quiver of excitement over the resurrected idea of installing turnstiles to control the flow of tourists entering the city at certain points. That idea has been mothballed. I think we don’t want to slow them down. The eternal subject of the selling a ticket to enter Venice has also been put aside. But these ideas will be back. They’re like the swallows going to Capistrano.

One huge drawback to the renting of apartments to tourists is their garbage. Many owners leave instructions about when to leave it out for collection (on our street, the trashmen come by between 8:10 and 8:25 AM). But if for some reason you put it out much earlier, even the night before, this is what greets the dawn. Seagulls can smell your pizza box and coffee grounds and they will rip the plastic bag to shreds.

Pigeons are also fans but they don’t get a chance till the seagulls have finished.

There are two tourist-rental apartments on our tiny stretch of street. I understand that if you have a flight that leaves at 6:30 AM, you’re going to put it out when you go. Then again, there are people who put it out at 9:00 because they want to sleep late. The trashmen are not amused but they can’t leave it there.

Biennale: Yes, it is opening this year — April 23 to November 27 — and the vibrations are palpable. The small park on the Riva dei Sette Martiri tends to host more light-hearted works. I’ll just call them “works,” because I can’t bring myself to say “art.” I honestly don’t know what they are.

So here we are, caught in the endless cycle of everything. Maybe there will be something new around the next corner (or ten), but I’m not counting on it.

My vision of a perfect world: Nothing fancy, everybody getting along, nobody trying to get anywhere.

Problems, Venetian Problems

Meanwhile, in other news….

July 17, 2021 3 Comments

Now that the G20 has come and gone, the surface of life that was so agitated thereby has returned to its normal level of agitation. There are plenty of things to keep track of, to one degree or another. In some cases, to many degrees.

Here are a few of them:

REDENTORE: The annual feast of the Most Holy Redeemer is tonight and Sunday — the big waterborne festivities on Saturday, the races and big religious celebration on Sunday. Last year there were no fireworks, which left a huge hole in the festivities. This year there will be fireworks, but in a serious effort to prevent the hazardous clumping-together of crowds the city has imposed a limit of 18,000 people, total, and those persons have to have made a reservation. To reach the place or area they’ve booked, they have to show their printed ticket as well as their “Green Pass,” or other certificate of vaccination, OR a document that confirms that their swab was negative within the 48 preceding hours.

The obverse side shows my name, birth date, and a few other details not interesting to anyone but them and me. This document allows me to travel to other European countries without having to quarantine.

Barriers are being set up around the reservation-only zones. Here, this fence ought to keep the traffic lanes separated. If Carnival is any example, it won’t.

These barriers are intended to prevent people falling in the water, I suppose; maybe they should prevent people in boats trying to board somebody or put them ashore?

The rules are the ones that we all know so well by now: Masks and distancing. Tickets have been organized in sub-sectors. Redentore used to be a real let-it-all-fly sort of festa; a party now where everyone will have to behave like Captain Von Trapp’s children is going to be really different.

Boats obviously won’t be permitted to tie up to each other: social distancing afloat. No trying to pass from boat to boat. No dancing parties aboard (take that, you big floating discotheques). The watery areas are delimited according to size and the use of boat, and you have to show a printed “ticket” from your booking (on water as on land) to be permitted to enter the area. Once your boat has entered its appointed area, it is forbidden to exit, nor will it be permitted to put people ashore. Boat captains have to keep a complete list of passengers for 14 days. Also, wear your mask.

There are regulations for people booking space along the fondamentas to watch the fireworks, or to scarf their dinner, but I’m not going to go into all that. If you’ve booked a space, you already have the rules. If you haven’t booked, you’d better hop to. Preference is being given to Venetians, it says here.

Lino and I will not be there; it’s been years since we decided we couldn’t stand the mayhem of the motorboats in the dark, with their drunk drivers. We might walk up to the fondamenta dei Sette Martiri (where I didn’t see any signs of assigned places) if it’s not too crazy.

The little yellow slice, Area 5 Dogana, is the space allotted to traditional boats, either rowed or with a motor of maximum 9.9 hp. The other zones are organized for boats according to size and use (pleasure, work, etc.). No need to get into all the details. Note the white emergency exits. When Lino was a boy, the Giudecca Canal was so thickly covered with boats — all propelled by oars, of course — you could walk across them from one bank to another. And they were all massed in the Giudecca Canal to the west of the votive bridge, up toward the Molino Stucky. The Bacino of San Marco was just background decoration.

