The role of The Venice in Peril Fund
What can a relatively small charitable organisation such as The Venice in Peril Fund, the British Committee for the Preservation of Venice, do for the city? We are not the Ford Foundation or the Getty Foundation, and in any case not even their means would suffice to safeguard Venice from the rising waters. Our income consists of donations large and small made by British people who love Venice and are concerned about its future. And then there is the famous gastronomic invention called the Pizza Veneziana; thousands of portions are sold in the various Pizza Express outlets and for each one sold, Pizza Express makes a 25p donation to The Veneziana Fund, which in turn gives half its income to Venice in Peril.

We have been known as ‘The Venice in Peril Fund’ since 1971, but in fact we went into action immediately after the great flood of 1966. At that moment, many Venetian monuments, churches and works of art were in serious danger of irreversible decay and we set out to collect funds for their recovery and restoration. Since those beginnings we have financed the
restoration—always in collaboration with the Italian Heritage Superintendencies and UNESCO—of over 40 buildings and single works of art. The most recent is the exquisite little 16th-century Cappella Emiliani on the cemetery island of San Michele.

We are now about to begin a project that might seem surprising but which, in fact, is just as important for the history of the city. The old hydraulic crane at the water’s edge inside the Arsenale, the great Venetian boat-yard, is considered by the famous architect Norman Foster to have a great sculptural quality but it is also a relic of the Industrial Revolution and a potent symbol of the maritime history of the city. Built by Armstrong Mitchell in Newcastle in 1883, it is one of only two surviving cranes of its kind in the world. It is in an extremely poor state of conservation and we have decided to adopt it because our policy has always been to intervene in cases where funding would otherwise be difficult to find. Big commercial sponsors are often willing to be associated with famous monuments; it is the unusual or less visible works that have difficulty finding help.

Another of our policies is to encourage new approaches to old problems. Between 2001 and 2004 we financed a research project at the University of Cambridge and the Consortium for the Coordination of Research on the Venetian Lagoon (CORILA), the aim of which was to bring together all the scientific work done on the flooding of Venice since 1966 and to examine the solutions proposed. The project culminated in a conference held at Churchill College, Cambridge, where over a 130 Venetian, Italian, British, Dutch, Russian, American and other scientists met for three days to exchange information about their research and proposals and to compare the Venetian situation with that of other places at risk from flooding such as London, St Petersburg, Rotterdam and New Orleans.

Their conclusion was that the city definitely needed mobile barriers at the openings between the Adriatic and lagoon, but that these only bought time, and that we all needed to be planning as far ahead as 2100. The project led to the production of two books: one for the layman, The Science of Saving Venice, published by Umberto Allemandi e C. (2004), and the other for specialists, Flooding and Environmental Challenges for Venice and its Lagoon: State of Knowledge, edited by C.A. Fletcher and T. Spencer, published by Cambridge University Press (2005).

Our most recent book, Un Restauro per Venezia (Mazzotta 2006), is the product of another, innovative form of cooperation between The Venice in Peril Fund and the public sector. It is the record of the restoration of an ordinary council house in Venice, the kind of building that makes up 90% of the housing stock yet is barely protected by building regulations. Venice in Peril set out to prove that an historically sensitive job could be done, using original materials and details, and still not cost more than the more usual ugly “commercial” job. The four good flats that were made are now going to people on the council’s housing list.

How much longer for Venice?
How do we put a value on our cultural heritage? How much does Venice matter to people who have never seen it? How much does it matter to the Venetians themselves and to those who have travelled to see it? Do we today have a responsibility towards the future, and if so, how far ahead? Fifty years, a 100, 200 …? And whose is that responsibility? The Venetians’? The Italian government’s? Europe’s? Or does the international public have both a say and an obligation?
These are partly philosophical questions, partly very practical ones. They are questions that must be asked if we are to clear our minds of lesser matters and come to sensible decisions about the future for the city. For Venice, like New Orleans, is such an artificial creation in ecological terms that it will survive only as long as we want it to survive. When we give up on it, it will be reclaimed by the waters and will gradually disappear.

Changing conditions and a warning
Venice is particularly susceptible to climate change. In 1900, St Mark’s Square flooded around 10 times a year; now it is around 60 times a year. The water level in the city is permanently too high nowadays—25cm above the mean water-level reference point established in 1897—and this is already eating away at the brickwork of the buildings.

Archaeological digs prove that Venice has been sinking at the rate of about 10cm a century since the earliest days, but in the 20th century it sank an extra 10cm because the factories on the mainland pumped water from natural underground reservoirs, causing the subsoil to compact. In addition, the water level in the lagoon has risen about 5cm due to local ecological factors.

Despite renewed political controversy, the new government has said that work should continue on the mobile barriers that are being built at the openings between the lagoon and the sea (estimated cost around 4.3 billion Euro), to be raised when abnormally high tides are predicted.

How long these will be effective depends on the degree of sea-level rise. The Consorzio Venezia Nuova, which is building the barriers, has factored a rise of 26 to 60cm this century into its calculations and believes that the barriers have a 100 year technical life.

But if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (www.ipcc.ch) worst-case scenario for sea-level rise this century (9-88cm) is realised, then Venice becomes indefensible on the basis of currently available solutions.

Anna Somers Cocks
Chairman, The Venice in Peril Fund