Venice in Peril - The British Committee for the Preservation of Venice

Born in South Africa and educated in London, environmental scientist Contessa Jane Da Mosto moved to Venice in 1995. In collaboration with Venice in Peril and Cambridge University, she has published a book, ‘The Science of Saving Venice’, and is now working on a sequel. She lives with her husband, the TV presenter Conte Francesco Da Mosto and her three children.

Even before I lived here permanently, I was in love with the city. My mother had a house here and I used to stay at weekends while I was on a research scholarship with a scientific foundation in Milan. I met my husband at a party here. It wasn’t a coup de foudre but the first time we went for dinner, he came straight from his job as an architect, wearing a tie and glasses, and I thought: “Well, he must be a serious person.” That was the first and last time I ever saw him looking like that.

My first years in Venice were a gentle, euphoric dream. I found it all so beautiful. Not just the palaces and churches but little details like the algae growing along the buildings fascinated me. Indeed, they still do. Just walking the children to school or going to the post office are moments to savour.

I live in an apartment in a 16th-century palazzo that belongs to my husband’s family. I marvel at how well constructed the building is compared to many modern apartment blocks. It’s 400 years old and it’s still a robust, elegant solution to domestic life. There are rooms with low ceilings where you can be warm in winter and airier rooms that are perfect for summer. Our sitting room is luminous thanks to tall windows and high ceilings.

Working on my book opened my eyes and made me more concerned for the future of the city. When you analyse it in detail, you realise how much isn’t functioning properly. Take the lagoon. The presence of deep navigational channels for tankers and cruise ships has caused strong currents that wash away vital sediments. Huge tracts of salt marsh are disappearing very fast. And it’s impossible to remain oblivious to the impact of tourism and the precipitous reduction in permanent residents. One month you go and visit someone in their office here and the next, you find they have moved to the mainland.

You can determine the pace of life you want to lead here. People say this is a slow city but in fact it gives you energy because you are in control of your destiny. You don’t lose time stuck in traffic or waiting for a bus that doesn’t come. Nowhere is longer than a brisk 20-minute walk and you can set your watch by the vaporetti.

When I go shopping, I only buy what I need because I have to carry it home. On the rare occasions I’ve gone to a hypermarket on the mainland, I‘ve got a whole lot of things we didn’t eat. Here, you live by the seasons and buy what’s cheapest and freshest in the market.

It’s a myth that there’s no contemporary culture here. Aside from the film festival, there are annual festivals of contemporary music, theatre and dance, plus the biennales of art and architecture. François Pinault, chief executive of luxury group PPR, has housed his contemporary art collection in Palazzo Grassi. It’s a question of making the effort to go and see things, just as it would be in London.

Learning the language is fundamental if you are curious about other people’s lives. I learnt Italian in Milan so I could understand what my colleagues – who spoke perfect English – were saying between themselves. Now I like to know what the old ladies are planning to cook for dinner when they are standing next to me in the market.

Compared to Britain, Italy is a much more discursive culture. Until recently, I thought that political debates on TV were hard for me to follow because my Italian wasn’t good enough. But I can follow every word and still end up saying to Francesco: “Why did he say that?” Other differences include wearing vests, which all Italians do, and not going out with wet hair, which I would do without a thought but no Italian would ever do for fear of catching pneumonia.

This is an easy place to bring up a family. It’s a safe city. From eight years old, my daughter was walking to school by herself and taking the vaporetto with her friends. Unlike London, there’s no anxiety around finding the right school because there’s little choice but the quality is uniformly high. Having said that, when we wanted something different for our younger son, we quickly found a Steiner School on the mainland, where he is very happy.

I would like to see more green spaces for the children to play in. Although they are happy and safe playing in the squares, it would be nice if they had a tree to climb or a swing. The spaces that exist often belong to the Church and are closed to the public. I’m hoping the parishes will start to grant access to some of them soon.

The Times - 5th April 2007

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Venice in peril as the tourists flood in and locals get out

Richard Owen in Rome

The last kindergarten in the historic centre of Venice is to be closed tomorrow and turned into a hotel — a move that confirms the city’s decline into a “Disneyland” for holidaymakers, empty of inhabitants.

