The Vampires Descend

Sign of the times

NOTE: I wrote most of the below last week, just after the disastrous acqua alta of 187 cm.

MOSE, the acronym for the mobile flood barriers that were by now supposed to protect Venice from disastrous flooding of the sort that swept into the city Tuesday night has been on everyone’s lips these past days--almost invariably preceded or followed by a variety of imprecations, directed not just at the monstrously-expensive and still non-functioning things themselves but at the various people who have promoted them, and profited from them for the last 37 years.

After all, not long after the big project (it was literally called Il Progettone) was formally announced, the then-Prime Minister of Italy, Bettino Craxi, named the date of its completion: 1995. If by some miracle the gates had been operational by that time, Craxi himself would have had to miss their inauguration, as in 1994 he fled from Italy to escape imprisonment for corruption to Tunisia, where he'd remain a fugitive until his death in 2000. 

This would be just the first of many, many, many missed deadlines.

Sadly enough the best account I've seen on MOSE remains John Keahey's 2002 book Venice Against the Sea. "Sadly," I say, not because of any fault in the book itself--on the contrary, it's an impressive and fair depiction of the complex political and historical forces involved in the dream of saving Venice from encroaching tides--but because so little progress on the problem has been made that it remains as good a guide to the current situation today, 17 years after its publication, as it was when first printed.

"Sadly," too, because all the reservations which Keahey carefully documents various people expressing about the project from its very inception to the time of his writing--engineers, environmentalists, and the EU itself--have been shown to be not just valid, but nothing less than prophetic.

For example, consider this passage about the creation of Consorzio Venezia Nuova (or Consortium for a New Venice), a target of more than a few curses, not to mention corruption charges, in recent years:

Created by government fiat, the Consorzio is made up of about fifty of the largest public and private civil-engineering and construction firms in Italy. This [gives] a virtual monopoly for the rescue of Venice to a group of Italy's largest for-profit firms. Such a monopoly could never been created in the United States. There it would require several independent groups, all bidding for a variety of contracts. They would compete for the right to determine what solutions needed to be developed for problems within the lagoon, how those solutions should be designed, and then who should build them. [I must insert here that while this invocation of the US makes for an instructive contrast, and is along the lines of the process which Keahey later notes the EU wanted Italy to follow, America has since proved itself to be quite fond of no-bid contracts, not to mention unpunished corruption.]

The Consorzio was created in the years when Italian contracts and money were routinely funneled to "friends of friends," as one official wryly described it. And it was created before the 1990s crackdown by judicial magistrates on major business executives throughout Italy who were believed to have profited from a variety of favors and scams.

To its credit the Consorzio has weathered the wave of investigations that swept the country in the last decade of the twentieth century, a fact that have not stopped cynical Italians from continuing to believe that money is being poured into a bottomless hole, and that the Consorzio was making billion of lire from a project--the mobile gates--that would never see the light of day. Even today, in the dawn of the twenty-first century, there are those who believe that the Consorzio is content to have the gates continually delayed because it gives the organization a reason to exist--and continue to draw billions of lire annually in government funds.

Those billions of lire have swelled enormously to billions of euros--6 billion euros by latest estimates.

And deadlines continue to be missed regularly, and one news article after another recounts the latest humiliating revelation of the Consorzio's ineptness and knavishness. The latter perhaps surprises no one: as the excerpt above suggests, corruption and unaccountability were baked into the very being of the Consorzio.

But the utter incompetence is such that it alone, the sheer embarrassing stupidity, especially in the context of saving one of the world's great historical and cultural sites, merits criminal charges. They're the kinds of stupidity and irresponsibility one must laugh about so as not to cry, recounting to others in Venice, "Ah, remember when the geniuses at the Consorzio discovered--but only after installing the gates--that the sea is salty?!"

The website Campaign for a Living Venice has recently compiled a very useful list of links of the Consorzio's most recent failures under the heading "MoSE Will Not Work."  It provides a succinct and valuable context for understanding why this week's floods hit residents so very hard--the blow to local morale being no less severe than the substantial damage done to landmarks, homes, and businesses.

A group portrait of shamelesness: Silvio Berlusconi, center; Renato Brunetta, right of him; Luigi Brugnaro, at far right (Corriere del Veneto)

Indeed, given the long painful history of MOSE it requires, in truth, a rather extraordinary amount of shamelessness to arrive in the city when the water has once again filled the calli and campi to alarming heights, slip into some rubber boots, and declare with no sense of irony that the key takeaway from this ongoing disaster is that our dedication to (and, inevitably, funding of) the completion of MOSE must be intensified.

But then some politicians become legendary for their shamelessness, and one of the most infamous of this sort showed his wax-work face in Venice the day after Tuesday's near-record acqua alta of 187 cm to laud the project whose cornerstone he quite literally laid on May 13, 2003.

If, as the saying goes, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, it should come as little surprise to be reminded that, yes, indeed, it was Silvio Berlusconi (during his first term as Prime Minister) who served as the midwife of what, in terms of its non-functioning, might be called MOSE's still birth.

Though this week a good many people might describe MOSE's entrance into the lagoon as nothing less than an abortion.

But Berlusconi was not alone in this week's pitch for MOSE, nor the only person present at the inauguration of MOSE in 2003 to reappear this week in rubber boots as the image below from Dagospia shows:

Silvio Berlusconi (center) with Luca Zaia to his left, and Renata Bruneta (far right: current head of Berlusconi's Forza Italia party's group of deputies in the Chambers of Deputies, then a minister in the Berlusconi administration) at the May 14, 2003 ribbon cutting of MOSE

Though not pictured in the second image of this post taken in the high water of Piazza San Marco, the President of the Veneto region, Luca Zaia, was also in town yesterday--as he was in 2003 to kick off MOSE's construction (see directly above)--and Venice's own non-resident mayor traveled all the way from his home in the Treviso region to push for MOSE's "speedy" completion.

(Soon after Venice's current mayor was elected, a native Venetian, retired after a lifetime of serving in local and regional administrative roles, characterized him to me as "ruspante." I didn't know the word, so he gestured with one hand as if scraping for something on the table top between us and explained, "Like a hen in the farmyard, you understand? Scratching at the dirt to see what she might find for herself." It has proved to be--or, rather, the mayor has proved it to be--an apt description. So much so that that's how I always think of him, and how I'll refer to him here: Mayor Ruspante.)

Climate change was to blame for the increased frequency and intensity of flooding, said Mayor Ruspante, and only MOSE could save the city.

Well, being an American citizen, I had to give the good mayor a point just for mentioning climate change, as American politicians on the Right don't dare utter that term--and even go out of their way to entirely ban its use by state and Federal government agencies.