THE BIG SHIPS: Ship-haters rejoice: As of August 1, the biggest ships will no longer be permitted to pass through the city. These ships are defined as having at least one of the following characteristics: Gross tonnage above 25,000 tons; hull at the waterline longer than 180 meters; height of ship more than 35 meters, excluding ships that are motor- and sail-driven; use of fuel in maneuvering that has a percentage of sulfur equal or superior to 0.1 per cent. Like any other cargo vessel, the big cruise ships will be routed from Malamocco to Porto Marghera, one of many solutions that have been discussed since dinosaurs roamed the earth. But this is just a stopgap. The real solution is the offshore port, and that’s not happening tomorrow.

Seeing that neither Porto Marghera nor anywhere else will be ready this year, the MSC Orchestra or Magnifica and Costa Deliziosa (the only big ships on the dance card this summer) will be departing, respectively, from Monfalcone and Trieste, up along the northern Adriatic coast. Passengers arriving in Venice will be swabbed or otherwise health-checked at the Venice Maritime area, then loaded on buses and driven a few hours to their ships. So much for the thrill of cruising from Venice.

The offshore port project is going to take some time. Phase One, send in your proposals by December 31, 2021. Make sure your design can accommodate modern container ships as well as the biggest cruise ships, and make sure the port will be safe in stormy seas because there won’t be any lagoon to protect you anymore. Phase Two, five experts evaluate the proposals. Phase Three, choose the winner. That decision will be made by June 30, 2023, if all goes as planned. That’s a pretty big “if,” I feel compelled to add.

Seeing that creating the offshore port will take at least five to six years, Porto Marghera will have to be modified fairly quickly. Building the new passenger terminal there, deepening the channels and revising the current industrial docks will cost 157 million euros — a hefty sum for a temporary set-up. Then again, “temporary” has a flexible meaning here. The Accademia Bridge was built in 37 days in 1933 as a temporary structure while proposals for the real bridge were to be evaluated, and it’s still there.

I have the impression that the sudden decision on dealing with the big ships is linked somehow to the fact that UNESCO recently decided to designate the water entrance to Venice — Bacino of San Marco, Canale of San Marco and the Giudecca Canal a national monument. This is surprising in that UNESCO, when it listed Venice as a World Heritage Site in 1987, specifically included the lagoon. You wouldn’t know that by the savaging of the environment that has gone on since then, but anyway, I’d have considered the Bacino, etc. as part of the lagoon. Now it’s a national monument. Okay then.

Spare a thought, though, for the humans — 1,260 direct workers and 4,000 indirect workers — involved in what will be a radical restructuring of the whole shipping enterprise here. Many are fearing for their jobs.

Almost no workers believed that this decree would come so fast, and right in the middle of the season. The maritime agencies are also worried. Every shipping company is required by law to engage a maritime agency, but, says Michele Gallo, head of two agencies, “You can’t even think of having the same ships as before coming to the docks at Porto Marghera, using the same places as the commercial ships. This is a devastating decree.” Organizing the entry, passage and departure of so many ships through the inlet at Malamocco and along the Petroleum Canal (Canale dei Petroli) is going to be a job worthy of an air traffic controller.

By the way, all this increased traffic will make it even more important to keep the aforementioned channel dredged. However, the deeper the channel, the faster the tide enters and exits, and already this action removes millions of cubic meters of sediment from the lagoon every year. Everyone knows that the Canale dei Petroli has thus caused incalculable damage to the lagoon and its extraordinary ecosystems. Ironic that UNESCO decided to designate part of the lagoon as a national monument with the notion of protecting it, but they seem not to have taken into account the effect so much extra traffic will have in a channel that essentially behaves as if it were a water vacuum sucking the soil from the lagoon.

This was the lagoon’s circulatory system in 1901. Lots of arteries and veins and capillaries kept the lagoon biome thriving.

In 1932. Notice the large natural channel at the bottom of the picture — the inlet at Malamocco. Here it is the shape of an oxbow. Works fine for the lagoon, but wasn’t at all suitable for commercial traffic.

The oxbow was furloughed when the Canale dei Petroli was dug in 1964-68. The channel shoots straight from the inlet on the right to the shoreline, and was dug along the shoreline in order to allow the tankers and other big merchant ships to reach Porto Marghera in the upper left-hand corner. After only two years, the effect was evident. Today, in view of the cruise ships arriving, dredging the channel has already begun, and will continue for 12 months. A deeper channel means the tide will be faster than before. All the little canals that used to be there helped to slow the tide down, but as you see, the tide won.