The population is said to have fallen from 175,000 half a century ago to 121,000 in 1966 to only 61,000 today. About 50,000 tourists a day visit Venice.

Mara Rumiz, head of housing at the Venice council, said that depopulation was reaching the point of no return and that the city would be empty by 2050 if the problem was not addressed.

“Soon Venice will become only a tourist destination, in which case it will lose the charm which attracts tourists in the first place,” she said.

Parents of children at the church-run nursery school for three to five-year-olds, in the San Marco district, protested in vain after the announcement that it is to close.

The school, in Calle delle Muneghe, lies between the Accademia Bridge and Palazzo Grassi, now a modern art gallery owned by the French entrepreneur François Pinault.

City officials say that there are 2,000 children under 5 in greater Venice but very few of them in the historic centre near St Mark’s Square, which was once highly populated.

Father Mario Senigaglia, the parish priest, said that the Church, regrettably, had no choice but to “restructure” the school as a hotel.

Residents say that whereas the centre of Venice was once “full of shops selling real things”, there are now only three — a butcher, a baker and a general store — with most shops given over to souvenirs such as Merano glass and carnival masks.

“Those who experienced the floods of 1966 will remember that thousands of children were affected” said Gian Antonio Stella, a local journalist. “Where are they now?

“It is only a matter of time before the number of residents is overtaken by the number of tourists.

“The nursery school will become Venice’s 231st hotel — in addition to the 706 flats which have become bed and breakfast establishments. It is like Disneyland.” Many Venetians, including shopkeepers who once lived above their shops but now commute, have moved to the mainland.

Many of those who have moved out blame rising prices. A 100 sq m (1,075 sq ft) apartment in the heart of Venice can cost up to €1 million (£670,000). This is two or three times the price of comparable, more modern, properties just across the lagoon.

Massimo Cacciari, the Mayor of Venice, said that the depopulation of urban centres was a Europe-wide problem and not confined to Venice. He agreed, however, that the “exodus” in Venice had to be stopped.

The council has begun a scheme to help first-time buyers and is supporting a project by Venice in Peril — the British organisation set up after the 1966 floods — to help to transform derelict historic buildings into low-cost housing.

Travel victims

— After featuring in dozens of films, including Gladiator and Lawrence of Arabia, the fortified Moroccan hillside village of Ait-Ben-Haddou attracts thousands of tourists each year. All but ten of the original residents have now moved to a modern village nearby

— Petra, a town hewn into the rocks of the Jordanian desert, was home to hundreds of Beduin until they were evicted when it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site

— Perched on a rock in Normandy and less than a kilometre wide, Mont St Michel has fewer than 50 permanent residents — mostly monks and priests — to greet the 3.5 million people who visit annually Source: UNESCO, Times archive, agencies

Country Life - 9th November 2006

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NOT FADING, BUT DROWNING

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the worst flood Venice has ever suffered. DAMIAN BARR investigates the controversy surrounding the decisions regarding how to save the city

TIME and tide wait for no man. Or city. On a stormy night, nearly 40 years ago, treacherous tides and wicked winds brought water to the doors of St Mark’s cathedral. The swollen lagoon surged 6½ft above sea level, flooding streets, churches and palazzos. As the waters rose, Franco Zeffirelli picked up his phone. He called his friend Lord Drogheda, pleading for emergency help from Britain. He responded. Venice in Peril (VIP) was founded.

‘We’re still trying to save the city,’ says Lady Clarke, current co-president of VIP and widow of co-founder Sir Ashley Clarke. ‘There hasn’t been another flood like the acqua grande of 1966, but if there was, well...’

VIP is not the Ford Foundation or the J. Paul Getty Trust. ‘Most of our money comes from ordinary British people who love Venice,’ says Lady Clarke. The Pizza Express chain donates a slice of the profits from every Veneziana pizza sold. The Orient Express, which chugs luxuriously in and out of Santa Lucia station, is the other major donor.