But while climate change is a major factor, it is not the only one. Also known to be a factor in the intensity of acqua alta are the kinds of changes to the morphology of the lagoon which Mayor Ruspante himself supports: that is, the digging of deep water shipping channels, which have washed away the extensive mudflats that once filled the lagoon and tempered tidal force, and the reconfiguration of the ports into the lagoon from the Adriatic for the sake of--the construction of MOSE.

Moreover, climate change is not the reason why MOSE is way behind schedule and still not functioning--nor giving many signs that it ever will.

It's simple (and cynical) enough to use the backdrop of a flooded city to demand that the pipe line of public funding poured into the private interests profiting from MOSE be kept fully open--after all, Berlusconi has declared "it's 94% completed!"

An impressive figure, indeed.

Until you consider that for the most part it's proven itself to be pretty much 100% non-functional.

If we've learned nothing else from this great long-running swindle, surely we've learned that all the money in the Italian budget doesn't buy competence or accountability. Why should it suddenly do so now?

These are some of the reasons why all the expressions of dismay in the world by Mayor Ruspante and Zaia and Brunetta and Berlusconi (if his face were capable of forming expressions) don't go very far with most Venetians.

And why a flyer posted all around town this week (below) labels these recent visitors "Crocodiles in the Lagoon," with the tears and sharp teeth that go with such creatures.

Venice's Mayor Ruspante (left), Regional President Luca Zaia, (center), and the Patriarch of Venice (right) are pictured on a flyer posted all around the city this week

But yesterday as I walked my son home from school--my son who has lived in Venice since before he was three years old, and who never wants to leave it--I caught sight of Berlusconi himself. We were approaching a bridge near Piazzale Roma as a long row of police boats and taxis began to pass beneath it, and then suddenly there he was: standing in the open air at the back of a taxi, spray-on hairline as black and flat as Bela Lagosi's Dracula, a faint fixed smile on his fixed filler-plumped face, a toady at the front end of the taxi's roof filming the former Prime Minister's slow procession down the Rio Novo with a smart phone as "Il Cavaliere" looked to see if anyone along the fondamente was noticing him--an aborted little wave attesting to a momentary false hope that he'd spotted an admirer.

Some, like myself, had noticed him, but I saw no one give a wave, and I saw no one smile. Seeing him cross one's path less than 24 hours after the acqua alta of 187 cm seemed a particularly inauspicious sign: a primped and long-black-coated undead passing through the stricken city, looking for more blood. 

An inauspicious sight in Rio Novo

"Venice Trembles": MOSE Corruption Arrests

"Rigged contracts," the headline reads, "Mazzacurati Arrested: Venice Trembles"

I ran into a Venetian architect friend yesterday evening who was in an unusually gleeful mood: "Have you heard the news?" he asked. "The director of MOSE has been put in jail! It's about time," he continued, "I've waited 15 years for this!"

The man he was referring to was Giovanni Mazzacurati who, until just a couple of weeks ago, was the president of Consorzio Venezia Nuovo, the huge conglomerate of businesses responsible for building the controversial, over-budget and behind-schedule gates in the inlets between the Adriatic and the lagoon that are supposed to protect Venice from high tides. 

My architect friend had resigned from one of his former positions in disgust over being repeatedly asked to sign off on fraudulent construction contracts cooked up by Mazzacurati. He said he'd reported the illegalities, but nothing had ever been done about them--and he imagined nothing ever would.

But all that suddenly changed yesterday afternoon, when Mazzacurati and 13 others were arrested for rigging contracts and other illegalities related to the Consorzio's multi-billion euro cash cow, the MOSE project. A project which for the last decade, as I happened to mention in a post last Sunday (http://veneziablog.blogspot.it/2013/07/mose-and-meadows-of-venice.html), has absorbed massive amounts of money that once would have gone to maintain the city of Venice.

Considering the amount of money tied up in the MOSE project, and the project's importance to the survival of Venice, I've been surprised not to find more coverage of the arrests and the huge ongoing almost peninsula-wide investigation of the scandal in the English language press: I've seen nothing, for example, in The New York Times, nothing in The Guardian... Here's a link to one short English language report:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10176520/Venice-dawn-raids-over-flood-barrier-corruption.html

And one in Italian: http://corrieredelveneto.corriere.it/veneto/notizie/cronaca/2013/12-luglio-2013/mose-maxi-inchiesta-consorzio-arrestato-ex-presidente-mazzacurati-2222114927111.shtml

 

My architect friend said, "Mazzacurati must have known something was going to happen soon--that's why he just resigned as president of the Consorzio."

It seems that everyone in Venice knew, or at least strongly suspected, what was going on with MOSE; the shock is that the authorities have actually done anything about it--and on such a large scale. And so my favorite headline of the local papers alludes to Visconti's Neo-realist masterpiece about poor Sicilian fishermen, La terra trema, or The Earth Trembles. One might suppose that Venetians would be trembling in rage and indignation to discover--or have confirmed--that the Consorzio Venezia Nuovo, entrusted with the survival of their legendary city, has used the opportunity for the most cynical profiteering. Perhaps. But given the far-reaching nature of the investigation, and the fraud, I think it's safe to say that more than a few Venetians may be trembling at the prospect of their own arrest.

[Part 2 of "Teatro Marinoni Revisited" will be the next post--as this news couldn't wait.]

An Outsider's Guide to Secret Venice, Part 3: The Emergency Lagoon Drainage System

A large floating buoy attached to one of the Emergency Lagoon Drainage Plugs in the basin of San Marco

The most visible element of the 45-year-old Emergency Lagoon Drainage System floats for all to see in the middle of the Bacino di San Marco, its primary function unknown to and even unsuspected by tourists and most Venetians alike. 

If anyone, besides my son Sandro and I, gives it much thought at all, they do so only when it's being utilized in its secondary function as a mooring place for a large, important ship, such as the Italian destroyer the Luigi Durand de la Penne.

But the primary purpose of this large floating buoy (at least as far as Sandro and I are concerned), and the others like it in the waters around the city,* has to do with an elaborate anti-flood system designed and implemented in the first years after the catastrophic deluge that struck Venice in 1966. It was this "perfect storm" that called international attention to Venice's susceptibility to being abruptly submerged by the sea--rather than merely subsiding into it--and which led 10 years later to the plan for a system of flood gates situated at the three mouths of the lagoons.

As noted by Salvatore Settis in his book If Venice Dies, in 1986 then-Prime Minister Bettino Craxi announced that these submerged flood gates (known by the acronym MOSE) "will definitely be operational by 1995." Instead, 22 years after this promised date, MOSE shows no signs of being operational any time soon--if ever--and has functioned only to transfer over 6.2 billion euros of public funding into the hands of private construction companies and corrupt politicians. Of course, in Italy, as in America, this is considered a laudable achievement in itself. Mission Accomplished!

But for all its fame and infamy, MOSE was the second engineering solution devised to protect the city against catastrophic flooding. The first was the now-forgotten, though still partly visible, Emergency Lagoon Drainage System.