On the left you can see the tide patterns before the Austrian domination (1814), while on the right the tide patterns in 2009. So by all means make all the big ships traverse the lagoon from Malamocco for however many years it will take for the offshore port to be built. I’d just avoid presenting myself as a defender of the lagoon at the same time.

FREE MARCO ZENNARO:

Marco Zennaro (veneziatoday.it)

The 46-year-old Venetian businessman, well-known and loved by many, has been in prison in Sudan for three months. He is the owner of a company that produces electric transformers that has been doing business in Sudan for years. He has been accused by a Sudanese company of fraud, but the situation is an utter tangle of claims and characters. However, the photograph of the cell in which he was kept for two months with 30 other men, at temperatures of 114 degrees F., was all too comprehensible. Yes, the Italian government has attempted to intervene; yes, money has been paid, but turns out someone wants still more.

Now he is on house arrest in a Sudanese hotel, awaiting the next hearing (August 9) in the string of court appearances that may finally resolve the problem. He has already been absolved of two accusations, but it’s hard to know who wants what at this point. Of course money is at the core of this. Marco is well-known in the Venetian world of sport — Venetian rowing, for one thing, as well as rugby. As it happens, Lino has known him since he (Marco) was a boy. Also, Lino taught his mother how to row.

This one is written in English, no less.

“We Support Marco.” Petitions and initiatives continue. On June 13, some 15 Venetian rowers conducted a 24-hour event in which they took turns rowing from the Rialto to the Salute and back a la valesana (one person with two oars). They continued from noon June 13 to noon June 14 to raise awareness of this situation and urge its resolution. But here we still are.

“Let’s get Marco back.” This banner has been posted around much of Italy by now, by a far-right “association of social promotion” called CasaPound. (lagazzettatorinese.it)

MOSE:

Are we heading back to this again? Oh boy.

Mose worked last winter (except for one time), so you might think all is well? You would think wrong. I’m starting to dread the winter again.

The plan was to complete all the work by June 30, and declare the project finished on December 31, 2021. But that timetable is now in tatters for various reasons, primarily money problems (as always). The refusal of some suppliers to continue without payment also slowed things down, and the work was officially suspended yesterday, July 16, even though it actually had been stopped for three months already.

Without regular tests, without personnel from the companies involved, without some degree of ongoing maintenance, it’s not certain the gates will even rise when needed. Broken elements haven’t been replaced, parts are deteriorating because there is still no air conditioning in the underground gallery. There is severe corrosion that has been reported for years, to the frames of the underwater tensioners as well as the hinges of the gates. Encrustation of barnacles and other crud will certainly make the gates heavier. The gates at San Nicolo’ have been underwater for eight years now.

Bids have been solicited for a maintenance program budgeted at 64 million euros, even though some estimates maintain that at least 100 million euros will be needed for this every year. (Personal note: Lino has never batted an eye at the titanic construction costs. His refrain has always been simply “And the cost of the maintenance?”)

A Venetian deputy in Parliament, Orietta Vanin, has written to Enrico Giovannini, the Minister of Public Works, saying “A plan is missing for the launch of the work and the completion of the machinery. When is Mose going to be tested? What is the risk to the city in view of autumn? At what point are the interventions for the security of the Piazza San Marco? We’ve asked several times but have never had a response.”

TOURISM:

Not exactly a horde at 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning. I did see a group of about 15 people being guided around the Rialto Market.

The infamous hordes are not yet swarming the streets; tourists there are, many of them still day-trippers, but not insupportable numbers, by any means. We could probably use a good horde or two right now. Happily for everyone, American travelers are finally permitted to fly to Venice (I presume also to the rest of Italy). Delta Airlines has non-stop flights from Atlanta and New York, and the other day 200 passengers from the USA disembarked to great, if silent, applause. That’s just a drop, however, as the Venice airport is currently handling 15,000 “passages” a day, a mere third of their daily pre-pandemic total.

Still, no coherent plans for managing the eventual masses have yet been proposed. The secretary of the artisans’ association, Gianni De Cecchi, says “The pandemic has passed in vain.” So stand by for the usual complaints, protests, and laments to come forth again. Probably toward the end of next summer, if forecasts can be trusted. Stay tuned.

I like these tourists. Too bad there aren’t enough of them to keep Venice afloat.

I hang the sheets out to dry, he raises his sail. The life, she goes on.

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