Is it possible to save Venice from tourism?
"I am a maniac for islands", confesses Enric Bou, a Venetian by adoption, in Venice. City of Losses (Editorial UB). The lagoon city is made up of one hundred and nineteen islands. The first inhabitants, emerging from the dregs of the Roman Empire, took refuge from the Hun and Germanic invaders in the lagoon, among others on the island of Torcello, where the oldest church is located, and on that of Rialto (Rivoalto, high bank), where the famous bridge now presides (there are more than 500 in the entire city).
The descendants of those first refugees ended up dominating the Mediterranean and becoming a crucible of capitalism: long-distance trade, finance and incipient industrial production (the Arsenal), a pragmatic, calculating and worldly mentality. And art?, you will ask: beauty at the service of the propaganda of the unique Serene Republic, which invented income tax, statistics, public debt investments, the lottery... and also book censorship and the ghetto.
Venice is an artificial archipelago on millions of wooden piles. A human marvel. A labyrinthine madness. A secular mystery where time has another rhythm and another density, where past and future shake hands. Against the evidence of the bland and pampered non-places described by Marc Augé, it is the place par excellence: there is nothing like it. For this reason, for five hundred years, it has been a tourist city, a mirror of wonders and miseries. Of course: glass mirrors were first made in Venice.
It has long since become a product of itself (postmodern capitalism). It was already a mandatory destination for aristocratic travelers of the Grand Tour of the 16th to 18th centuries, not only thanks to its aquatic uniqueness and its architectural and artistic heritage (during the Renaissance, oil painting became the norm there), but also for its ability to transmit knowledge (although it did not formally have a university until 1868), for its cultural dynamism (dance, music, theatre... and almost 200 printing presses already in the early 1500s; the Venetians created copyright) and for its attractive system of government (the powerful, sophisticated and civic Serene Republic).
The Great Paradox
Santa Margherita. The dampness chilled you to the bone. He had read the Enric Bou recalls that it hasn't snowed or frozen there for years. I was there in 1991 and enjoyed it snowy, captivating. I was welcomed by Mariona, who lived with Italian friends, students like her, in a ground floor of the campo Santa Margherita. The humidity chilled you to the bone. I had read the Venetian Notebook by Àlex Susanna. Happiness was discovering the secret Venice of the Venetians, listening to their dialect, going to the sestieri (neighborhoods) where clothes were still hung out in the calli, glimpsing the corti (courtyards) and hidden gardens, having their cicchetti (tapas) or tramezzini (sandwiches) or, even better, some moèche (crabs caught on the beaches of Pallestrina when they shed their shells) with an ombra (a small glass of wine), if possible from the nearby hills of Prosecco.
Despite the loss of inhabitants (from 175,000 in 1950 to less than 50,000 today in the lagoon core), there is still life beyond tourism. Friends Nicola and Sílvia let us taste it in small doses. They show us how a medieval structure is superimposed on a modern city in Venice. No other city of its size and importance functions without cars. All thanks to the water, which has protected it for centuries and is also its greatest threat. The city dedicated twenty years to building a barrier against the acqua alta
, the Mose (modulo sperimentale elettomecanico) or Mosè, Moses in Italian, which separated the waters of the Red Sea. It has seventy-eight gates and worked for the first time on October 3, 2020. It is not clear that it is the saving solution.
"The eye, our only fish-like organ, here truly swims [...], acquires an autonomy similar to that of a tear," said Joseph Brodsky, who spent many years in Venice, the city that, seen from the air, has the shape of a fish in the middle of the waters. In 1500, Jacopo de Barbari already drew it like this, from a bird's-eye view, a masterpiece of urban cartography unthinkable with the means of the time. Brodsky, a poet, gives us another image of water: "The slow progress of the boat during the night was like the passage of coherent thought through the subconscious." Venice, a dream city... for more than twenty-three million visitors a year. What urban ethics will save it from itself?