In contrast to the no-bid contract that was gifted to the Consorzio Venezia Nuova to construct MOSE, in the immediate aftermath of the great flood of 1966 an international engineering competition was held. The winner of that competition was, to hardly anyone's surprise, considering the country's long history of hydraulic engineering, a Dutch firm.

This firm's solution to catastrophic flooding was both simpler and far more radical than the later MOSE proposal. It called for a vast drainage system to be installed beneath the lagoon, with a series of "plugs" located at the periphery of the city. The plugs themselves, situated snugly in massive drainage ports at the bottom of the lagoon, are invisible; we see only the large buoys attached to each of them and floating above them.

Each buoy, as you can see in the image at top, has a large steel ring in the center of its circular platform. In the event of extreme flooding, a fleet of massive helicopters known as "sky cranes" (with which Sandro was familiar from his then-favorite educational video series Mighty Machines), and currently stationed nearby on the mainland, would lower a hook into these rings, then haul them and their attached plugs into the sky.

A floating drainage buoy used for its secondary function by the Italian Navy

That is, just as we're in the habit of pulling a plug out of a sink or bathtub to let the water drain from it, so a fleet of massive helicopters would de-cork the lagoon.

By 1972 this Emergency Drainage System had been completed and was, according to computer analysis and a series of tests (extensive in number but necessarily limited in scope), fully functional.

Venice was saved.

Or was it?

For even as the system was being installed a multitude of scientific studies were arguing that just one use of the system would cause massive and irreversible damage to the lagoon itself. The rapid and violent emptying of water from the lagoon would result not only in a staggering loss of animal, plant, and probably even human life, but widespread destruction of the lagoon's ecosystem.

The shallow, rough, irregular terrain of the lagoon bed itself, with all its sedimentation, sub-acquatic plant life and mudflats (barene), would be sucked down with the swirling mass of water rushing into the drains installed in the lagoon.

To save the built structures of the city, in other words, the lagoon itself would be sacrificed.

Indeed, a heated debate over the ethics of what critics described as the sacrifice of Nature for the sake of Culture appeared across a number of issues of the obscure but influential International Journal of Hydraulics in the first years of the 1970s, reaching such a pitched state of contention that a fear that the hitherto scholarly debate might break out into the broader public consciousness caused it to be purchased by an unknown buyer and promptly shut down.

Some have identified the Italian government itself as the buyer; others, the Dutch engineering firm responsible for the drainage system. Whoever it was, they did an admirable job of suppressing the content of the debate and purging all traces of the journal from libraries. To this day, single issues from this contentious period have fetched bids in the low six figures, and a multi-copy set said to contain the complete series of exchanges garnered a million dollar bid from the famous Ransom Rare Book Collection at the University of Texas Austin. But in every case the proffered publications have turned out to be fraudulent. 

Equally troubling, though, was the fact that a single use of the system would, by scouring the lagoon clean of its wave-buffering natural features, leave the city significantly more susceptible to disastrous flooding than ever before. A single use of the system was likely to turn what had long been a lagoon into what was effectively a shallow bay, through which water from the Adriatic would rush in with unimpeded force.

According to some it was this realization that ultimately led to the decision in 1976 to go ahead with the mobile flood gates.

While others more simply, and cynically, say that the decision to go forward with the MOSE project was less about impeding the flow of dangerous tides than about diverting a massive flow of public money into the "right" (ie, well-connected) private bank accounts.

Whatever the reason, Venice now has one almost 50-year-old system of flood prevention that is theoretically still functional but that it dare not use, and one "new" one (originating just 10 years after the former) which it's supposedly clamoring to use but seems unlikely to ever be functional.

And, alas, because some municipalities, like some people, never seem to learn from their mistakes, the use of the MOSE system--if ever it does function--raises as many questions about its own disastrous effects on the lagoon as the old Emergency Lagoon Drainage System.

In truth, considering the long ineffectual history and deleterious consequences of each system side-by-side, the real MOSE one (with all its corruption and incompetence) and the one imagined by Sandro and me, I can't quite ultimately decide which of them stretches credulity more. 

 

"An Outsiders' Guide to Secret Venice, Part 1: The Cannaregio Gondola Factory" can be found here.

"An Outsider's Guide to Secret Venice, Part 2: The Regional Weather Control Center" is here.

-----------------

*There are a few such floating buoys and Sandro and I were inspired to look into the mystery of them after repeatedly passing a particular one of them that lay--like the subject of Part 2 of this series of posts--on the vaporetto path between his pre-school and our home (specifically, between the San Pietro di Castello stop and that of Bacini).

The Ambassadors: An Anecdotal Glimpse into MOSE and Contemporary Venetian Governance

Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, from the National Gallery, London

While writing my November 16th post about the great swindle that the MOSE water gates appear to be--since which time even more evidence has been published--I was reminded of an anecdote, which I tried to write up and attach as a short footnote to that piece. But the length of that footnote grew until it basically attained the length of a post all its own, which you can now read below.
 
For a short period of time three years ago I gave English conversational lessons to a man high up in the administration of one of Venice's major cultural institutions.

We'd met a few times, once a week, to practice in his office, before one day he announced he wouldn't be available for our next meeting, as he'd be in New York City. He explained, with more than his typically robust sense of pride, that he was going to be a member of a contingent of Venetian administrators traveling with then-mayor Giorgio Orsoni to the Big Apple on something of a cultural outreach mission.

We didn't talk about what he'd be doing there, but we did talk a little about New York City, and I told him I looked forward to hearing his impressions of it.

This was in October 2013. I didn't really think anymore about this administrator's trip to New York, or read anything about its main purpose, until today, while remembering this anecdote.

It turns out that various local publications, including the press office of the comune itself, trumpeted this important mission to New York City. The main point of each account was that, in the words of La Nuova di Venezia, "MOSE va a New York." (MOSE goes to New York).

For Hurricane Sandy had flooded New York City's subways in October of the previous year and had finally awakened its administration to the fact that, yes, indeed, rising sea levels--and not just more frequent "Storms of the Century"--were going to inundate major sections of the city as surely as they'd swamp Venice. Preventive measures would need to be taken.

This is where the representatives of Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the conglomerate of private construction firms gifted the no-bid contract to build MOSE and headed by its new president Mauro Fabris (who replaced the old one, Giovanni Mazzacurati, who'd been arrested for corruption in July), spied an opening to market their own "expertise" in the creation of flood prevention systems to America's largest and richest city. (As La Nuova plainly put it in the article above: "il Consorzio vola a New York per 'vendere' il progetto agli americani.") 

