This is canottaggio, a sport which motondoso has doomed to imminent extinction in Venice. A few clubs still have some rowers, but training is feasible almost exclusively in the winter. This image, taken in January last year, shows some rowers from the Querini rowing club making the most of the broad stretch of water by Sant’ Erasmo (here looking toward San Nicolo’ on the Lido), an area which in a few months will be a boiling maelstrom of waves. Between May and October, training will have to be done at dawn, if at all.
What I love are the glimpses of life I get when I’m walking around the city with Lino. Lino’s life, mostly, which by this point extends and entwines itself with what seems like virtually everyone and -thing we encounter. I’m convinced that I could point at anybody (or thing) at random, anywhere in the city, and it would bring some reminiscence to the fore.
Sometimes the reminiscences arrive under their own steam.
The other morning we were walking from San Giovanni e Paolo (please note: No matter what the guidebooks insist on claiming, primarily because most of them repeat what they’ve read in other guidebooks — fancy way of saying “copy” — NOBODY says “Zanipolo.” I have seen it written as the name of a transport company, but as for saying it? Never. They might have done so 50 or 100 years ago, but even if the Venetian language is still thriving, it too is metamorphosing, and certain words and phrases are as remote as “Forsooth.” People here go to the Maldives and Thailand on vacation and have all the satellite TV in the world. And it’s hard to maintain quaint old-fashioned modes of speech, no matter how much certain foreigners wish you would, when your kids watch “The Simpsons” and MTV). Anybody who wants Venetians to be saying “Zanipolo” almost certainly wants Americans to say “Goldarn it” and Mexicans to say “Caramba.” Except that specimens of the latter two might possibly still be found in a grotto somewhere. If you find a Venetian who has just said “Zanipolo,” I want you to bring him or her to our house and I’ll fix him or her dinner and take pictures of him or her and send them to the Gazzettino.
So as I say, we were walking from there toward the Strada Nova, wending through the mid-morning traffic. A man overtook us.
“Ciao Lino,” he said as he passed, without stopping.
“Oh, ciao!”
And he was gone.
“That man used to be a national rowing champion,” Lino said. By “rowing” he was referring to canottaggio, or what is also called here “English-style rowing.” This is a sport with a glorious history of Venetian athletes but which now barely survives, due to the inexorable increase of motondoso, by eating tree bark and licking dew-dripping leaves. So to speak. So a national champion from Venice is not to be taken lightly.
“His son also rowed,” Lino continued.
“One day they (the Italian Olympic committee) contacted his son and invited him to join the national Olympic team. No tests, no trials, no eliminations. Just like that. He was that good.
“And his son said, ‘Nah. Not interested.’ Nobody could make him care. So he didn’t go.”
This photograph was not made in black and white. That’s the way it looks when water comes to Venice not from below, but from all around. I would hazard to say that this winter we’ve had more days and nights of fog than we have of acqua alta. I’m not going to check the records, but that’s my impression.
Do you know how to say “lots of water” in Venetian? Even though we live at street level, at our house it isn’t “acqua alta.” It isn’t even really “motondoso.” It’s “Happy New Year.”
For some reason, water events seem to prefer holiday periods. Not just in our little hovel, but in Venice in general.
Example: Some years ago, when we were living in a rental hovel on the other side of Venice, our New Year’s Eve afternoon was enlivened suddenly by the sound of running water. As we were one floor up from the ground, it wasn’t the rushing of high tide. A quick stupefied glance revealed that it was the rushing of water from the bathroom of the tenant just above us. Water coming down the wall and forming a pond. Happily, it was clean water. Unhappily, it was bringing part of his floor/our ceiling with it.
We were able to call our landlady (this was in the epoch before cell phones, so it was a certifiable miracle that she was at home, and answered the call. I say this because if you were a landlady and your phone rang on New Year’s Eve, would you answer it?).
She came, she looked, she called some mysterious shadow-dwelling plumber she undoubtedly paid sottobanco, as we say here (small, unmarked bills….), because a plumber with all his papers in order and tax receipts arranged by date would have been unreachable till Epiphany.