VIP is not rich, but it is important. Since 1966, it has financed the restoration of more than 40 buildings and works of art: the flamboyantly Gothic multi-coloured stone gates, the Porta della Carta, of the Doge’s Palace; the cross once carried in front of those about to be beheaded in St Mark’s Square. The latest project is less romantic: the big rusting crane looming over the Arsenale boatyards. ‘It was built in Newcastle in 1883,’ explains Lady Clarke. ‘It’s one of only two in the world. Norman Foster thinks it’s stunning.’ Most people would prefer a statue to regain its limbs. ‘Our policy is to protect that which others overlook.’

The zeal of Lady Clarke is remarkable: springing on and off vaporetti, nipping up and down narrow alleys, and all the while pointing out this or that treasure in Italian and English. Philanthropy now tends towards the flashy—Lady Clarke is an unredoubtable
and quintessentially English evangelist. She is also, regretfully, a dying breed.

And, says John Berendt, her cause may die with her. ‘We must do everything we can to save Venice,’ says the author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Mr Berendt’s latest book, The City of Falling Angels, is all about Venice: the fire that destroyed the La Fenice opera house and the scandal surrounding its reconstruction. ‘But we must also admit we may not be able to do enough in time. Bureaucracy and corruption are more damaging than water.’

After long delays and political controversy, mobile barriers are being built at the openings between the lagoon and the sea. The Mose project is set to cost €4.3 billion. ‘It’s a scandal,’ Mr Berendt says. ‘Some say it won’t work, some say it will but only for a short time, and others say there’s no urgency. Even the scientists disagree.’

At best, Mose buys Venice time. How long? The builders, Consorzio Venezia Nuova, foresee a rise of 6in to 10in this century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates as much as 35in. ‘Venice has always flooded,’ says Mr Berendt. ‘It will always flood.’ In 1900, St Mark’s Square flooded 10 times a year. Now it is around 60 times a year. Carnival revellers swap stilettos for wellingtons.

Many blame the giant cruise liners whose honking horns breach the peace of La Serenissima. ‘It’s global warming,’ says Lady Clarke. ‘Rising sea-levels and more intense storms. We’re the canary in the mine. Venice is sinking, but no faster than ever. She’s drowning. Not fading, but drowning.’

Mr Berendt sees another problem. ‘Venice was a living city when I first visited in the 1970s. Now there are no butchers or bakers, only glass-makers. The city lacks real life—how many children do you see here?’ The tourists keeping the city afloat are also sinking it. Which is a why a tax will soon be levied on every visitor. ‘That’s not right either,’ says Lady Clarke. ‘Venice belongs to everyone.’

Venice is the Miss Havisham of cities. A grand old lady slowly sinking into decay. Yes, the canals stink in summer, but they also sparkle. Yes, there are leprous patches of crumbling plaster, but what’s beneath is beautiful. Thanks to global warming, depopulation and appalling bureaucracy, she may drown. Thanks to the efforts of Lady Clarke, VIP, and others, she may, somehow, be saved. Whatever happens, Venice will float forever in the imagination: a place to which everyone should be able to go.

The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt is now available in paperback from Sceptre

Burlington Magazine -November 2006

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Editorial

Not waving but drowning?

OVER THE YEARS numerous articles in this Magazine have referred to the past destruction or alteration of the buildings of Venice and the disappearance or dispersal of their paintings and furnishings. In this issue alone we find Joshua Reynolds sketching works that no longer exist in buildings long since demolished; paintings by Canaletto datable to what is and is not on the skyline; and the building over of the campo in front of S. Francesco della Vigna. But in spite of great incursions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Venice today would be perfectly recognisable to a citizen of, say, 1700. As with any city, decay and renewal are inseparable, but in Venice, having more than its fair share of the ‘fatal gift of beauty’ that Byron ascribed to Italy, one is more conscious than anywhere else of a city impaled on its history.

It is forty years ago this month (4th November 1966) that Venice was overwhelmed by an exceptional acqua alta that submerged the city for a day. Internationally, however, concern was almost entirely focused on Florence, which was flooded at the same time, and with much more disastrous results. The Florentine flooding was unexpected and unusual, and the extent of the destruction was shocking. In Venice acqua alta has increasingly become a regular occurrence, an irritating fact of life for its citizens and a hazard met with
almost amused insouciance by tourists who simply remove their trainers and carry their cameras a little higher. But, as is well known from numerous reports and commissions, the
increasing frequency and altitude of the flooding threatens not only much of the city’s infrastructure but its very survival.