Indeed, you can still read a marvelously inflated account of this mission written up by Consorzio Venezia Nuova itself, in which it recounts the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, the threat of rising sea levels, and Consorzio's own unchallenged position as the world's expert on flood defenses: referring to the Consorzio's "know how and highest level of experience attained over many years," and its position as the "example for other areas of the planet that must develop programs to protect their own coastlines from the sea" ("acquisendo know how e competenze di altissimo livello, rappresenta oggi un  esempio  di  riferimento  per  altre  aree  del  Pianeta  chiamate  a  programmare  azioni strutturali per la salvaguardia delle regioni costiere dal mare").

(And, here, I must admit this about Consorzio Venezia Nuova: while both their incompetence and cupidity have proven to be off the chart, they do an admirable job on their press materials--especially for a firm based in Italy, where such things are typically rudimentary compared to the flash and polish of American and British corporate publications. My son came home from school a few weeks back with a large, glossy, colorful pamphlet published by Consorzio Venezia Nuova in English [not Italian] about how MOSE works--or is supposed to--that was every bit as slick as anything put out by an admirable company such as, say, Exxon-Mobil. In cash-strapped school systems like that of Venice, such advertising materials (fictional though they may be) are "generously" distributed by corporate interests as educational materials--as, I imagine, texts about the benevolence of the Venetian Republic might have been to distributed to any residents of Constantinople still alive after their city was sacked in 1204).  

In any case, this band of august Venetian ambassadors set off on a trade mission to a powerful distant land--just as Venetians used to do all the time during the glory years of the mighty Republic--to meet with its powerful leader, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, himself as rich as one of the sultans of old.

But these representatives of an ancient, imperiled and ever-more-empty city of less than 60,000 residents did not go merely hat in hand to one of the world's undisputed capitals with a population of more than 8 million. No, the venerable Mayor Orsoni--still some months away from being arrested himself and forced from office for corruption--is reported to have declared to Bloomberg that Venice "is a modern city of innovation." Considering the sophistication of the MOSE project, that is, it was almost as if Orsoni and company were emissaries from the future, with a great gift to bestow (for the right price).

Well, you'd think that anyone fortunate enough to have been a member of this honorable group of statesmen (and it was all men), would have plenty to say about this historically significant trip: this moment at which Venice reasserted its trail-blazing importance on the international stage. 

But the next time I saw the administrator I tutored, a couple of weeks after his return to Venice, he morosely refused to say almost anything about it, scowling and muttering at the mere mention of it.

I persisted, and found out why.

Only after concluding their visit to New York City did this contingent of Venetian representatives discover that they had arranged to meet with an outgoing lame duck mayor in his last two months in office.

For strange as it may seem, none of these perspicacious ambassadors seemed to be aware of the fact that New York City would he holding a mayoral election less than two weeks after their visit. An election in which Michael Bloomberg, having already exceeded the term limit of his office, was never going to be on the ballot.

That is, an entirely new administration would take charge of running the city in the new year, while Venice's representatives had spent their time meeting with powerless outgoing officials. 

To make it even worse, the winner of the mayoral election by a landslide (Bill de Blasio), as expected, was not even a member of the same political party as the outgoing mayor. 

The Venetians' trip, in other words, was, in the words of the administrator I tutored, a total waste of time.

But, of course, this anecdote refers to something that took place three years ago. I have no doubt that the current administration and leadership of Venice is much more astute.

One of History's Great Swindles? Venice Is Sinking, but MOSE Is Sinking Much Faster

One of the large MOSE water gates prior to its installation in the mouth of the lagoon--where it will lie inoperably until corrosion necessitates its removal for costly repair and cleaning

If Venice is widely considered in its beautiful, implausible entirety--all its art, architecture, industry and economic innovation arising in the most inhospitable and limited of spaces--to be one of civilization's greatest creations, shouldn't the scandal-ridden, defective and ever-more-obsolete MOSE water gate system (that was supposed to save it) be considered one of civilization's greatest swindles?

This is the question that's haunted me for the last couple of years as all the corruption, incompetence and ill effects--both ecological and civic--of the great work (grande opera) have come undeniably to the surface:

So, the gates have created changes in water flow that have resulted in huge deep pits in the lagoon, which actually intensify acqua alta...?

So, the Director of the project Giovanni Mazzacurati and scores of others were arrested for corruption...? (Corruption that many people saw wired into the project from its inception.)

So the €5.5 billion that have gone to the project have meant that even essential services necessary to the operation and preservation of the city (eg regularly dredging canals) have been cut, and social services necessary to the life of what's left of the living city have been wiped out (funds to schools, libraries, senior centers, tidal monitoring centers, etc)...?

So, only in the last two years have the project's crack team of engineers discovered, as the local papers put it, that there's salt in sea water--which is corroding the water gates at alarming rates and fouling their operation...?

So, the gates were designed for a rise in sea level of 20 cm and now the projection is 80 cm...?

Well, in spite of all this and much more, I told myself not to jump to any conclusions. After all, the fate of one of the world's most celebrated cities depends on this grand project, and having sucked up all the Special Funds designated for Venice, and knowing full well that the entire world is watching them, those involved in the project couldn't be so shamelessly venal and/or inept as to make a complete shambles of it all.

Don't be such a pessimist, I told myself.

Now this, published in yesterday's L'Espresso: the massive concrete caissons lodged in the lagoon bed from which the water gates are supposed to rise up are actually sinking faster than Venice itself.  
(The entire article by Fabrizio Gatti merits reading, even if you need the help of a translation program to do so.)

The project's crack team of engineers had, of course, projected a certain limited amount of subsidence--but nothing even approaching what is actually happening.

While the city sinks a few millimeters each year into the ancient sediment of the lagoon, MOSE's foundations are sinking at a rate of 4 cm per year.

In other words, not only is the expected sea level going to be higher than was planned for in the design of the gates, but the foundations of the gates are going to be sinking ever lower.

Or, in other words, it appears that €5.5 billion (and counting) have been poured into a corrupt project that not only does not function--its operational date is perennially pushed further and further back--but which is already obsolete.

Meanwhile, Giovanni Mazzacurati lives out his golden years in La Jolla, California, having been deemed too infirm to withstand punishment for his crimes; the next and perhaps last generation of Venetian children attend filthy schools to which they must bring their own toilet paper; and Venice's own non-resident "Can-Do" mayor fantasizes about hosting a Trump-Putin summit here and, in spite of the ongoing disaster that is MOSE, pushes for beginning yet another grande opera: an offshore port just outside the lagoon.

Once again: senza parole.

Behind the Mask of Carnevale: A Bit on Schools in Venice

Venice is a great place to be a child, but one with very limited quality educational options

We recently were notified by the public school our son attends here in Venice that his second grade class next year will be sticking to the same three half-day two full-day weekly schedule it follows this year. We were pleased to hear this, as we saw no need to increase the number of full days each week to three for second graders, as had been discussed as a possibility.

We were not pleased to find out, though, that the decision was not based upon any pedagogical considerations. No, the educators believed the third full day was necessary, but it turned out that there was simply no money in the city budget to pay for staffing it. 