He stopped the flow. That’s really all that matters to our story. The rest of the work got done in a scheduled sort of way, and I made the most of the chaos and dirt to sand the kitchen walls and repaint. Tiny apartments are so annoying, until you have work to do. Then you’re really glad that you have so little space.
Years pass, and we’re in our new hovel. I think it was the day before New Year’s Eve a couple of years ago when Lino remarked, “Do you hear a noise in the kitchen?” (Why is it always the kitchen? Maybe we should wall it off and cook outside, like nomads.)
Behind the tiled wall under the sink, there was indeed a liquid sound, the sort of sound that is so soothing when you have it on your white-noise machine. In ErlaWorld, it’s a sound soon to be followed by hammering and cracking. We found a plumber by urgently appealing to the man at the Bottegon, our mega-hardware-and-everything-else-except-jars-of-buckwheat-honey store. My “urgent appeal” look must be something like the eyes-getting-larger-and-more-pathetic of Puss in Boots in the Shrek movies. Added to which gaze would be desperation and a tinge of threat.
Yes, there was indeed a porous pipe behind the wall, joyously leaking water out of the conduit and onto our water bill that month. The plumber fixed it. He didn’t fix the hole in the wall, though. It’s still there, as are a couple of the tiles. He had to get home for the rest of his holiday and we had no intention of paying a plasterer to make it all perfect again. Besides — what if we needed to get at that pipe again?
This year’s event didn’t involve water that you could fill a glass with, but water there was. Our refrigerator door came off, so the warming machine gently released liquid from here and there. No, the door didn’t come off just like that; it had been giving every sign of imminent prostration for months. If it had been a mule, we’d have just kept hitting it on its rump and yelling. As of New Year’s Day, no more rump, no more yelling.
So the day after New Year’s we went to buy a new consumer durable. If we didn’t have all that fish frozen, I’d have suggested we experiment with living without a fridge, at least till summer. (Lino would certainly have considered that an americanata).
Consumer durables after Christmas usually mean plasma TVs and other glamorous frippery. We’re just as happy with our new appliance. It was delivered this morning, and we’ve washed it and re-stocked it, and its own mother couldn’t be more proud of it than we are.
If Jean Dujardin were coming to lunch, I’d really try to do something about this hideosity. As is it, till a solution is found, there’s no point in applying paint that’s just going to fall off again.
But there’s more, and it doesn’t involve New Year, as in the holiday, but the New Year, as in 2013, I fear.
The latest low-grade chronic water event to moisten our lives is a blocked tube or pipe passing from somewhere upstairs (there are two storeys above us) down into the ground by our front door. This tube, like many tubes in Venice, is concealed in the wall, which makes dealing with it unpleasantly inconvenient.
But we know it’s there because its oozing dampness is deteriorating the wall indoors, and outdoors as well. I’d be willing to overlook the humidity outside, but what we see inside isn’t good.
The retired builder living on the top floor came to look at it, and deepened his investigation by knocking open a hole. This was intended to release the humidity (otherwise known as solving the problem). He wanted very much not to have to theorize that the water might be blocked at his level. However, Lino went up to see his apartment, and says there are more humidity-releasing holes in his walls than the perforations in the proverbial Swiss cheese.
Rising damp in Venice is implacable, and capillary action here evidently is constrained by no force we know of. We can see it in the bathroom wall, if you’d like to know. If there were a building in Venice that went as high as the exosphere, there would still be dampness in its walls making those ugly blister bubbles.
I appreciate that the man upstairs didn’t really want to go so far as to discover the location of the blockage, in case it should turn out to be on his floor. So he left the hole to do its dehydration work (or not), and now he gives us fresh fish occasionally when he comes back from a session out in the lagoon. I interpret this as hush money to prevent us from pursuing the subject. So far, it has worked very well. The wall just stays as it is, and we eat the fish. I guess this will be fine till the wall falls down.
I look inside this hole and it’s like looking into a dissected frog. I have no clue as to what’s going on here or how it’s supposed to work. If anybody can enlighten me, don’t hold back.
Seeing how catastrophes prefer holidays, I figure that whatever is likely to happen next won’t be before next New Year’s Eve. I suppose we could take the Situation in Hand and apply ourselves seriously to Finding a Solution, but everything here is just too much trouble. Or expensive. Or both.