The events of November 1966 spurred a rethinking of ways to preserve Venice and acted as a trigger for international aid and funding. But even before then there were concerns for the city’s future. Appalling plans for its transformation were seriously proposed, and the industrial zone of Marghera on the lagoon was expanding in the 1940s and 1950s as a visual affront to the city and a drain on its population. Tidal management and the state of the lagoon, pollution, subsidence and the effects of mass tourism were all under consideration, alongside the plight of buildings in need of urgent attention. Unfortunately, and in spite of considerable improvements (especially in the matter of subsidence and the rescue of many buildings), the problems remain the same, and Venice’s future is still in the balance. The contemporary needs of the city and the preservation of its past continue to be the two ends of this familiar tug-of-war. But, so equal in strength are the two factions
that a state of immobilismo has most often been the result.

The latest strategy is the construction of underwater floodgates at the three inlets to the lagoon from the sea, work on which was begun in 2003. One objection to this project, known as MOSE, is that it is based on a now outdated prediction of sea-level change. Another is that the barriers will upset the ecosystem of the lagoon. While Prime Minister Prodi has commendably held firm to the initiative, Massimo Cacciari, the Mayor of Venice, havers. Political change and uncertainty colour public opinion, and many Venetians object
to this costly (€4.6 billion) government-backed intervention.

‘Venice in Peril’, one of the many committees formed in the wake of the 1966 flood, recently hosted a debate in London with the motion: ‘Enough money has been spent saving
Venice’. Naturally the motion was defeated, but it provoked the airing of some startling facts and radical proposals. Professor Sir David King, the British government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, emphasised the international inertia over global warming through the calamitous rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; if this continues and, for example, all the ice on Greenland were to melt, ‘no plan could save Venice’ from being submerged. Professor Joseph Rykwert concentrated on the dangers of a monoculture of tourism but suggested that tourist numbers would soon decline and that the city must find other solutions for its economic survival. But Professor John Kay argued that tourism would inexorably increase over the next decades and that ‘the sea of tourists may be a lot more
threatening than the Adriatic’. He put forward a detailed course of tourist management that, if alarming in its themepark controls, at least stared reality in the face.

Hanging in the air above all these arguments and projects are the entangled questions: what exactly does preservation mean and for whom is Venice to be preserved? While fifteen million people visit the city each year, the resident population has dwindled to 60,000, exactly half of what it was in 1848. Nothing can ever be rescued from the passage of time. Preservation lasts only so long, especially in so volatile and artificial a construct as Venice. There are those who deplore much of the restoration that has been undertaken in recent decades, from unsuitable materials and colours to a fundamental misunderstanding
of a building’s meaning and history.1 Others take a more laissez-faire view, thankful that a building has been repaired and put to use, even if it has been wounded in the process by a boiler outlet in a façade that is, in any case, quite the wrong yellow for Venice. Will the tourists have noticed before they depart in their vast cruise ships? Most will have seen nothing but the very centre of the city, which they are bound to think has been superbly preserved to provide them alone with the experience of a lifetime.

In Venice, culture, politics and emotional debate are inextricable. Rather than radical slogans, objective scientific data should inform all decisions in the coming decade that will determine the future of the city. To that end, ‘Venice in Peril’ sponsored a report of the physical state of Venice and its lagoon.2 Let us hope it is being read by all those involved in the imperative negotiations for Venice’s survival.

1 The conservative position is put forward in G. Pertot: Venezia “restaurata”: centosettanti anni di interventi di restauro sugli edifici veneziani, Milan 1988; English edition: Extraordinary Maintenance, London 2004.

2 C.A. Fletcher and T. Spencer, eds.: Flooding and Environmental Challenges for
Venice and its Lagoon: State of Knowledge, Cambridge 2003.

