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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
As waters everywhere rise from global warming, Venetians engage in a passionate debate on how to keep their palaces from sinking into the Adriatic.
Dec 14, 2004 | It is winter and St. Mark's Square is puddled, although it hasn't rained for days. The water has come roiling up through the drains, seeping through the stones, creeping over the banks of the canals. Plywood platforms on metal legs are stacked, school table-like, around the square; when the water is inches deep, as it often is, Venetians line them up and walk along them to keep their feet dry.
I am on my way to see Maria Teresa Brotto, a civil engineer who thinks she knows the answer to Venice's flooding problems. But then, almost everyone in Venice thinks they know the answer to the flooding. Few subjects here arouse such passion, not least because which solution you favor reveals much about what, and whom, you think Venice is for.
At the beginning of the last century, St. Mark's Square flooded on average 10 times a year. Now water seeps into the square more than 100 times each winter, and its paving stones are cracked and pulling apart. Venetians keep a pair of waders at home and another at the office. Their calendars show the height of the tides. There are phone lines for weather updates, and sirens warn them of "exceptional" (waters 110 cm above sea level) or "extreme" (140 cm above) events. They manage to go on living in their beautiful, drowning city. Or those who are left do; the population has halved since the '50s.
But everyone agrees that something has to be done. Saltwater is eating into the buildings as the lagoon follows its natural destiny, which is to be absorbed back into the sea. Without human intervention, Venice would eventually find itself isolated in a marine bay, exposed to wild waves. The city is subsiding, and always has been, as coastal sediment settles and the movement of the Earth's crust (on a geological time scale) pushes this part of Italy under the Alps. In the past, the Venetians simply piled new buildings on the ruins and foundations of earlier structures, creating a city like a lasagne. Most people would accept that this is no longer an option: In the words of Anna Somers Cocks, chairwoman of Venice in Peril: "The Venice we've got is the Venice we want."
The process of subsidence sped up in the 20th century as the result of the pumping out of water for industries on the nearby mainland. Too late it became apparent that the aquifers under the lagoon and the islands were a kind of cushion, buoying Venice. In the last century the land dropped 23 cm in relation to the sea, and although the pumping has stopped, the damage is done.
Natural changes in the surrounding landscape, such as erosion of salt marshes, along with man-made ones such as the cutting of a deep navigation channel for oil tankers, have conspired to exacerbate the tendency for the lagoon to take in water from the sea. And then there is global warming. The eyes of the world are on Venice not simply as the repository of some of the most stunning art and architecture ever created, nor merely as an area of outstanding biodiversity, but also because the city faces problems that may soon confront many other places as waters rise around the globe.
Brotto is a glamorous figure in suede trousers and high heels, with a deep tan, a ready smile and perfect English. Brotto is the coordinator of the final design of the Venice barrier, and her name arouses strong reactions in Venice.
The Venice flood barrier has been decades in the planning, has been endlessly debated and remains intensely controversial. Unlike in London and Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where the barriers created anxieties but the population was broadly willing to trade some environmental impact for safety, the Venice barrier (or, strictly speaking, four barriers, which will be strung between the islands that separate the lagoon from the Adriatic) has split the city down the middle. Opinion polls sometimes show Venetians broadly in favor, sometimes against (depending, usually, on how the question is framed). Brotto assures me most people want the barrier, but acknowledges that "those who are against it are very noisy." They have, she says, created a false dichotomy between the barrier and other, more gradualist measures to deal with flooding. Both are necessary, she insists; and the consortium of engineering and construction companies that is building the barriers is also raising canal banks in the city, restoring salt marshes in the lagoon and dealing with the legacy of industrial pollution.
Brotto admits there will be some environmental disruption during construction -- "but we are taking mitigating measures, such as using an ecological dredger to reduce turbidity." She is adamant, however, that the gates remain necessary. They will be closed, she anticipates, five to seven times a year. "With this solution, we will solve all problems for Venice and the other settlements around the lagoon. Definitely."
"So," says Gherardo Ortalli, professor of medieval history at Venice University, "are you going to write that the barriers will solve all the problems for Venice? That is what the world wants to believe. A lovely story with a happy ending." I have come to meet Professor Ortalli at a palazzo close to the Grand Canal, the headquarters of an ancient institute of arts, letters and science, of which he is the administrator. In the fading light of a winter afternoon there is something gloomy about the building, an impression that Ortalli's mood does nothing to dispel. "This town is ending," he says. "When I arrived here 30 years ago, there were 130,000 inhabitants. Now we are half that. But the numbers are not so important. Young people are being priced out of the city, and those of us left behind are old and exhausted."
Venice is not being saved for its people, Professor Ortalli believes, but for the tourist trade, which is not owned by Venetians. His institute recently bought a palazzo across the square to prevent its falling, like so many others, into the hands of an international hotel group. Every year, 15 million visitors pour into Venice, where they buy fake Murano glass and carnival mask souvenirs that Ortalli says "are all made in Taiwan." In his view, business interests are dictating the future for Venice in a way that leaves Venetians with very little control.
Venice woke up to the grave threat it faced in the first week of November 1966, when a violent storm surge from the Atlantic swept into the city, flooding it to nearly two meters above sea level. The population was left with no electricity, with black oil oozing out of cisterns and with alleyways strewn with rubbish and the corpses of pigeons and rats.