The mark of internal humidity is uncomfortably clear outside the front door. But you get into a frame of mind that interprets “Not getting worse” as “Everything’s okay.”
This, in a microcosm, is one explanation of the picturesque degradation that makes Venetian houses and streets so charming to everybody but their tenants. Small problems don’t get fixed in order to prevent their becoming large problems because if you’re going to have to be hugely inconvenienced and impoverished by the expense of repairs, you might as well wait till it’s utterly unavoidable.
Water from below doesn’t afflict only the humble residents. The city got a direct shot of it just a few days ago when a water pipe busted under the Riva degli Schiavoni. In minutes a sort of vortex had deranged an area of pavement between the Danieli Hotel and the Londra Palace. And the residents of those, and nearby lodgings, found themselves without water.
There is something a little droll about living in the middle of water and not having any when you need it (of course it’s not the same water — I merely jest). And I suppose I’m sorry that people spending hundreds of euros a night should not be able to turn the tap and brush their teeth, or whatever. A quick-witted person prone to philosophy might have said, “This is great! It’s just the old days, when doges roamed the earth and people got their water in buckets from wells.” But probably nobody said that.
We experienced a brief period of low water pressure, that was all, and the water wallahs installed a shunt in record time. One has to be reasonable; that particular pipe was 130 years old, like a number of pipes still slaving away under the paving stones. Eventually, like our fridge, it just couldn’t do it anymore.
We went for a walk toward San Marco the morning after. “Well,” said Lino; “let’s go see where they struck oil.”
Too bad it was only water and not black gold that burst through the street here. Maybe then the city would stop saying it has no money.I agree that a water event of this nature doesn’t have the glamour of acqua alta, but it’s got a lot of extra negative aspects to it. At least when there’s acqua alta you can still brush your teeth.
From the Rialto Bridge, you can see four busy vaporettos practically nose to tail. And this was a meaningless morning in April. As summer approaches, there are more. Actually, there are more now, too. It’s not that one of them makes so many waves, it’s that all of them together make plenty. So a solution was sought. And bought and paid for.
Every time I tell an arriving friend that a single ride on the vaporetto here is going to cost 7 euros ($9.26), I stifle a shriek. Though if I were to let myself shriek, it might cover the sound of my friend’s shriek. Or gasp. Or disbelieving laugh.
Why vocalize at all? Because the city covers roughly a mere four square miles (ten square kilometers), and while ten dollars may not seem unreasonable if you want to travel the length of the Grand Canal on the faithful #1 from Piazzale Roma on to the end of the line at the Lido (apart from the crushing crowds, it could qualify as one of the cheaper scenic boat tours in the world, I guess), it seems a demented price if you only need to go four or five stops.
For the record, I have done some calculations, and the average distance between stops is 1,141 feet (348 meters). The time involved in each leg is usually around five minutes. If you only need to go a few stops, the price comes to a lot per minute. It’s true that you can often reach your destination faster on foot, but not if you’re lost, and dragging suitcases the size and weight of the foundation stones of the Great Ziggurat of Babylon.
Note to readers: There are unlimited-ride tickets available for specified lengths of time for much less per ride, but that’s beside my point.
Returning to my point: The cost of public transportation in the most-beautiful-city-in-the-world. It wasn’t always thus, back when there were more residents than tourists. But over the years, although the number of residents has fallen, the number of tourists has risen which, according to my primitive notion of economics, ought to mean that the price of a ticket should shrink. Silly me.
“We have no money” remains the one-size-fits-all justification given by the ACTV, the transport company, for anything it does or doesn’t do; it has adopted this motto from the city government as a whole (note: the city is a part shareholder in the ACTV).
But why do we have no money? One reason could be the effect of the thieving ticket-sellers; there was a lively period in which sticky-fingered employees were turning up all over, discovered selling tickets worth a fraction of the price they charged for them and pocketing the difference, or counterfeiting tickets (back in the paper-ticket days), or other simple little dodges that worked surprisingly well for a surprisingly long time, taking home what amounted to multiple thousands of euros.
