Venice: future overcast

Gherardo Ortalli

Venice! Centuries of resolute effort went into creating it and now it seems that destruction of the distinctive features that make the city so extraordinarily unique is taking no more than a few decades. There is no doubt that the houses, the calli, the churches and the palazzi will continue to exist; the income they can generate if skilfully exploited by the market is certain to guarantee their survival. What point would there be in destroying a money-making machine? What is rapidly and perhaps irreversibly wasting away is not so much bricks and mortar as the city as a living organism and the witness it still bears to outstandingly civilized values and a matchless cultural heritage, none of which can even remotely be quantified in monetary terms.

A long series of troubled events had to run their course before Venice put down roots amid the brackish waters of the lagoon, starting with the invasions of the V and VI centuries that swept aside the Roman Empire and set in motion the movement of people searching for safety and which led to the new settlements on the islands of the Lagoon. Then there was a wait until the VIII century turned into the IX before the island-dwellers around Rialto began to develop the functions characteristic of an urban centre; and only at the beginning of the X century did the people of the time start to refer to the settlement as a city. This was the civitas Rivoalti, the “city of Rialto”, which grew to become the heart of one of the most highly esteemed states in Europe.

Long years of fortune and success eventually gave way to more difficult times. The crisis following the fall of the Serenissima Repubblica in 1797, in the Napoleonic period, brought dramatic impoverishment, also as regards works of art. Thousands at a time were sold at auction. State papers of 1811 record that the Gentile Bellini polyptych at the Church of San Zulian was sold off for 20 lire! Economic recovery later in the XIX century, and the phase of industrialization in the period dominated by Cini and Volpi revived matters to some extent but then the capital (and control) of the great corporate engines passed increasingly into outside hands. Even the great hotels went the same way.

All that’s left to today’s Venetians are indeed the bricks and mortar, and even these (though they do still remain – in part – under Venetian control) are being bought up, more and more by non-Venetians who know how to invest their money shrewdly (with the spin-off of being able to spend a few days a year in a dream city). It matters little that another side-effect of these out-of-control mechanisms is the expulsion of residents; people coming from outside see the city full of people and find it difficult to understand that in fact the population is draining away. A few figures will quickly adjust the perspective: immediately after the Second World War there were 178,000 inhabitants and in 1960 there were still 145,000; now they don’t even reach 60,000. The average age is rising all the time and young people and the more vulnerable members of society are being systematically excluded, the victims of an apparently unstoppable process. And what sort of a city is one emptied of its inhabitants?

This raises the old question of what we are trying to save in safeguarding Venice, for Venice is an amalgam of many things. It is a marvellous museum, a splendid built environment with matchlessly memorable views, a whole series of traditional activities, a dialect of its own, a exceptional place to pursue studies, a way of being born, living and dying that the rest of the world does not know or has forgotten. To save a museum or a scenic view or a dialect may be important to some, but we believe that the exceptional quality of Venice lies in its embodiment of all these things (and more besides) and therefore that really to safeguard Venice means safeguarding its complex whole, not single elements, however extraordinary they may be. Every aspect deserves respect if the ultimate object of our effort is to protect the delicately balanced whole.

There is no question but that certain elements of the system are more delicate than others. To start with there is Venice’s special relationship with water: symbiosis with the sea and the lagoon characterized its birth and development and defence of the city still involves defence of the waters that have always been both friend and potential enemy. A dramatic example of this is provided by the events that followed the great flood that brought the city to its knees in 1966, events which unfortunately show that the authorities were simply not up to dealing with the problems at their real level of seriousness. Six years of studies led to the Special Law for Venice (no. 171 of 1973), which identified safeguarding actions that were considered so urgent that the government policy statements approved in 1975 provided for extraordinary procedures to ensure their immediate implementation. One of the measures ordered was action to modify the cross-section of the channels through which the sea enters the lagoon, reducing their depth and therefore the tidal flow; another was to reopen the fish farms, unused reclaimed land and the other enclosures, many of them unauthorized, to the spread of the tide (such areas still occupy a third of the total lagoon area); and petrol tankers were to be excluded from the lagoon, thus making it possible to fill in the “highway” that had been dredged to enable them to reach Marghera and which had transformed much of the lagoon into sea. All these were relatively economical, technically simple actions; they were also reversible and involved no risks. But what with futile protests and a torrent of idle talk, nothing was done. The ineptitude of the public authorities at all levels was evident, but the story did not end there.