The Guardian - 26th August 2006

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Population decline set to turn Venice into Italy's Disneyland

John Hooper in Rome
Saturday August 26, 2006
The Guardian

Venice is on course to become a city virtually without residents within the next 30 years, turning it into a sort of Disneyland - teeming with holidaymakers but devoid of inhabitants.

Depopulation is getting to the point of no return, the Venice council housing chief, Mara Rumiz, said following the publication this week of the latest figures. "Beyond then, Venice will never again be a normal city, but will become a mere tourist destination and lose its charm - even for the tourists themselves," she was quoted as telling the daily La Repubblica yesterday.

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The register of residents, tallied every 10 years, shows that the population of Venice proper has almost halved - from 121,000 to 62,000 - since the great flood of 1966. A city that once ruled an empire now has a smaller population than Herne Bay and, if it continues to lose full-time inhabitants at the same rate, it will be "empty" by around 2046.

Although the pace of decline has been slower in the past 10 years than in previous decades, it is now speeding up and threatens to strip Venice of its full-time residents even sooner. Since 1996 the register of residents has shrunk by 800 a year. But in 2005, 1,918 more people moved out of the city or died than moved in or were born there.

Today, 25% of the population is over the age of 64. The latest council estimate is that the rate of decline will increase to between 2,000 and 2,500 a year. That does not mean the city will be without inhabitants because foreigners and Italians are continuing to buy second homes in Venice, but it does mean the native Venetian is an endangered species. Venice may then become a living museum-city - a place to which, as La Repubblica remarked, it would be "normal to charge entry". The 1966 flood led to the ground floors of some 16,000 houses being abandoned and the growth of mass tourism, combined with rising water levels, has made living in Venice increasingly challenging.

Yet it looks like Italy's new government will suspend work on the Moses Project to build a flood barrier. And the volume of tourists, already 50,000 a day, is climbing inexorably.

House prices have meanwhile soared beyond the reach of all but the richest Venetians.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - 16 August 2006

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Review of Un restauro per Venezia

Get the salt out of the wall
Flexible instead of rigid floors are needed: the model renovation of a Venetian house

For years Venetians have been leaving their city and settling on the mainland. Many people have asked themselves how this might be halted or, better still, reversed. A reason often given for this exodus is the high, often unpredictable, cost of modernising living accommodation.

Despite its usually venerable age, the housing stock is not protected by building regulations. Well intentioned, often contradictory precepts of an otherwise beneficent law (Legge per Venezia no. 171 of 1973) have proved incapable of guaranteeing care in the treatment of the historic fabric of the city. The indifference of all too many builders and architects towards the qualities of historic buildings, and profit-orientated building practices have done huge damage in recent decades to the historic substance of the city, particularly the interiors of houses. Through careless treatment of floors and walls, particularly on the ground floor, and the failure to record what is there, more and more of the early history of Venice is disappearing; how different it would be if we were dealing with archival material.

There is still, however, enough of the precious original fabric to make it worth trying hard to preserve it.

With the restoration of a house in the Calle delle Beccarie, the aim was to establish whether a careful repair of an historic, but not listed, building could be done at a reasonable price, using traditional techniques.

Behind the project was the conviction that it is irresponsible to treat a ³monument², protected by building regulations, differently from a simple building, protected by less strict rules. The fact that the house chosen for the experiment had been abandoned for decades by the town council and was ruinous inside made it even more of a challenge. The idea for the experiment came from Venice in Peril and was carried out in partnership with the council, not without some differences, but with very satisfying results.

Venice in Peril has devoted itself for many years and with great success to financing the restoration of works of art, and it also promotes scientific research to increase understanding of the lagoon and the city. The now completed restoration of the house has proved that historic buildings can be repaired with restrained methods and at reasonable cost if the interventions follow the same criteria applied automatically by the State officials who look after the grander, listed buildings. Such methods, of course, require specialist competence in the planning and overseeing stages, as well a readiness on the part of everyone to give up the usual tendency to renew everything.