Another reason for the belt-tightening which was given in the somewhat distant past (and my favorite): “Do you have any idea what a can of paint costs?” Visions pass through my mind of surging oceans of paint upon which little bits of tickets are floating.
But a new glimpse of why they have no money may be discerned in a recent series of detailed articles in the Gazzettino, and the reason is the simplest of all: The ACTV has no money because they’ve spent way too much of it, particularly on failed conveyances.
This is the “Waves-eater” as shown in the Gazzettino (uncredited). If I had time, I’d try to find out why it wasn’t lagoon-worthy, just out of morbid curiosity.
There was the revolutionary vaporetto dubbed the “Mangia-onde” (or Waves-Eater, a nice, Norse-saga sort of nickname) which was going to banish waves and make their destructive effects a fading memory. It was built by the M Ship Co, of San Diego, California. One craft was bought and came to Venice in 1999 to great fanfare and trailing clouds of glory and the promise of the salvation of the city from motondoso.
But it was too good to be true. Not because it created waves, but because it created problems. For example, it wasn’t adapted to lagoon conditions (I take that to mean it was unstable); it didn’t pass under the bridges, such as the Ponte delle Guglie, and also the hull wasn’t fireproof.
The Mangia-onde was taken to a shipyard in Castello where it sat, abandoned, for 13 years. A few weeks ago this once-proud herald of the future, which had cost 900,000,000 lire (464,811 euros, or $651,061) was sold to a private buyer for 20,000 euros ($26,465). Without the motor. Nobody seems to know what happened to it.
The current director of the ACTV, Maurizio Castagna, was also director in the late Nineties. He explained that the boat was put aside because “It didn’t meet the standards of the Italian Naval Registry, and also because of a series of onerous (that means “expensive”) maintenance interventions and adaptations of the boat to the lagoon area.” One certainly couldn’t be expected to know what the legal nautical standards were (I’m thinking of the fireproofing), or what characteristics a boat has to have in order to putter around the lagoon, especially if you’re in the aquatic transportation business. So that was that.
There is now the “Sandra Z.” to consider, a motonave which the Gazzettino has dubbed the “latest ‘hole in the water’ of the ACTV.” She too was built and unveiled to great pomp in 1999, and since 2006 she too has been nestling in mothballs.
This unoffending ship was born under an evil star, it seems. An expensive evil star, too: Four million euros, or more than five million dollars. Pretty fancy for a floating storehouse.
She was built (in Messina, curiously, not at a Venetian shipyard, but let’s not get distracted) to carry 1,200 passengers — the perfect vehicle for the pilgrims traveling around Italy in the Jubilee year of 2000 (who never materialized, in Venice, anyway). But even if they had shown up, they’d have had to start a new round of prayers and supplications after climbing aboard.
The system of propulsion created serious problems of maneuverability. The “Schottel” (name of its German company) enables the propellers to work at 360 degrees, which — says the Gazzettino — transformed the ship into a sort of spinning top that couldn’t be managed by its captains, not to mention the unpleasant effect on the passengers.
I am not qualified to make any judgment on the qualities of this propulsion system; I have no doubt that it is excellent in many situations. Just not on a motonave. Which couldn’t have been tested, it seems, before it was too late.
Four months after its launch, it ran into the wall at the cemetery island of San Michele (four injured); not long after, it ran into the dock at Punta Sabbioni. The electronic system went crackerdogs. Finally, in July, 2002, the “Sandra Z.,” pulling away from the Ponte della Paglia by the Doge’s Palace, caused two gondolas to run into each other and their passengers ended up in the drink.
She kept on randomly running into docks until 2006, when the ACTV tied her up and turned her into a floating storehouse.
Cost: 7 miliards of the old lire (4,000,000 euro, or $5,293,000).
“No ghe xe schei.” We have no money. I begin to see why. And I begin to see why vaporetto tickets have to paid for with small gold ingots.
So the Costa Concordia ran aground (January 13) and the administration here instantly went into several varieties of fits to show how eager it was to ensure that no such catastrophe could ever be inflicted on the most-beautiful-city-in-the-world by one of these leviathans, whose number is increasing at a Biblical rate.
Passengers see a ship. The anti-ship cadre sees a potential disaster. The city government sees a floating Brink's truck loaded with money, without which Venice can no longer survive. You decide.
