THE BATTLE OF VENICE NEW DISCOVERIES EMPHASISE CITY'S HAZARDOUS SITUATION

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32676, 4 August 1971, Page 16

THE BATTLE OF VENICE NEW DISCOVERIES EMPHASISE CITY'S HAZARDOUS SITUATION

(By

CLAIRE STERLING.

ivriting from Venice to the "Financial Times." London)

(Reprinted by arrangement)

Absorbed in an unusually glorious rumpus over ways and means of S u Vl xr® . mce Italian Government has made an offer of s4oom which the Venetians have turned down—hardly anybody has noticed the detection here of yet another threat to one of the world’s loveliest cities. Scientists have known for some time that the city is sinking faster from year to year, while the sea around it is rising. What they did not know until a few weeks ago is that the sole barrier shielding its lagoon from the encroaching sea, a long, thin tongue of land called the Lido, is sinking twice as fast as Venice is.

The calculations were made by the Laboratory for the Study of the Dynamics of Large Masses, exploring the interplay, of air, earth and water here for the past three years. According to the laboratory’s director, Professor Roberto Frassetto, the northern Adriatic is rising a tenth of a centimetre annually whereas Venice is “subsiding” half a centimetre and the Lido a full centimetre. Most of Venice has a margin of only 70 centimetres, or 27 inches, above the water line. Already floods of at least 110 centimetres are coming ten times more frequently than they used to half a century ago, and “high water” is spilling over into Piazza San Marco as often as 200 times a year. In 50 years, if nothing is done, the sea will claim it. Truce with elements Built on the seabed itself, propped up on millions of larch-poles sunk into the sediment of 118 alluvial islets, criss-crossed with 180 narrow channels, Venice lives in an eternally precarious truce with the elements. By rights it should have been washed away long ago, in any of a thousand storms whipped up by fierce sirocco winds. It has been saved for a millenium by a mysterious harmony between the lunar tides flowing through the lagoon and the great spongy mudflats or “barene” of the mainland two and a half miles away. However angry and swollen the incoming tides, the "barene” have always soaked up enough water to head off calamity. The preservation of every last oozing acre of mudflats has therefore been sanctified by centuries of experience and the unforgettable counsel of a Renaissance Doge who, upon presenting a new Magistrate of the Waters to his subjects, advised them to “weigh him, pay him, and hang him” should he stray from the rule.

“Barene” built on

How far some have strayed recently may be judged from a glimpse of industrial Marghera, whose 248 factories squat on 5000 acres of what used to be "barene." Just south of it lies Marghera’s proposed "third zone” at Malamocco, where 10,000 more acres of “barene” were banked off from the lagoon to be filled in, before a leisurely Magistrate of the Waters ordered all work to be stopped in, 1968. Beyond

lie 27,000 acres of the Valli di Pesca, fenced in to imprison a commercial fishery. In all over 40,000 acres have been cut off from the tides. It stands to reason that water finding no outlet there must fall back on Venice itself.

As if things were not bad enough, a new canal has been built at Malamocco, dredged to a depth of 50 feet for 17 miles (before an unhurried Magistrate stopped that too) to accommodate larger tankers and cargo ships for Marghera. Starting more than two miles off the coast, at one of the three entrances to the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic, it has created such rushing currents that incoming vessels need at least two tugs and often four. But the expense is so high that this SUS2Sm canal is hardly being used after all. Unexplained factors To this day most Venetians are convinced that continued shrinking of the lagoon’s perimeter will be the death of Venice. They point to the dreadful flood of November, 1966—barely a year after work began at Malamocco—when their city was under six feet of water for 24 hours; a threatened flood almost as grave in 1967; a rising frequency of "high water” overflowing their canals, from 121 occasions in 1967 and 154 in 1968, to 223 in 1969. What they cannot explain, though, is why the frequency in 1970 dropped back to the 1967 level.

This is the kind of thing that has induced particular humility in trained observers here: most admit that they are still working in the dark where the “geophysical fluid dynamics” of the lagoon are concerned. They can scarcely doubt that filling in large tracts of “barene must help to bring on the high waters. But so do the sirocco winds, unaccountably increasing in recent years, so does the rising Adriatic, swelled by the North Pole’s melting icecap; and so, of course, does the sinking land of Venice and. its Lido. The popular answer (none too popular in Marghera) is that Venice is subsiding because Marghera’s factories are pumping too much water from its artesian wells. But whether the blame is Marghera’s or not, a prodigious amount of water is undoubtedly coming out of those wells. Groundwater tables have dropped an average 50 feet throughout the region in the last few years. As they drop, the ground sinks.