The preparatory phase is also key to success. If the person drawing up the plans is imbued with Venetian building traditions, he will know how to assess deviations from modern building practice. Thus, settlement of up to 30 cm by individual walls is normal in Venice. Over the centuries, knowing the unstable nature of the ground, Venetian builders evolved a building technique that allowed for such settlement without it putting the structure at risk. The flexible wooden beams and the thick terrazzo floors play an important role in this. Both serve to reinforce the house, while changing shape without suffering damage. Any projects that hope to correct the settlement by using modern flooring or renovating the walls damage the carefully thought-out structures. The fact that many manuals still recommend such radical interventions makes the position of anyone campaigning for gentle conservation much harder.

It goes without saying that responsible planning needs skilled craftspeople to carry it out. Here repairs to the beams and the terrazzo floors are a particularly demanding task. Finally, it is clear that in Venice, as elsewhere, more care is taken with façades than equally precious elements on the inside‹it is easier to communicate the image of the city than maintain its substance.

A richly illustrated book (Milan, Gabriele Mazzotta) in Italian has been published to document the successful renovation of the Calle delle Beccarie house, as well as all the preliminary investigations. This study of the historic fabric and the focused structural examinations are described, together with their cost.

The account of the desalination of the walls to a height of five metres by running water through the brickwork could be particularly important for Venice and elsewhere. This method is both cheaper and preserves more of the original fabric than the methods currently in use, which involve replacing the bricks. The difficulty of how to treat the party walls was resolved by a compromise.

Thus, if we want to improve the quality of the current hectic building activity in Venice for the benefit of the inhabitants and the historic buildings, we will have to work on enlightening and training everybody involved. In this, the international private committees operating in Venice under the aegis of Unesco can play an exemplary role Wolfgang Wolters The author teaches art history at the Technische Universität Berlin. He is known internationally as one of the greatest experts in Venetian art and architecture and has been involved for many years in the conservation of the monumental patrimony and architectural fabric of the city.

Expresso Magazine - Summer 2006

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Keeping Venice Above Water

It’s 40 years since devastating floods hit Venice and we first took action by raising funds to restore and save the city. Now we’re celebrating a major milestone, having raised over £1.6 million. In fact, together with the generous support of our customers, we’ve raised an amazing £1,645,319 for The Veneziana Fund, which supports the Venice in Peril Fund as well as restoration projects in the UK.

While helping restore major architectural gems, Venice in Peril also supports innovative schemes like the recently completed house at 792 Calle delle Beccarie in the San Giobbe parish. Here, an ancient building was sympathetically restored and turned into flats for social housing, including a flood-proof ground-floor flat for a disabled resident.

A combination of subsidence and a rise in the levels of the lagoon waters means that Venice is already 23 cms lower in the water than it was in 1900. So another aspect of the Fund’s work is supporting research and development for huge barriers designed to hold back storm surges from the sea.

Every time you enjoy a Veneziana pizza with onions, capers, olives, sultanas and pine kernels, we make a 25p contribution on your behalf to The Veneziana Fund.

The Art Newspaper - July 2006

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Venice’s real problem is organisation and management

Today 12m people a year pay €50 a head to visit Eurodisney. It is quite clear...that if the Disney Corporation owned Venice, Venice would no longer be in peril.

Venice is threatened by crumbling infrastructure and rising sea levels, and also by the inexorable growth in the number of visitors. But with effective management, one problem
could solve the other. The gates that let the tourists in could pay for the gates that keep the waters out.

If left unmanaged, the sea of tourists may be a lot more threatening than the Adriatic Sea. Currently, around 15m people visit Venice each year, while the city has a resident population of about 60,000. Around the world literacy and cultural awareness are increasing. Incomes in India, China and Eastern Europe are now increasing very rapidly; there are 2.5 billion people in India and China alone who within 50 years might have incomes comparable to ours. That means that the number of people who want to see Venice and will be able to afford to see Venice might very plausibly expand by a factor of three or more over the next few decades. There is little we can do to stop that happening and I don’t believe we want to stop it happening. If we regard Venice as one of the crown jewels of Western European civilisation—and we should—we want as many tourists as possible to go to there. The issue is how to accommodate, indeed to promote, such cultural tourism without letting visitors destroy what it is that people go to visit. Managing the flow of tourists into Venice involves segregating in time and in space the people who want only to be photographed in front of the campanile of St Mark’s from people whose aspiration is to wander the streets of the city as Ruskin did.