This is the reality of living in the "fairy tale city" of Venice.

Last year parents literally took to the streets more than once in public marches to protest the fact that budget cuts to school maintenance had left the schools so filthy that some literally had to be closed as unfit for classes.

Of course nation-wide Italy already spends the least on education of any EU country (http://www.ansamed.info/italy-bottom-in-european-education-spending-ranking-report). Not surprising, perhaps, in a country run for nearly two decades by Silvio Berlusconi. For in the blithely cynical and remorselessly corrupt world view of Berlusconi, in which (to use a line from Eugene O'Neill) "every man is a knave with his soul for sale, and every woman who isn't a whore is a fool," what use, really, is education?

But Venice has its own particular problems. As Ana Somers Cocks has diligently reminded whomever will listen, the federal money that once came to Venice for the special maintenance required in a city like this (592 million euros in 2002) has been reduced to less than 1/20th of that amount. If it shows up at all (http://www.nybooks.com/2013/jun/20/coming-death-venice/).

The rest of the funds from Rome have been poured into the great slop trough that is the MOSE mobile tidal barrier project: a trough surrounded by a legion of ravenous venal swine whose behavior might shock even Dante, familiar though he was with characters who richly merited a spot in the lowest depths of hell. (See Venetian artist Elena Tagliapietra's recent site-specific performance piece depicting corruption as the new plague on the city: http://www.thevenicetimes.com/new-plague-in-venice.)

Indeed, one might argue that this Grand Project to, purportedly, save the city has done more to kill it as a city for residents than any of the lagoon's well-documented economic environmental challenges. Of the 5.6 billion euros funneled into the project, it has been estimated that as much as 1 billion was siphoned off for graft.

That was not a typo: at least 1 billion euros swallowed up by corruption.

(And, incidentally, I saw that Matteo Renzi was recently in California's Silicon Valley, hat in hand, talking up Italy as an excellent destination for investors. Good luck with that, Matty. See: http://www.ft.com/italian-corruption-scares-off-investors)

Oh, and by the way, the barrier gates that will save the city from high tides are nowhere near functional. Their operational date has been pushed off, once again, until 2017. And, of course, billions of euros more will be needed to meet even that deadline.

Or to not meet it. As, really, deadlines come and go here without consequences, just as large criminals pursue their crimes, and are arrested, also without any consequences. More than 100 people were arrested last spring, including the head of the powerful Consorzio Venezia Nuova (Giovanni Mazzacurati), a conglomerate of companies with a monopolistic no-bid right to all MOSE contracts, but who has gone to jail? The mayor of Venice lost his job for corruption, but his punishment was nothing more than a few days of house arrest.

Mazzacurati himself, called "the mastermind" of the system of corruption, has been deemed too old to serve a prison term even if he were convicted of anything.

But Venetian children are not the only ones profoundly affected by this criminality at the highest levels. For while they must make do with schools of dubious quality--finding a good school in Venice is quite difficult--other residents, including the city's large elderly population, must make do with what my Venetian physician bitterly refers to as "half of a hospital."

And we are lucky to have that. Only a concerted opposition by determined citizens was able to change the regional government's plan to essentially close Venice's hospital and move most of it to the mainland.

In other words, for all the choreographed evocations and celebration of Venetian culture on offer to visitors (for a price) during Carnevale, it's pretty easy for residents to feel that those with real power over the city not only care nothing for those who live here full-time, but would find the city much more profitable and efficient if we were gone completely.

A city devoid of actual residents would mean no more money "wasted" on educating children, on facilities for the sick or aged. All the big money of transporting tourists to and from the city--on big ships, on planes, trains, buses, lancioni (the large boats that shuttle tour groups from outlying landing areas to the city center)--could still be made, all the things people come to see would see be here.        

Indeed, a city of commuting employees, not residents, seems, ultimately, to be the implicit ideal for most of those with power, whatever they may sometimes sentimentally, even operatically claim.

I sometimes think about what could be done for the city with just the 1 billion euros that went to corruption--not to mention the other 4.6 billion or so that supposedly found its way to legitimate MOSE-related uses (if any money toward MOSE can be considered well spent anymore). But then I remind myself that the criterion for a huge money project such as MOSE (and not only in Italy) is not whether it benefits citizens, or in this case "saves" the city of Venice, but whether the money ends up in the right well-connected hands and bank accounts. And in these terms, no doubt, MOSE has been a smashing--or should I say, crushing?--success.

There Are Limits to What MOSE Can Do, This Evening (3 Views)

 

The flood barriers known as MOSE were up for 40 continuous hours this past weekend, during which time they prevented two high tides of more than 130 cm (as well as all the rest of the normal tidal movement in and out of the lagoon). The forecast for late this afternoon initially put the high tide around 125 cm, and MOSE is only raised when the forecast is for a tide of 130 cm or greater. MOSE also requires, if recall correctly, about 3 hours to rise into it full upright position and, moreover, shipping traffic that would be entering or departing the lagoon must be notified in advance that their route will be closed. All of which explains why there was nothing to be done this afternoon when Bora winds ended up pushing the high tide to 145 cm at 4:45 pm, which was about 45 minutes before these images were taken.

 

A long exposure of 10 second smooths what in reality was the deep choppy water in Piazza San Marco while the series of video screens in the window of Museo Correr, an installation by the artist Fabrizio Plessi, appear as blank white light. 

 

 

 

Of Cappelunghe, Salt, MOSE, and the Lowest Forms of Life

 photo credit: AT

The hole of a cappalungha is recognizable by the lower-case "b" that surrounds it

To be honest, I didn't even know what cappalunghe were, much less that they were caught using salt. In English, I've only just learned, they're called razor clams. But when I saw them stacked or bundled together at the Pescheria di Rialto they registered as little more than sticks of the sea, and nothing I ever thought about eating. I also had no idea that they were local; that they could, in fact, be caught a short distance from where we live.

Like so much of the natural life and culture of the lagoon, our introduction to them came through Sandro. He'd spent last Saturday afternoon with our neighbors and he returned home after eating dinner with them bearing two cooked cappalunghe which, to be honest again, didn't look especially appetizing to me at that particular moment.

But he was thrilled with them. He'd caught them himself just a few hours earlier on the strand of Sant' Erasmo and they had eaten all but these two for dinner at our neighbor's apartment and they were, he told us (bouncing on the balls of his feet with barely-containable enthusiasm and pride), absolutely delicious. He actually licked his lips to underscore this last point, just as a particularly ravenous cat might do in the very old Woody Woodpecker cartoons he likes to watch on Youtube.

There was nothing to be done but eat them. Jen took one, I took the other. The taste and texture didn't exactly go well with the apple I'd just finished eating, and it took me a moment to identify them both, but then I exclaimed, "It's a clam!" Which was a discovery only for myself.

