Venice tries to turn back the tides

Nick Squires

• Last Updated: March 28. 2009 9:30AM UAE / March 28. 2009 5:30AM GMT

VENICE // Only from the air does the fragility of Europe’s most beautiful city become clear. Surrounded by a vast lagoon, Venice resembles a crouton in a bowl of soup, the terracotta roofs of its churches, palaces and town houses giving it a biscuit-brown hue.

But the lagoon, which for centuries protected one of the world’s most powerful republics from invasion by foreign fleets, now threatens to engulf the city.

Rising sea levels blamed on global warming and subsidence resulting from decades of groundwater extraction for agriculture and industry on the Italian mainland have resulted in Venice sinking 23 centimetres over the past century.

The Italian government has embarked on one of the world’s greatest engineering projects in a bid to save the city known as La Serenissima – the Most Serene.

The Project Mose scheme, which aims to hold back the tides, is both an allusion to the story of the Prophet Moses parting the waves of the Red Sea during the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and a neat acronym for the project’s name, Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico.

It involves the construction of 78 giant steel gates across the three inlets that puncture the 45km long, thin sandy spit which separates the lagoon from the surging waters of the Adriatic. The 300-tonne hinged panels, 28 metres wide and 20 metres high, will be fixed to massive concrete bases which are currently being dug into the seabed.

Whenever a dangerously high tide is predicted, compressed air will be pumped into the hollow panels, forcing them to rise up on their hinges, forming a barrier to the incoming waves.

“Mose will solve the problem that Venice has faced for a thousand years or more – the threat of flooding,” said Elena Zambardi, a spokeswoman for Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the consortium of engineering contractors which is building the barrier.

A century ago the city’s Renaissance palaces, splendid churches and 410 bridges were menaced by flooding 10 times a year. Now they are threatened as many as 60 times a year.

There was a worrying reminder of the dangers facing Venice in December, when it was hit by its worst acqua alta, or high tide, in 22 years and the fourth most severe since record-taking began in 1872.

After days of high winds and heavy rains, the lagoon rose more than 1.5 metres above its normal level, inundating almost the entire city and forcing tourists to wade through waist-deep water or hunker down in their hotels until the water subsided.

So extensive was the flooding that a wakeboarder was able to be towed across the tea-coloured waters which swamped St Mark’s Square.

“Mose will be capable of protecting Venice from a high tide of up to three metres, so if it had been up and running in December, the city would not have been under water,” said Ms Zambardi from her frescoed office in a 14th century palazzo a few steps from the Grand Canal.

Project Mose is expected to be operational by 2014 but ever since its inauguration by Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, in 2003 it has been mired in controversy.

Environmentalists fear the project will turn the lagoon, one of Europe’s most important wetland areas, into a giant stagnant pond and destroy fragile breeding grounds for birds.

There is great unease over its cost: US$5.5 billion [Dh20bn], with estimated annual maintenance costs of around $11 million.

Bankrolled by the Italian state, it is fiercely opposed by very people it is meant to save – ordinary Venetians and the city’s council, which is run by Massimo Cacciari, a fiery former philosopher.

The mayor condemns the project as a prime example of Italian political cronyism by Mr Berlusconi’s centre-right government, saying that the project was given to the consortium without being put out to tender.

He argues that there were other engineering schemes which would have been just as effective but much cheaper.

He also says that while government money is poured into Mose, the amount given to Venice to conserve and safeguard its historic buildings and canals is woefully insufficient.

“All the state funds go exclusively to the Mose project,” Mr Cacciari said recently in Rome. “It’s the most expensive option and will take longer than any other to be completed.

“In the last 12 years the flow of money has stopped and the little funds we receive from Rome arrive totally at random, following no planning at all.”

The condition of many of Venice’s crumbling churches is a “scandal”, he said. “In what other country would the state be unable to find resources to renew monuments such as the Doge’s Palace? But that’s exactly what is happening.”

The lack of funds has forced the city to go into partnership with corporations, allowing them to put up huge and highly controversial advertising hoardings on the facades of historic buildings in return for money. Fears that the city is being sold out to commercial interests intensified last week when the mayor announced that he would allow Coca-Cola to install 38 of its drink vending machines in key spots in return for $2.6 million over five years.

Not all Venetians oppose Project Mose. Critics of the mayor accuse him of being jealous of the millions of euros which the government is pouring into the flood protection barrier.

“Politicians here are only against it because they are furious that they’re missing out on funds which would otherwise have gone to them,” said Franco Maschiello, the president of the Venice Hoteliers’ Association.

It is not just the sea which threatens to engulf Venice. The city is also having the life squeezed out of it by the sheer weight of tourists who come to marvel at its Renaissance and Byzantine splendours.

Venetians fear that their home, a Unesco World Heritage Site, is in danger of being turned into a human zoo, a cultural and architectural Disneyland admired by hordes of slack-jawed tourists but without a soul of its own.

Rising rents, the decline of industry and the conversion of many historical homes into hotels and guesthouses mean that Venetians can no longer afford to live in the city and are leaving in droves. In the last 40 years the population has halved, from 120,000 in 1966 to 60,000 in recent years. A quarter of those residents are more than 64 years old and the city’s registry office has warned that Venice could be devoid of inhabitants by the year 2030.

Budget airlines and gigantic cruise ships have put the Queen of the Adriatic within reach for millions. Each year Venice’s embattled inhabitants are swamped by a staggering 20 million visitors. On most days, tourists equal or even outnumber residents.

A group of locals staged a protest recently in which they gathered at the famous Rialto Bridge dressed up as American Indians to make the point that they feel as though they are living on a reservation.

The leaflets handed out carried a blunt message: “Our cultural identity is at risk of dissolving if Venice becomes a theme park – but we Venetians will not surrender!”

The city is trying to staunch the exodus of locals by promoting businesses other than tourism, such as education (Venice already hosts 20,000 students), information technology and boatbuilding.

“Venice is a normal city which just happens to have an extraordinary cultural heritage,” said Mara Rumiz, a councillor in charge of housing.

“Only the stupidest tourist could love a city in which there is no normal life. Tourism must not be the only economic activity.”

The city is fighting for its survival – both from the pressure of mass tourism and the insistent tides of the Adriatic. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has put forward a worst-case scenario in which global sea levels could rise up to 88 centimetres over the course of this century.

If that happens, the lagoon would no longer form Venice’s stunning watery backdrop; it would consume it.

* The National