Managing the flow of tourists effectively would give day trippers a proper opportunity, which they do not have at the moment, to learn about the history, the culture, the context of what it is they see, with well-designed exhibits, and with qualified guides. Here is a sketch of the kind of plan which managed tourism might involve. In the peak season—mid-June to mid-September— admission of tourists to Venice will only be as part of a guided tour. The most popular package will be the one-day Venice experience. Guests would arrive by train in the modernised station from which they would cross the Grand Canal from the ticket office to the new visitor centre, which would replace the car park there. In the visitor centre you would get audiovisual presentations of the culture and history of the city. There would be libraries and lecture theatres, a shopping mall and restaurants of all kinds and price .

In that period of June through September a wide range of other tours focused on themes and areas, all accompanied by briefings in the visitor centre, would be offered to people who are making their subsequent visits to the city, and, of course, they would be free of the crowds of guests who are doing the walk back from St Mark’s Square to the Rialto. Outside this peak season, you would be able to buy individual admissions to the city at €50 [$63]. There will also be special Ruskin weeks in which there would not be any guided tours, and the number of visitors would be strictly limited. Tickets for these weeks would be quite expensive for the general public, probably normally as part of a package with hotel accommodation, but a limited number of less expensive or even free Ruskin week tickets would go to scholars and educational institutions, and be allocated by ballot.

We already have many successful examples in the world of managed tourism. Yosemite is a place of astounding natural beauty even though it’s on the doorstep of the densely populated coastal strip of California where 30m people live. In Yosemite, the National Park Service (NPS) ensures that people who simply want to be photographed in front of one the massive waterfalls can be rapidly bused in and out, while people who want to spend a week hiking in the park have an opportunity to do that also. The result is that the NPS allows large numbers of people to visit Yosemite, while preserving the attractions that make them want to come in the first place. Yosemite is successful because Yosemite is managed as a park. I can already hear: “We don’t want to turn Venice into a park”; but the blunt truth is that Venice is already a park. It was once a great business centre; it was once a great political force; it was once a pioneer of new cultural ideas rather than a showcase of old ones, but in these senses Venice died centuries ago and it is only the flow of visitors in the last century that has brought Venice back to life.

Today, as a simple matter of arithmetic fact, most of the people who are in the city at any time are tourists and most of the people who work in Venice have come in for the day to serve the tourists. People do not go to Venice to have their hair cut or to buy their groceries. They go as tourists and the economics of the city are similar to the economics of Yosemite and Disneyland, not the economics of a city such as Slough.

If the mobile barrier that will provide flood protection for the city is going to cost €4.6 billion [$5.8 billion], a longer term solution will cost a lot more. But let us be clear that these are not large numbers in the context of the perhaps three billion people who are
likely to visit Venice as tourists in the course of the next century. Today 12m people a year pay €50 a head to visit Eurodisney. It is quite clear when you see it in these terms that if the Disney Corporation owned Venice, Venice would no longer be in peril.

We do not want Disney in Venice, but what we do want to do is to learn some relevant and useful lessons. As so often in economic matters, the lack of money is the manifestation of the problem rather than the problem itself. The problems of Venice are not problems of technology or finance; they are problems of politics, of organisation and of management.

The writer is an economist and columnist for the Financial Times. This is an abridged version of a speech he made at the “Venice in Peril” debate held on 12 June 2006, on the side of the motion: “Enough money has been spent on saving Venice”

The Guardian - 15th June 2006

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That sinking feeling

Venice's fight for survival has attracted international attention and large-scale funding. However, it is not the only city trying to keep its head above water, says Nigel Praities

The disastrous flooding that overwhelmed New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina highlighted the vulnerability of low-lying coastal cities around the world. A predicted global sea-level rise of up to 88 centimetres over the next century, due to climate change, would put many major cities at risk.

In New Orleans, it happened suddenly. Venice, by contrast, is gradually being submerged. Over the past 100 years the land level has dropped by more than 23cm, due to rising sea levels and land subsidence.