Mission: Banish the Big Ships from the Bacino of San Marco where they might well run into a section of historic and irreplaceable real estate. I haven’t seen any calculations on the odds of this risk, but they may be similar to the odds of winning the lottery.
Lots of people who buy a lottery ticket think/hope that the probability of winning could be pretty good. In the same way, lots of people who see the big ships passing think/fear that the probability of a huge catastrophe could be pretty good. The distance between “could” and “might” is hard to measure when emotions run high.
The mayor, of course, promised rapid solutions, to be followed, naturally, by immediate results (hence the use of the word “solution”). As expected, “rapid” is morphing into “eventual” on its way to “maybe” and then — who knows? — “never.”
The Petroleum Canal, which has already done so much damage, is the right angle on the left of the frame. The proposed new extension to the cruise port is the slightly sagging line connecting it to Venice. The idea would be to assign either the arrival or departure of a big ship via this route,thereby halving the number of transits of the bacino of San Marco.
The first proposal launched — and so quickly as to have barely resulted from first thoughts, much less second thoughts — was to dig a new canal. The environmental damage this would cause is so vast and so obvious that it’s hard to believe it was even discussed. A large amount of information demonstrating what a terrible idea it is was instantly thrown in front of this notion to prevent its going any further (latest detail: deepening the Canale di Sant’ Angelo would mean having to tear out and reposition somewhere else a certain quantity of important cables buried there, not to mention the high-tension-wire pylons flanking it). Even the cost of this undertaking hasn’t caused this notion to be officially abandoned, but its momentum seems to have slowed.
But if a new canal makes no sense, the proposal made a few days ago obliterates the line between creative and cuckoo. I wouldn’t even have mentioned it, but I wanted to show how really hard it is to come up with an alternative to the present system.
Ferruccio Falconi, a retired port pilot (who you might think would be more familiar with the lagoon and its behavior than most), has pulled the pin on the following idea and tossed it at the groin of common sense.
He proposes gouging out the mudbanks between the island of Sant’ Erasmo and the inlet at San Nicolo’, an area known as bacan’ (bah-KAHN). On the map, it looks like useless empty space longing for a purpose in life. But it already has a purpose — two of them.
This view shows the lagoon inlet at San Nicolo' on the left; in the middle is the island created for the MOSE project, which has already affected tidal behavior. "Bacan'" is the beige area in the big channel to the right, a swath of mudbanks with a temporarily exposed islet fronting the lower edge of the island of Sant' Erasmo. (Photo: Chris 73, Wikimedia Commons).
Its first purpose is the same as that of similar areas which compose the bloody-but-unbowed natural lagoon ecosystem. Mudbanks and barene, the remnants of marshy wetlands scattered around, are an essential component of the lagoon environment. You may not care about clams and herons and glasswort, but these formations also slow the speed of the tide, something that ought to interest people ashore in the most-beautiful-city at least as much as the vision of a ship heading toward the fondamenta.
Its second purpose is as one of the all-time favorite places for thousands of pleasure-boaters to spend long summer days swimming and clamming and picnicking.
Doesn't this look neat and tidy? Eight ships all snugged up together. While constant dredging would undoubtedly be required to keep the area from refilling with sand and mud, that effort would be helped by the vortexes created by cruise-ship propellers. (Photo: Il Gazzettino)
But according to Falconi, the creation of a basin where nature never put, or wanted, or intends to keep one, would be the perfect place to park the cruise ships. Ergo, there would also have to be the construction of a huge jetty.
As simple geometry, it looks okay, though I failed geometry. But apart from the problems the size, weight, and propeller-power those eight little rectangles represent, there is also the inconvenient fact that Sant’ Erasmo is an island, raising the issue of by what means the floating Alps of the sea would be provisioned, and how the passengers would arrive and depart.
Simple: By boat. Thereby increasing by several powers of ten the amount of waves (motondoso) caused by the multiplied number of motorized craft running around the area (barges, taxis, launches, and scows carrying trucks). Motondoso has already damaged a lot of the lagoon, so this new activity would eradicate a new chunk of what’s left. The summer motorboats are already sufficiently destructive — why would even more be seen as a good thing?