"That's what cappa means," Jen said.

"Ah, yes, 'long clam'..." I murmured, a small dim bulb lighting up for me while the rest of my family already stood in knowing sunshine. Then, in response to Sandro's vivid waiting expression: "It's great!"

And so it was--especially in terms of the adventure he'd had in catching them with his friends.

"Their holes are in the shape of the letter 'b'!" Sandro told us. "That's how you find them!" For a first grader excited about learning to write and spell and read this fact seemed to carry a special significance. As if the natural world were validating, as no teacher or parent ever could, that the alphabet really did have some immediate practical--and fun!--application. Boy, I wanted to say, that alphabet is really something!*

But he was already telling us about how you have to put rock salt on the their hole. Carefully, not letting your shadow fall upon their hole, or else they won't come out.

"Really?" I asked.

"Really. It scares them."

"How long won't they come out?"

He shrugged. "For a while. From the shadow they know not to come out. But then they forget..."

When they do start to rise out of their hole you have to grab them quick, before they retreat--with not too tight and not to loose a grip--and then they spit at you!

"They spit at you?" I asked.

"Yes. It's their defense."

"But it didn't work against you?"

He shook his head, fearless.

(The next day I'd learn from the father of Sandro's friend that took him to catch cappalunghe that while the spitting was no deterrent, the surprising fact that much of the first clam Sandro caught stretched pendulously out the back of the shell as he lifted it from its hole almost made him drop it in disgust. But after that first shock he was the picture of courage.)

"And salt is all it takes to get them out of their holes?" I asked Sandro. "But isn't there plenty of salt in the water of the lagoon? Don't they have enough of it already?"

He shrugged. "They like salt," he said.

Alas, it seems that cappalunghe are not the only things in the lagoon with a fatal susceptibility to salt.

To absolutely no one's surprise except, apparently, those conscienceless crooks civic-minded saviors of Venice who do business under the name Consorzio Venezia Nuova, it seems that the salt of the Adriatic is having a shockingly deleterious effect upon the multi-billion-euro water gates (known by the acronym MOSE) that are supposed to protect this city from extreme acqua alta. (As many people have sarcastically exclaimed, "But how could CVN and its various well-paid experts have ever been expected to know that there was salt in the sea!")

As reported three days ago in the local paper La Nuova di Venezia, architect Fernando De Simone (who specializes in underwater and underground projects) has called attention to the disturbing fact that photographs of the water gates raised out of the sea after just one year in place clearly show far more damage to them from the salty marine environment than was ever projected by Consorzio Venezia Nuova (http://nuovavenezia.gelocal.it/cronaca/2014/11/03/news/le-paratoie-del-mose-gia-aggredite-dal-sale). Which means, he says, that the Consorzio's projected maintenance costs--already, as one might expect, astronomical--will turn out to be only a fraction of what in reality will be needed.

Rather than the projected maintenance cost of between 30 and 40 million euros every five years to deal with damage from salt water forecast by Consorzio Venezia Nuova, De Simone claims that current evidence suggests that between 30 and 40 million euros in maintenance will be required each and every year.

Now, given the fact that the cozy monopoly that is Consorzio Venezia Nuova has exclusive rights to perform maintenance on MOSE unto perpetuity this egregious (but no doubt entirely innocent miscalculation!) is really no problem at all for Consorzio Venezia Nuova. But De Simone, and many others, are encouraging Prime Minster Renzi's new anti-corruption czar--who already has his hands full with the more than 130 people already under investigation or arrest for corruption in connection with the particular "business practices" of the Consorzio Venezia Nuova--might want to take a closer look into this profitable little underestimation.

And so twice in recent days I've been amazed to learn of the kinds of creatures that a little (or a lot) of salt can expose to the light of day: in one instance, a bunch of hapless and innocent bivalves. In the other, an unsavory bunch of much much lower forms of life.

--------------------
*Note: From Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: "Printed posters go up in the cities, in Samarkand and Pishpek, Verney and Tashkent. On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian f--k you signs, the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!)..."

MOSE and the Meadows of Venice

A pastoral paradise within sight of the campanili of San Giorgio Maggiore and San Marco

For more than 10 years the federal money that once would have gone to the city of Venice to fund the extraordinary maintenance required to keep this most extraordinary of cities afloat (so to speak) has been directed instead to the system of underwater floodgates at the portals between the lagoon and the Adriatic known as MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico). Built by a private consortium of companies who were handed a no-bid contract not only to build it but to maintain it when (or if) it is finished (which means a guaranteed annual income of many millions of euros in perpetuity) this project is responsible for the fact that the 592 million euros the city received in 2002 has been reduced for the last decade to a small fraction of that amount: only 20 million euros in 2005, according to Ana Somers Cocks's recent piece in the New York Review of Books entitled "The Coming Death of Venice?" (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/coming-death-venice/?pagination=false Moreover, Somers Cocks (former chairperson of Venice in Peril) writes that "the 40 million euro allocated to it in 2011 only arrived from Rome this April." That is, two years behind schedule.

(An excellent book on MOSE and the problem of rising tides is John Keahey's Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged. Though published in 2002, the glacial rate at which change happens in Italy means that it still reads as if were published last year.)

The diversion of all these funds to this private monopoly--to which, as Keahey writes, the EU had very strong objections--means that the city budget is a shambles: school children must, for example, bring their own toilet paper to school, and this summer the few public lawns of Venice are being left to grow wild for longer periods of time than I've seen before, as there's no money to pay the city giardinieri. The grass in Sant' Elena reached such a height at the beginning of this summer that Jen remarked you could easily lose a child in it. I believe she was understating it: in truth, it was quite high enough to swallow up a good many of their grandparents, too.

But it's not been all bad, as I hope the photo above suggests. There's never been a better summer in the three years we've lived here to appreciate the wild flowers.

Every Door A Water Door: Venice Submerged

We don't usually have a water door in our apartment building, but last night our cortile became a canale (and our son sweeps out the water that surmounted our front steps)

Two common misperceptions about acqua alta are that:

1) It signifies the same kind of flooding that commonly strikes other parts of the world when, for example, a river overflows and inundates an area for a full day or two (or more) before receding. In contrast, acqua alta is simply part of the usual movement of the tides here, which follow an alternating cycle of roughly 6 hours up and 6 hours down. So that, for example, while a normal instance of acqua alta may impede your path through a certain part of town some morning, it's likely to be out of your way by noon.

2) If there's acqua alta in Piazza San Marco, the rest of the city must also be flooded. This depends, but as Piazza San Marco, which centuries ago was one of the highest points in the city, is now (thanks to subsistence) one of its lowest, there may be flooding there but very little anywhere else. That is, acqua alta is not necessarily general throughout Venice.