Around the world, massive public projects such as the Maeslant barrier in the Netherlands and the Thames barrier in the UK have been constructed to protect economically and culturally sensitive areas from sea-level rises or storm surges. Venice, on the other hand, has only recently begun constructing a long-term solution - a large-scale barrier between the Venetian lagoon and the Adriatic Sea.

Venetians are well used to high tides, or "acqua alta", invading their city. Piles of sandbags guard entrances to buildings and elevated wooden walkways help navigate around the worst of the flooding. But the problem is worsening. St Mark's Square was flooded seven times in 1900 but 99 times in 1996. "The flooding has heavily increased, especially in the past 40 years," says Professor Ignazio Musu, an economist based in the city.

Venice has made an art of decaying beautifully. Acqua alta are picturesque for tourists, but hugely damaging and costly. High waters reach over the water-resistant marble foundations of the city to corrode masonry, interiors and artworks. "The effect on the cultural heritage, churches and artistic monuments has not been estimated properly," says Musu. "But when the floor of an ancient building is continuously flooded there is considerable damage."

Venetians are escaping the flooding; most ground-level dwellings lie abandoned and the city's population has halved in the past 50 years, from 120,000 in 1951 to around 60,000 today.

City deluged

The worst flooding seen in Venice was in 1966, when a storm surge deluged the city with metre-high waters for 15 hours. This instigated a debate about schemes to protect it. In the UK, there was a similar impetus after the floods of 1953, which affected 100,000 hectares of eastern England and caused 307 deaths; that resulted in the construction of the Thames barrier in 1974.

Progress in Italy has been slower. After nearly four decades of debate, the ambitious idea of a barrier was backed by the previous Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who laid the foundation stone of the Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico, or Mose, project in 2003. The project, named after the biblical figure Moses, was one of Berlusconi's largest public works projects while in office.

The size of the £2 billion (€3 billion) Mose project is impressive. It consists of 79 hinged steel gates, each 30 metres high, 20m wide and between 4-5m thick. At the three inlets of the Venetian lagoon to the Adriatic, these hollow gates will usually be filled with water and lie unseen on the ocean floor. After a storm or high tide warning, they will be pumped full of air and rise up to form a wall to restrain the tide. "If you are going to protect the city from the strength of the sea, then you have to have some hard structure," explains Musu. "If it is used properly, all the costs of high water will be avoided."

The Mose project has attracted international attention. Professor Peter Guthrie, an engineering expert from Cambridge University, admits he is "very drawn to the simplicity of the design. It is a good technical solution to the problems of flooding in Venice."

However, the barriers remain controversial with Venetians. Italians are generally cynical about large-scale government projects, and the citizens are concerned that the money could be better spent on restoration projects and reducing pollution. "The only money the Italian government gives is to support the Mose project, and this contributes to creating a negative opinion in the local population," says Musu.

While work on the barriers has begun, their future is uncertain as the Italian political climate has changed. The recently elected mayor of Venice is reconsidering the Mose project. Last week, the Italian Minister of Public Works, Antonio Di Pietro, commented that the work on the barriers should continue as it is already one-quarter complete, but he called for a further meeting of the committee overseeing the project. The new Italian government, headed by Romano Prodi, also faces potential difficulties with its coalition partner, the Green Party, which opposes the barriers.

Most experts agree that the project could be obsolete within 50 years if the higher predictions about sea level rises are realised. "You can't build a barrier and think that Venice will be safe for evermore," says Guthrie, "but it certainly is not possible to say that the barriers are a bad idea."

However, some influential academics argue that the barriers are a waste of public money and are unable to protect the fabric of Venice. "Even with the Mose project there will be flooding in Venice," comments Professor Paolo Pirazzoli, a prominent geographer born in Venice. "If the sea level rises 20-30cm, then the barriers will not be sufficient."

Irreversible project

He also argues that the barriers will obstruct any future schemes: "The present project is not reversible and the passages [into the Adriatic] will be blocked by millions of tonnes of concrete. Some other defences must be constructed in the same place and this will not be possible."

Other solutions have been suggested, such as raising pavements, reinforcing fo