Languid Venice Retains an Air of Greatness
The skies are blue and sunlit and the streets are swept by warm, gentle breezes as the leaders of the industrialized world sit down for their annual summit conference in one of the world’s great Renaissance cities. But, if the literary admirers of Venice are correct, the magnificent weather and site could get in the way.
“In truth,” American novelist Henry James wrote more than 100 years ago, “Venice isn’t in fair weather a place for concentration of mind.”
James was simply one in a long line of writers and painters and composers seduced over the centuries by the languid charms of this once-powerful Italian city on the Adriatic Sea. These sensitive artists came to Venice not to think and make hard decisions but to savor its colors and light and antique beauty.
Outpouring of Praise
The sensuousness of Venice has been celebrated by so many books and paintings that even James thought it impudent of him to try to add to the praise. “There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject,” he wrote in 1882. “Everyone has been there, and everyone has brought back a collection of photographs.”
This despair, however, did not keep James from writing an essay of 31 tightly printed pages about Venice. Nor will it prevent the 2,003 journalists here for the summit from writing tens of thousands of words about the wonders of this city and its economic summit conference.
There is little doubt that Venice, now almost 1,200 years old, is one of the rarest cities in the world. It has managed to retain more of the look and feel of its long-ago greatness than any other city in Europe. And as a city built on a cluster of islands ribboned with canals on a lagoon off the Adriatic, Venice lives with water in a way that no other city in the world, not even Amsterdam, can match.
150 Canals, 118 Islands
Venice is a city of 250,000, but only a third live in the old, historic center that gives the city almost all its splendor and charm. On a map, the old central town may look like two large islands separated by the Grand Canal, but the town is actually crisscrossed by more than 150 canals that slice it into 118 islands. Four hundred bridges help residents and tourists make their way over the canals from one narrow street to another.
The narrow and twisting streets and bridges have no room for cars, and none are allowed in the historic center. The residents of old Venice are completely dependent on water transportation.
Boats collect garbage that is piled up at the end of alleyways that lead into the canals. Emergency speedboats carry the sick and injured to hospitals. The famous gondolas with their slender, upward-curving bows ferry residents across the large canals and, for an exorbitant fee, guide tourists through the narrowest ones. The dead are carried by hearse boats from the islands to mainland cemeteries. Speedboat taxis carry newly married couples in their wedding clothes around town in a water parade.
On a recent morning, two boatmen, their craft crowded with three new, large sofas to deliver, glided from one narrow canal to another, bewilderedly searching for the right address.
Some Disadvantages
A visit to the Rialto market alongside the Grand Canal reveals some of the disadvantages of this picturesque life. It is not easy to unload heavy boxes of fruits and vegetables from an unsteady boat in the water. Nor is it easy then to carry the boxes to markets and shops on nearby streets.
A special Venetian handcart has thus become the second-most-important tool of transportation in Venice. These carts, pushed forward on two large rubber wheels, have two tiny extra wheels jutting out in front that can catch the steps that lead up and down most Venetian bridges.
Using the little wheels as a kind of lever, a workman can then push the cart over the steps. The narrow streets are crammed with workmen pushing carts and crying for pedestrians to get out of their way.
The fastest way for a Venetian to move from one part of town to another is to walk, but tired Venetians, especially those with bundles, cram into the vaporettos-- the diesel boats that move along the large canals and between large islands of the lagoon like a not-so-rapid rapid transit system.
Skilled Seamen of Venice
The seamen of Venice are incredibly skilled with their boats, maneuvering deftly in crowded waters, but the water transportation, with all its loading and unloading, increases the cost of carrying goods to Venice. Moreover, the constant lapping of water against buildings raises repair and restoration costs. Venice has become one of the most expensive cities in Europe.
“That is why our young people are leaving,” said a hotel manager who lives in Venice. “They cannot afford to live here and are going to the mainland.”
The great art of Venice--especially the paintings of Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto and the gold mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica, where the evangelist is buried--come from an era when the Venetian empire was one of the most powerful in the world. In its heyday, in the 15th and 16th centuries, Venice controlled the lands around the Adriatic and traded with the Mediterranean, the Middle East and East Asia.
Venice was so powerful and feared that the Duke of Milan warned its leaders at the end of the 15th Century, “If you knew how everyone hates you, your hair would stand on end.”
Even before that, Venice was the site of great events, including a summit of sorts in 1177 between Pope Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa that produced the Peace of Venice and ended centuries of strife between the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. They met, incidentally, in the Ducal Palace, where President Reagan and summit leaders will meet tonight for the summit’s opening ceremony.
Tourism the Main Industry
A series of military defeats plus its failure to keep pace with Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and other explorers of the New World sent Venice into a decline, and the city has never regained its wealth and power. But it has never lost its artistic magnificence and remains one of the great tourist attractions of Europe. In fact, tourism is its main industry now.
The attraction for tourists is so great that Venice is desperately trying to keep some out. Ceaseless convoys of buses arrive every day, disgorging tourists at the end of the bridge leading from the mainland to the old town. On some days, especially during the summer and the pre-Lenten carnival, so many people jam into Piazza San Marco--dubbed “the drawing room of Europe” by Napoleon--that some tourists find it impossible to move.
“It is even dangerous,” said an Italian diplomat. “People can even fall into the water.”
“And if you go to Venice with a crowd of screaming people,” he went on, “you do not have the possibility to see the cultural side of the city. Venice is fascinating, but you have to at least sit down in a cafe and let its charm work. If you follow a guide with a stick who says, ‘Let’s move,’ you get a much less deep impression of Venice.”
Attempt to Limit Tourist Influx
City officials believe that these tourists, who come to Venice for the day and leave before nightfall, spend little money in the town and drive away tourists who might stay and spend more. As a result, officials have proposed an ordinance that would limit the number of people arriving in Venice just for the day to no more than 50,000, about half the number that now come. This would be done by requiring tourists and tourist agencies to have a hotel or a special parking reservation to park their cars and buses before entering Venice.
The proposed ordinance has provoked furious opposition from tourist agencies, which fear a great loss of revenue.
Another problem for Venice is the flooding that comes every winter and eats away at the foundations of Venice’s palaces and other old buildings.
To control the high tides in the lagoon that cause the flooding, a consortium of 31 international companies plans to build movable dikes by 1995 that would limit the amount of seawater entering the lagoon.