But when the tides surges 156 cm above its mean level, as it did yesterday, then even buildings situated in higher parts of the city find themselves with water doors, which had led out to paving stones before.

70% of the city was flooded yesterday and most of the city was shut down. In fact, in anticipation of the high tide all schools had been canceled as of Sunday evening--and not just for yesterday, but for today as well. The Rialto markets didn't open yesterday, nor did supermarkets, and though most of the Rialto produce stalls were open today, and a couple of the fish stalls of the pescheria, the supermarkets were still closed today as of noon due to the extensive cleanup necessitated by the flooding. I don't know how many, if any, were able to open by this evening.

The most famous instance of acqua alta that stuck around for far longer than usual is of course the flood of 1966, whose waters rose to over 190 cm and were prevented from receding by an extraordinarily strong scirocco forcing water up the Adriatic, and topped off by heavy rains and rivers that overflowed the diversionary routes Venetians had laboriously dredged for them centuries before.

There were strong winds yesterday and last night as well, and our upstairs neighbor, who'd weathered the 1966 flood in the same building in which he (still) and we (now) live, alluded to that disastrous scirocco of old and hoped the one blowing last night wouldn't have anything like the same effect. The next high tide was due in just after midnight, and at 11 pm I looked out our window to find the previous one still filling our courtyard.

But this morning our cortile was no longer a basin whose water exceeded the height of our just-below-the-knee stivali (rubber boots) and it was time to clean up. 

Of course, one is tempted to note here that if MOSE, the multi-billion euro flood prevention system, was working all of this might have been avoided. But then one remembers that MOSE is working perfectly--on its own terms. For it has done what seems to be its real job of transferring billions of euros of public money into the bank accounts of well-connected private interests--flood prevention and the saving of Venice serving merely as the pretext for this admirable operation.

Meanwhile, as today's New York Times reports, the basilica of San Marco's interior was submerged yesterday to an extent recorded only four times before in its 900 year history and, according to one of its board members, "in just one day aged 20 years."

And thus I find myself further convinced that, considering the cultural and historical importance of the city which it was charged to protect and the amount of money that has been spent on it, the forever non-functional MOSE project must surely rank as one of history's great swindles. Anyone and everyone involved with it should be very proud indeed: they assume their well-deserved places among those Venetian and/or mercenary miscreants who sacked Constantinople and bombarded the Parthenon. 
 

MOSE as Art and as Mirage

The backdrop of white fluffy clouds in this image taken two days ago are in sharp contrast to the dark clouds that have figuratively hung over MOSE since its inception

Though the threat to Venice is from too much water rather than the complete absence of it, when it comes to the giant flood gates known by the acronym MOSE in Italian it seems to me the city is stuck in a long fruitless trudge through a hopeless desert, its eyes fixed upon a vision of salvation that forever recedes, mirage-like, before it.

Originally scheduled to be operational by 2012, the functioning date is forever being bumped a little further into the future. The last I heard it was 2017--which strikes the perfect balance being close enough to encourage some hope and distant enough to allow ample time to target yet another slightly more distant deadline as the former one approaches.

But then the other day I happened upon a piece on Venice in the Financial Times that referred to an operational date of 2020! Considering that the journalist--and I use that term in its loosest sense--got a number of other basic facts about the city wrong, perhaps it shouldn't be taken seriously. Or maybe in getting it wrong the writer actually got it right, as we do seem to be approaching close enough to 2017 that it's time for the relevant authorities to push back the date again.

In any case, after going to put some gas in our small boat two days ago I was struck by the sight of one of the giant flood gates near the lagoon-side dock of the Arsenale. Last year gates like this had inspired a round of dark, despairing mirth when local papers reported that once installed in their places in the mouths of the Lidi they were rusting far more quickly than ever imagined by the crack team of engineers assembled by the Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the conglomerate of Italian construction firms that without any competition had been handed the multi-billion euro project--and which, to absolutely no one's surprise (see, for example, the 4th- and 5th-to-last paragraphs in this 2008 piece), have in the last couple of years been found guilty of extensive corruption and fraud. Local papers pilloried the Consorzio for only having just discovered that there was salt in seawater.

Perhaps the gate above was a replacement for one already so far gone with corrosion as to need replacement? Whatever the reason, there it was on display, as utterly useless to this point in time as the most decadent of any old "Art-for-Art's-Sake" enthusiast could ever demand that a work of art be: more massive and more massively expensive than anything ever displayed nearby at that great International Art Show of the wheeling-dealing 1% called the Venice Biennale.      

This cropped image shows the depth scale in meters on the gate's side

Vulture Under Glass

A figure of Venice's Mayor Luigi Brugnaro stands in the window of what had been one of the city's many vacant commercial spaces until it was turned into a display space for the holidays.

A lot of people are understandably upset by the decision by Venice's non-resident mayor, self-appointed Councilor for Culture, and Vice-President of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Luigi Brugnaro, not to re-open the city's museums when all of Italy's museum have been given the green light to do so on January 15, in spite of the fact that 8 million euro have just arrived from the national government to make up for lost ticket sales in 2020.

As the piece linked to above on the website Ytali succinctly lays out, and as discussed in more detail in a post I linked to last week by Monica Cesarato, the benefits of re-opening the museums seem obvious, and are of significant importance to preserving the vitality of the city through this very difficult time. Given the facts of the situation laid out above, the decision by the Brugnaro administration seems inexplicable.

Beneath the figure a hand-written card pleads in Venetian: "Sir Mayor,/ We don't have anything,/ not pesto/ nor anything to grind up.../ Give us some help" ("pesto" signifying not so much the literal Genovese sauce and "pestar" not just to crush, but playing on the words' similarities and suggesting we have neither the sauce itself nor the mere ingredients needed to make anything at all).

But maybe that's because those of us who find it so are, in a sense, asking the wrong question. We ask: 

What could possibly prevent an administration from taking a step that has obvious benefits for more than 500 employees of the city's museums, its residents, and for the reputation of the city itself?

An obvious question, it seems to us. But that is where we go wrong. 

For the assumption in our question is that the Brugnaro administration shares our concern for the more than 500 employees, the city's residents, and the city's reputation. We assume that the values implicit in our question are shared by the Brugnaro administration.

But there has been ample evidence before this that, despite a bit of rhetoric here and there (especially during election season), they are not shared by Brugnaro and his administration. 

His priorities and ours do not line up, no matter how much we tell ourselves that ours are grounded in well-founded traditions of both culture and policy.

There is no sign that our criteria of success have anything in common with those of Brugnaro and his ilk. 

To use a larger example: as the 6 billion euro MOSE water barrier system sat unused and unusable, I used to shake my head in disgust at what an utter failure the project to protect Venice had been. But then I realized it was only a failure insofar as I believed that the primary goal of the project was actually to save Venice from flooding. 

What if, in fact, that was not the primary goal at all?