This idea is yet another example of the point where Feasibility and Desirability break up, despite the best efforts of people with assorted motives to make them get married and have children.
The "Ruby Princess" backing out of its berth at Tronchetto, like its companions, scours up a lot of sediment, not all of which settles back where it came from.
The following letter to the Gazzettino (March 29, 2012) gives an excellent analysis of this suggestion (translated by me):
LAGUNA CROCIERE E GRANDI NAVI (Lagoon, cruises, and big ships)
I read in the Gazzettino of the new proposal to “save” the cruises.
One appreciates the fantasy that unfortunately is right in step with the temerity of certain choices which we see at all institutional levels in the management of this problem.
To excavate bacan’ at Sant’ Erasmo to make it feasible for the big ships to maneuver and moor, ships which are tending to get bigger, would signify changing the hydrodynamics of the North Lagoon.
The creation of the new island in front of the inlet (at San Nicolo’) has already caused an increase in the velocity of the incoming tide, creating hydrodynamic imbalances with important consequent damage to the city.
To create a basin of 12 meters (40 feet) deep, at the least, to move and accommodate ships would make even that piece of lagoon into a piece of the sea.
Perhaps the fanciful pilot who has come up with this “loveliness” has forgotten about the abyss in front of San Nicolo’ with the resulting collapse of the bastions of the Fort of Sant’ Andrea a few years ago.
One understands that unfortunately the mentality still hasn’t changed: One tries to resolve a problem creating others. Or to put it this way: the application of the theory that has created MOSE: one creates a “solution” which, to talk about it, resolves the effects but not the cause.
The question arises spontaneously: Is the port worth the city?
(signed) Manuel Vecchina, Venezia
Excellent question, but don’t put it to Falconi. He’s already got the answer.
Here's a view of the area where the eight ships would park, with Sant' Erasmo in the background. Low tide reveals how much mud and sand there is, and how far below the surface it is. Guess Vittorio Orio will have to find another place to work on his mascareta, to make room for the Queen Victoria, the Norwegian Gem, and so on.A winter view of the same area, seen from the shore of Sant' Erasmo. It may look empty, but you should just see how much life there is bustling around in there.And here's a glimpse of how much life is bustling around the surface on a typical summer day here. Actually, this is nothing -- there are boats anchored all over bacan'.Egrets like to eat too, but if the big ships move in, all this will wash out to sea and the birds will have to bring their lunch with them.By "big ships" I mean something like this.
The Venetian lagoon is one of the most important coastal ecosystems in the entire Mediterranean. A century ago there were 35 square miles of salt-marsh wetlands in the lagoon; due to erosion by motondoso and the tidal force increased by the Petroleum Canal, by 1990 there were only 18 square miles left. Now we have MOSE, the floodgates whose installation required extreme deepening of the inlets, creating even stronger tidal flows.
In little more than 30 years, some 25,000,000 cubic meters of sediment have been flushed out to sea. At the current rate of erosion, the World Wildlife Fund has estimated that by 2050 there will be no wetlands left. So Venice is spending masses of money to rebuild a batch of them where they’ve been eroded away. Where they will be eroded away again. Now we want a fantasy port to speed up the process which is turning the lagoon into a bay of the sea?
I sometimes think that if these people want to change the lagoon so much, why don’t they just drop a bomb on it, and get it over with?
The fort of Sant' Andrea was built in the mid-1500's to defend the approach to Venice from enemies entering at San Nicolo'. The cannon were placed at the waterline in order to blast out the hulls of any approaching enemy ships. At low tide the cement apron is easy to see.
The reference to the Fort of Sant’ Andrea in Vecchini’s letter recalls the fact that some years ago (even before MOSE) the force of the tide was eroding the island beneath this historic structure, and the walls of the entrance were beginning to sag and open up. Solution: Throw masses of cement on the shallow lagoon bottom in front of it to stop the slow-motion collapse. When we row past there, we have to avoid what is essentially a broad cement shelf reaching outward from the fort. Of course I’m glad it’s there. I’m just saying.
Venice wanted the ships, but playing with them and their effects is beginning to look a lot like getting into a game of strip poker with no cards at all.
