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Time and tide: Saving Venice
By Scott Eyman
Palm Beach Post
May 5, 2002
Venice is a miracle. It even feels like a miracle, bathed in a strange,
pearly light that's as much a treasure as any Titian.
After Rome fell, Venice ruled the eastern Mediterranean
for more than 500 years, not through military means but simply by controlling
commerce. In those years, the Piazza San Marco was truly the center of
the civilized world.
But since Napoleon ended the Venetian Republic in 1797,
Venice has been the Miss Havisham of cities, subsisting on its dense,
baroque architectural and sense of the past, and reliably sending writers
and artists into orgasmic states.
Everything about the city is jury-rigged, especially
its construction. The immense stone palaces are essentially held up by
an interlocking series of wooden poles, 10 to 15 feet long, buried in
the mud of the Venetian lagoon, that have been nearly petrified by the
passing centuries. Oak planks were laid across the top of the pilings,
followed by Istrian marble, an impermeable stone serving as a sort of
foundation, followed by rows of brick.
The miracle is in terrible trouble, but then, Venice
has been in trouble for a long time. There are at least five levels of
pavement in St. Mark's Square beneath the level where the tourists and
pigeons now congregate -- as the sea rose over the years, the Venetians
just raised the pavement.
The sea gave birth to Venice, and now the sea is taking
her back. A hundred years ago, St. Mark's was covered by water at extreme
high tide about a half-dozen times a year; in 1999, knee-high water was
present in St. Mark's Square 99 times. That, however, was minor compared
to the catastrophic floods of 1966, when a storm arrived at the same time
as high tide and deposited 6 feet of water in the city. Homes and businesses
were devastated, and dozens of historic buildings were damaged. To this
day, you can see the waterline from that flood on hundreds of buildings.
That was the worst flood ever, but as recently as November
2000, a sirocco pushed nearly 5 feet of water into the city, flooding
93 percent of the historical center. Scientists believe that, if nothing
changes, by 2055 most of the center of Venice will be underwater on a
daily basis.
John Keahey's Venice Against the Sea is a journalist's
account of the struggle to save one of the world's great cities, even
as its own population bails out, in both senses of the phrase.
The population that totaled 184,000 in 1950 is down
to 60,000. Eighty percent of the 10 million yearly visitors are day-trippers
from cruise ships -- few stay in the hotels.
Between the rising water that has seeped into the bricks
and caused them to begin crumbling, the exodus of the population and the
corresponding deterioration of services, Venice is growing less livable
every year, if no less enchanting.
What can be done to save it?
In the long term, nothing. In another 200 years or
so, barring divine intervention, Venice will drown. The primary vehicles
for short-term survival are giant gates to be built just beneath then.
When the alarm for high tide is sounded, the gates will rise above the
water and prevent flooding.
A similar project was installed in the London borough
of Greenwich, near the Millennium Dome, and has worked very well. The
English installation took about 10 years, while the Italians have been
wrangling over everything for fully 30 years, with no sign of construction
anytime soon. (In that time, the cost has ballooned from $367 million
to around $3 billion.)
Smaller projects are happening, notably $24 million
being spent to revamp the subsurface and drainage system of St. Mark's
Square so that routine high tides will be kept out.
Keahey seems to think that much of the bottleneck is
a function of natural Italian attitude, which, in terms of Venice, can
be summarized as "What is the problem? The water goes up; it goes down.
No one is hurt. This has been happening for centuries, and we are still
here!"
Italians are instinctive anarchists. The trains reliably
run on time, but the people are essentially sybarites and work in order
to live, not the other way around. Their attitude toward government is
that it is an amusing irrelevance, which is why there is a new Italian
government about every 18 months. This, remember, is the nation that elected
a porn star to the legislature -- which, now that I think of it, is a
more sensible protest vote than Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan.
To get by, the Italians rely on guile and a bewildering
bureaucracy. At one point, the Italians were taxing at 12 percent the
foreign money that, you should pardon the expression, was flooding into
Venice to finance restoration. At the same time, they were withholding
their own money.
Venice in Peril, one of 29 private groups funding art
restoration projects, began work at the Church of the Madonna dell' Orto
in Cannaregio -- the parish church of Tintoretto -- on the theory that
it would take about $1 million and two years. It took four times the money
and 10 years -- the building disintegrated nearly every time it was touched,
and massive amounts of the structure had to be rebuilt, using, of course,
original materials and methods.
It would be easier to accept Keahey's unease about
laissez-faire Italians and resolute Americans if it wasn't for the immediate
example of 30 years of politicized stalling over the Everglades. And don't
expect our government to do anything about rising ocean levels until the
Intracoastal begin slapping at CityPlace.
Venice Against the Sea is well-researched and
cleanly written, but it has a provisional feel about it -- a report from
the front lines about a city that, along with Paris, is itself a work
of art.
Whether Venice can survive for another millennium won't
be known for a good 10 years. That book, still to be written, will, one
hopes, have a more upbeat ending than Keahey's.
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