Sinking twice as fast But why should the Lido, twice as far from Marghera’s factories as Venice is, be sinking twice as fast? Why is the same thing happening all along the Adriatic to Ravenna, much worse off than the Veneto, and inland through the Po Valleysinking 40 centimetres a year in some areas—to Lombardy and the Apennines? Is it because of the methane gas pumped out of the Po Valley m profligate quantity since the last war or, as some suggest, is North-East Italy slowly but surely tilting into the sea? , To explore this further. Professor Frassetto’s staff has just finished boring an observation hole in Venice more .than 3000 feet deep. But it may be years, if ever, before engineers can learn enough that way to see how subsidence can be stopped. Venice cannot wait that long. Meanwhile, experts have dreamed up everything from giant collapsible rubber sea walls to a dam straight across the Adriatic into Jugoslavia. The laboratory has settled for moveable gates of steel caissons on hinges, costing SUSBOm, strung out for a mile and a half on the sea floor across the lagoon’s entrance. The gates would swing upward when high waters were on the way. A mathematical model tested successfully this winter would give a sixhour warning. Once up, the gates would at least, temporarily keep Venice dry—or nearly so.

Air pollution - But if Venice and Its 10,000 paintings, frescoes and sculptures are to be saved, then an answer has to be found to another threat—air pollution. Many visitors will have seen the plaster peeling from the once-splendid Renaissance walls, the lurching arches, fingers and heads of marble statutes disintegrating to powder on Santa Maria della Salute’s cupola and the doors of the Palazzo Ducale, frescoes of San Martino di Castello caked with mould, streaked and discoloured Tiepolos and Veroneses. Most of this has happened in the last 40 years, and the process has accelerated in the last ten. By now, a third of the city’s works of art are "gravely damaged” by the elements, says the superintendent of galleries, Mr Fran-

cesco Valcanover. Each year another 4 to 6 per cent are lost irredeemably, and without massive intervention, every one of its interior frescoes will be ruined before the decade is out. The harm is done in a hundred ways, few of which were given much thought until quite recently. It was simpler to blame Marghera, without even troubling to inquire which way the sulphurous wind from the smokestacks blew.

Venetians responsible In fact, the wind happens to blow away from Venice most of the time, and towards it perhaps one day in ten, for an hour or two. If 80 per cent of the air pollution in Venice is indeed caused by sulphuric acid the most aggressive of al! agents, eroding plaster, frescoes, canvases, stone and metals, and eating through the patina of marble statues to depths of nearly an inch—then it is produced almost entirely by Venetians themselves. Fuel oil, imperfectly burned, its residues issuing from those picturesque and inefficient Venetian chimney pots, not to mention the exhausts of "vaporettf” and private motor-boats, has done more to ravage the city since central heating took hold after the war than anything Marghera ever did. While air pollution is a problem all over Europe, it is worse in a damp and salty climate, and much worse when the salt water actually intrudes. Saline solutions spread through the walls in capillary action, sometimes to heights of 15 feet or more. The water evaporates in dryer weather, leaving salts behind which reabsorb still more water next time. Together, water, salt and vitriol have infected all Venice with what the experts call the "sickness of the stone” (the Parthenon in Athens has it too), for which they have yet to find a lasting cure. That was the real tragedy of the terrible 1966 flood when, as Mr Valcanover says, the city aged 100 years. It is not for love of Marghera and Mestre that more than 100,000 Venetians, a third of the population, have fled to the mainland in the past 20 years. Venetians care no more for this industrial complex, second largest in Italy, than it does for them.

Inferior housing

In Venice itself a third of all apartments and twothirds of those on the ground floor, have been pronounced unfit for habitation. Barely half have lavatories, still fewer a bath or shower. Twothirds have either inadequate central heating in one or two rooms, or none, and 58,000 Venetians, half the remaining population, live in homes listed as “badly degraded.” This is hardly surprising considering that anybody repairing a house at his own expense has to pay higher taxes whilst those who are supposed to get their money back from the city might be kept waiting eight or ten years. To say that city authorities here have been dilatory is to credit them with a capacity for efficiency they have yet to reveal. Until three years ago there was not a single laboratory to restore damaged art works in Venice, or a single chemist (there is only one even now) working full-time to study the causes of accelerating decay. The burning of domestic fuel oil was not forbidden until last year, and even then the law allowed sulphur contents up to a damaging 4 per cent. Not an official finger has been lifted to ban high horse-powered private motorboats, doing nearly as much harm by churning up waves in narrow canals as the pollution they add to the atmosphere. If gallant efforts are being made to rescue some of the city’s finest paintings by Cappaccio, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Titian—most of the rescuing being done by Britain, the United States, France, Germany and U.N.E.S.C.O. Meanwhile the SUSSOm emergency fund allocated by the Italian Government after the 1966 flood remains unspent, while that offer of a further SUS4OOm has been rejected.

Scientists have Just discovered that the Lido, which shelters the city from the sea, is sinking twice as fast as Venice itself. And air pollution is now ruining many of the city’s famous statues and paintings.