One of the provisions of the 1973 law was that if the urgent measures (which shamefully remained ignored and unimplemented) in fact proved unable to guarantee the safety of the city studies should be undertaken to determine whether barriers at the lagoon entrances could do the job. So the authorities that had done nothing to carry out what the law had required of them now had the brilliant idea of “starting again from scratch”: starting the house from the roof! In the ‘80s a private consortium of large companies was given the task of investigating the possibility of installing mobile dams. Then the Consorzio Venezia Nuova was made sole concessionaire for all safeguarding work, a move than many judged to be a monstrous mistake, not only because it created a de facto monopoly but also because the Italian State (which, as commissioner of the work, is responsible – and must therefore accept the associated guilt – for everything that is, or is not, done) was consequently in contravention of its inalienable duty, established in Article 9 of the Constitution, to safeguard our cultural heritage.
And so began the long-debated issue of MOSE. There have been innumerable protests and technical objections from all parts, but in the end, it requires no more than common sense at least to wonder why, before setting off on extraordinarily complex, extremely expensive works which were, in practice, non-reversible and of debatable effectiveness, the provisions of the 1973 were not first implemented and put to the test. And those with a taste for paradoxes will note how Italia Nostra was deviously (or stupidly) accused of being the “party of inaction” whereas in fact, faced with the inertia and the web of vested interests that blocked every action, it was Italia Nostra that for years demanded, insisted and shouted that the work envisaged by the law should be carried out. And if now many influential people, including many public officials, are raising their voices against MOSE, one is entitled to wonder where they were 30 or 20 or 10 years ago when something might still have been done about it.

The promptness that made Italia Nostra the first to pose the problem of the need for action to be taken to protect the city from water and from any repetition of the events of 1966 (long before the current dispute over MOSE) deserves to be mentioned because amongst the things for which the Association can take credit is having understood immediately, and often before anyone else, the poor decisions that were being taken and the consequent dangers threatening Venice. And here it’s worth at least recalling that such was the case when the plan was to double the size of the petrochemical industry in Porto Marghera (where, incidentally, phosgene still presents a risk). Italia Nostra was also in the front line of the battle to stop the disastrous (and fortunately failed) project to fill in a substantial part of the lagoon for a new industrial zone. It was the same when the plans to dredge the channel for the oil-tankers – the Canale dei Petroli – were announced, and the Association presented the first (and for a long time the only) opposition to ENI’s plans to extract gas from beneath the Northern Adriatic, with its attendant risks of serious subsidence. Again it gave the lead (though no-one followed) in attempting to break the Consorzio Venezia Nuova’s monopoly of action to safeguard the lagoon by taking the matter up in Brussels (where the action was carefully, and with unseemly ambiguity, buried). And it was the first to draw attention to the fact that a city cannot be saved by expelling its inhabitants.
These are difficult battles, often against local administrations and government decisions whose mistakes can now be measured by the seriousness of the current situation. The Association has also enjoyed significant support and been involved in bitter clashes, some of them in court, as in the case of the famous trials that saw the Association as co-defendant with Indro Montanelli, pointlessly put in the dock by administrators whose mediocrity has already been judged as such by history. All this is part of a difficult past. But if that was the past, the present is no happier!

Today the city is increasingly weak, fragile and tired. The old problems are slow to be resolved, and new ones are always cropping up. Many of the actions that pass under the name of “safeguarding” are transforming the lagoon into a rigid system, deprived of that flexibility it needs to survive. Mudbanks become islands edged with concrete camouflaged with wood. The lagoon is becoming more and more like an artificial basin and the lesson taught by centuries of experience is being forgotten: that its natural evolution must by accompanied by low-impact, reversible actions that can always be adjusted if necessary. Instead of being made inert and harmless, sludge with high toxic content, dredged from the lagoon off Marghera, is being used to create new islands or the odd hill on which (because we are all ecologically responsible) pretty green copses will be planted. Massive public works projects with their huge financial commitments, like the Calatrava bridge, make an incisive impression in media terms but are of such small practical use that it is difficult to see them as other than fig leaves to conceal shame!
Of course, the picture is not entirely gloomy. After years of inertia, the process of maintaining the city’s canals was restarted well over a decade ago. The City Council has carried out a good policy of support for the restoration of residential accommodation. Monumental buildings are better looked after than in the past. But the balance is still negative and the problems multiply. Nowadays, for example, tourism is becoming an unbearable burden, totally out of scale with the city’s ability to deal with it. At this point, tourism is not so much a resource as a cause of further decay. And it is a mere illusion that it represents an economic help to Venice. In large part, the benefits are reaped by individuals and social groups who have no interest in spending to offset the problems of tourism and it is left to the public purse to cover the hidden costs of services that have in any case to be provided. Then there is the wear and tear on the physical fabric of the city: the paving of St.Mark’s Square has suffered more damage over the last decade than in the previous two centuries!

Then there is the danger represented by the enormous cruise liners that now sail through the Giudecca Canal and St. Mark’s Basin, where previously not even a barge was allowed to pass. It would be so easy to keep these huge floating skyscraper-hotels outside the lagoon and ferry their thousands of passengers in on boats of a reasonable size, but how then would the travel agents be able to advertise packages including “Venice seen from above”? And no matter that entering Venice in such a fashion brings no understanding whatever of a city that was conceived and constructed in relation to the expanse of water around it and to sea/ground level. Venice continues to be held in a mesh of powerful vested interests, of scant cultural awareness and of culpable inefficiency. The commitment required is ever more onerous, but then again Italia Nostra was born to fight the difficult battles. And there are some that simply cannot be lost because the loser would not be our Association but the nation.