What if the real goal, at least for some well-connected people, was to secure a no-bid monopoly contract that would assure a steady transfer of immense sums of government funds into their own private businesses--not just while the long-overdue project was under construction but after it was ostensibly "completed"? After all, annual maintenance of the monstrosity is placed at 200 million euro. 

In those terms--that of effecting the transfer of huge amounts of public funds into private hands--the MOSE project was a huge success. And so, in those terms, it continues to be, even while the cost of its mere functioning, not just maintenance, are huge (which is, of course, another great success according to this measure).

Similarly, our idea that Brugnaro would have any interest at all in maintaining the vitality of public institutions seems unfounded. On the contrary, not only has the Brugnaro administration been complicit in the sale of public property to private interests, Brugnaro himself has attempted to buy public property (the island of Poveglia before he was elected mayor, not to mention his complicated ongoing arrangement involving the Scuola di Misericordia).

One thing that Venice has a lot of are retired residents; two things it typically has too much of are tourists and hotels. The above property on Riva degli Schiavoni is now in the final stages of being converted from a retirement home for residents into yet another hotel for tourists: as such it embodies the administration's priorities.

 

That is, what we see as the defects in this latest decision regarding the city museums are precisely what Brugnaro might see as its appeal: the weakening/destabilizing of public institutions (and the demoralization of their employees).

Brugnaro is a predatory capitalist, it's how he made his fortune. The son of a Leftist pro-labor poet, what some might term his Oedipal reaction has been acted out on a big stage, first in his overtly anti-labor temporary employment agency, then in his ongoing support of neo-liberal policies which aim to sell off public assets to private interests and sacrifice public good (and even public health) to private profit.

To such people, the undermining of any public asset is not considered a danger, but an opportunity. And Brugnaro has made it clear over the last six years, as he promotes the transformation of this or that public asset into a private luxury hotel (eg, Fort Sant' Andrea), that he sees the lagoon as being filled with opportunities rather than, you know, citizens (unless an election is approaching, in which case the latter become temporarily visible on his radar insofar as they are voters). 

Alas, there are a lot of Brugnaros around. So many, in fact, that Venice's non-resident "first citizen," as he aids in the dismantling and selling off (or buying off) of what is supposed to be one of "Western culture's" great constructions, seems relatively (but only relatively) benign. I mean, at least he's not in the midst of an ongoing coup attempt upon what was purported to be one of the world's "most stable democracies" (though on the Democracy Index my native land doesn't even crack the top 20, described only as a "flawed democracy," and with a score that I sadly expect will now plummet even further).*

So what do we do about it? I don't know, it's too much to go into in a blog post. But perhaps the first step is to move beyond our surprise or indignation at each new outrage to a recognition of consistent patterns, those to which our assumptions of some shared cultural values or priorities may be blinding us. 

NOTE

*A 1988 article in The New Republic aptly described the current occupant of the White House as "a real estate garbage man. He can smell opportunity in distress." The piece, by Louis Menand, also includes this exemplary quotation: "'When bad times come,' Trump told Barbara Walters recently, 'I’ll get what I want.'"

More recently, in a 2014 television interview, Sarah Kendzior writes that when asked about the direction of the country, America's current leader "rooted for its demise:

'You know what solves it?' Mr. Trump told Fox News. 'When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [laughs], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.'"

I don't suggest that Venice's mayor is anything like the "stochastic terrorist leader" currently occupying the Oval Office, but he is among those more stable "entrepreneurs" who sniff out private opportunity in public distress, whether in matters of employment or land. Why do voters imagine this habit would make them suitable candidates for a public office? 

It's akin to saying, "Please come right on in, Mr Fox, we understand you have some great ideas about how to tidy up our hen house...."

A True, Present-day Bridge of Sighs--and Lots of Dead Fish

As I type this at 7:40 pm the temperature here in Venice is 31℃ (88℉), but with the humidity it feels like it's 38℃ (100℉). We're at the beginning of a heat wave. Last week--prior to the heat wave--there was a mass die-off of fish in the lagoon, thousands of them could be seen floating everywhere, even in the Grand Canal.

In its best Death in Venice-style, the city's official reassuring response was that this kind of thing wasn't out of the ordinary when the weather turned hot, it's happened before. But last week--unlike today and the forecast for the week ahead--was no hotter than usual; than last summer, for example, and there were no mass die-offs of fish last year.

The slightly more in-depth official response was that the fish suffocated to death; that the warm weather had encouraged the growth of algae in the water which robbed it of oxygen. Of course, algae growth is made much worse by the presence of certain man-made substances in the water, such as phosphates, and there's concern that there may have been a release of other pollutants into the lagoon. Some people have complained of a particularly unpleasant chemical smell on the lagoon, but the official response has been that tests show the chemical plant in Marghera is not at fault.

Gianfrano Bettin, Venice's Councilor of the Environment, was quoted last week as saying that "the situation in the lagoon is quite normal (my emphasis). The absence of wind and currents has caused overall warming of water in the lagoon, which has led to obvious difficulties for native species, especially in the southern and central areas of the lagoon."

This was supposed to be reassuring, but as Venetian blogger Fausto Maroder pointed out in a post about the dead fish on his blog, isn't "the absence of currents" exactly what we have to look forward to whenever (or if ever) the MOSE gates are activated?: http://alloggibarbaria.blogspot.it/2013/07/moria-di-pesci-venezia.html

His concern, shared by many others, is that MOSE, along with merely the usual man-made pollutants in the lagoon, and (if we ignore Global Warming as many still want to do) even merely the usual warm temperatures, will turn the mass die-off of fish into the new "quite normal." A deadly new "quite normal."

None of which I actually intended to go into in this post... Instead, my original aim was to remark briefly on the photo above of the illegal vendors (or abusivi) driven to take refuge from the heat and sun in the scant shadows of a parapet on a bridge spanning the Canale dell'Arsenale (easily identified by the pair of obelisks visible in the photo, which also adorn the roof of any palazzo on the Grand Canal in which a commander of the Venetian fleet lived).

On the hottest days of summer such vendors seem to me to be especially fearless of the law, whose would-be enforcers I imagine spend as much time as possible within the air-conditioned walls of their respective departments and as little as possible pounding the paving stones of the Riva. On such afternoons, bridges like the one above look very much like open-air markets, with scores of counterfeit bags, dozens of tripods, and hundreds of pairs of sunglasses displayed on blankets on the ground. The vendors array themselves within whatever strip of shade is available, moving as it does with the slowly passing hours, making small talk, and, I imagine, sighing beneath the unrelenting sun and heat and boredom.

As many Venetians themselves sigh, too, at the sight of the vendors in such complacent numbers: these troops of regulars, seen day-in and day-out, as familiar as the neighborhood pharmacist, but illegitimate. Ir-regulars, you could say. A part of the city fabric, but not part of it, not officially, but always always there.