Natives Flee City : Venice Is Adrift in Sea of Troubles

Sandwiched like interlopers among the exclaiming crowds of day trippers on Venice’s water buses each morning are about 25,000 Venetians returning as commuters to jobs in a city they have fled.

Every week, two or three more Venetian families swap champagne for seltzer, abandoning splendid, waterlogged Venice the Serene for easier life on the nearby mainland. Most resettle in Mestre, a polluted industrial-residential complex of outstanding anonymity that a new government study finds to be the noisiest city in Italy.

Once site of a vigorous world capital that ruled a sprawling maritime empire, modern Venice has become a suburb of itself, victim of its bygone majesty and its present-day magnetism. Venice has worn many faces over the centuries, but always as a city attractive to visitor and resident alike. Today, however, a new Venice is emerging, more seductive to outsiders than to its own people.

Great Living Monument

Persistent flight of Venetians from their lagoon city alarms and infuriates those who remain. If Venice’s civic decline mirrors changes also occurring in other West European cities, it is particularly disturbing here because the dwindling population threatens both the character and future of one of civilization’s great living monuments.

Hard-core, won’t-leave Venetians such as baker Alfredo Rizzo are on the warpath. Their outrage is catapulting “the exodus” to front rank among a daunting array of municipal dilemmas that the Venetians, as ever adrift in what one chronicler calls portentous melancholy, find easier to denounce than to solve.

“We Venetians are becoming like Indians on a reservation,” Rizzo complained. “We don’t create art and music any more. No, we live selling beads and trinkets, prisoners of a tourist economy. As a living city, Venice has reached the point of no return.”

Grand Canal--an Empty Stage

These spring nights, the Grand Canal is gap-toothed with darkness, an empty stage. Many old palaces are shut tight. In some, the elderly survivors of patrician families live in dim solitude to keep down the light bill. Others belong to rich outsiders, foreign and Italian, who come only once or twice a year.

Change is no respecter of tradition. Descendants of the doges who for 700 years ruled history’s longest-lived republic watch it with the same dismay as Venetian workers.

“I am not a sweet old lady. I am a didactic grandmother. Venice has lost its soul,” said 72-year-old Countess Teresa Foscari Foscolo in the drawing room of her palace, sipping a Scotch and lighting her third cigarette in 20 minutes. “I don’t want to see a city of waiters and cooks. I hope I’m dead by then.”

There are summer days when Venetians are swamped by sandal-wearing tourists at the rate of 6 million a year, two-thirds of them day visitors. Narrow streets are so full that a normal 20-minute walk takes an hour. Vaporetti, as the water buses are called, groan with more overload than freeboard.

One merchant on the Rialto Bridge has a warehouse eight times the size of his store to stock the typical Venetian souvenirs he buys in job lots on twice yearly trips to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Papier-mache carnival masks are a Venetian family tradition, but now 110 shops, all new in the last decade, sell them year-round to tourists. Rizzo and other Venetian traditionalists despise the mask shops as evidence of their “colonization.” It is ironically appropriate that the dean of Venice’s commercial mask makers is a foreigner. Alberto Sarria hails from La Pampa province in Argentina.

Real Venetians Gone

“In the 12 years I’ve been here, the sense of community seems to have dried up. I sometimes think all the real Venetians have moved to the mainland,” said Sarria, who long ago won the architect’s degree he came here to get but finds more money in masks.

Change brings more than money to an already rich city. A 20-year-old gondolier died of a heroin overdose last month.

“For years, people have talked about saving Venice. Talk, just talk,” said the outspoken Rizzo, who heads the association of Venice’s last 80 bakers. “But who ever talks about the Venetians? Nobody. Nobody cares about us. What good is a city without its people?”

The bakers’ hopeful call for “extraordinary intervention” to revive a livable Venice is supported by other hard-pressed Venetian workers, including the city’s eight remaining plumbers, its 20 electricians, 45 barbers, and 33 carpenters.

A ground-breaking study commissioned by the bakers earlier this year documented a decline of population and life style that is sapping Venice, leaving it a shell city where dominant tourists gawk at quaint natives talking a fading local dialect heavy with x’s and z’s.

Population Decline

In 1951, according to the study, Venice had a population of 175,000 and was the dominant third of a municipality that also includes out-island communities and mainland Mestre. By the end of 1987, Venice’s population had fallen by more than half, to 82,703. In contrast, the population of Mestre, site of a major petrochemical complex, has quadrupled since 1951 to 196,851 by the end of last year.

“Venice is no longer a complete city, but only a tourist quarter which retains some basic services,” said Gabriele Zanetto, a University of Venice geographer who co-authored the bakers’ study. “Poor people are better off on the mainland with better access to food stores, doctors and cheap shopping. Now the middle class is going. It’s cheaper and easier to run an office in Mestre.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, blue-collar Venetians left in search of jobs in modern mainland industries, according to Cesare De Piccoli, the city’s Communist vice mayor in a new, leftist-controlled, municipal government.

“In the ‘70s, there was a natural population decline as in the rest of Italy: deaths outnumbered births,” De Piccoli said. “In the ‘80s, professionals like doctors, lawyers and teachers, and young couples looking for a place of their own to live, have left principally because of housing. It is scant and expensive. Many buildings need restoration, which is very costly and difficult to achieve. It can take two years, for instance, to get permission to install a shower.”

Stern building codes and architectural protection laws enforced by a naysaying tangle of government agencies make Venice’s crumbling palaces prohibitive to repair. Venetians insist that their city is no more expensive than Paris or New York, but more than one resident has walked away from a ruinous repair estimate: builder’s sand is six times more expensive delivered to a Venice job site than to one in Mestre.

Venetian’s Complaint

“For what I paid for an old apartment here that needed a lot of work, I could have bought a single-family home with a large garden on the mainland,” said Zanetto.

For the first time in many years, the new mayor of Venice actually lives in Venice, but eight of the 15 city councilmen are from Mestre. Their mainland pave-more-streets concerns must be painstakingly balanced against Venetian preoccupations with tourist control, canal dredging, palace restoration and, critically, warding off the threatening sea. Venice still shudders at the memory of a disastrous 1966 flood, and each year sirens sound anew to warn of approaching high water.

“Once the Venetian Republic was master of the sea. Now we live in fear of it,” said Giuseppe Rosa Salva, who heads local environmentalists pressing for long-delayed flood control and anti-pollution measures to clean up Venice’s fetid waters.

A seismograph-like gauge in the Piazza San Marco continually monitors tide levels, and a computer in the lobby of city hall projects them 24 hours in advance. Mestre is high and dry on terra firma while city fathers haggle over whether to build a controversial dike, but a tide 3 1/2 feet higher than average will flood 15% of Venice. Flood danger has left ground floor apartments empty in many parts of the city.

As a consequence of the exodus, the average age of Venetians today is 44, seven years older than in the rest of Italy. Economist Giuliano Zanon, who co-authored the bakers’ study with Zanetto, notes that 75% of Venice’s schoolchildren are 14 or older. Middle and high schools are jammed, but with only 400 births a year in Venice’s seven hospitals, elementary school classes of as few as eight children are now common.

Handicapped Courted

“Public schools vigorously compete for students to preserve teachers’ jobs. They particularly woo the handicapped,” Zanon said. In Italy, one handicapped student counts as three students in a school’s enrollment report to the state.

Occurring together with the population decline--and one of its causes--has been a change in the economic base of what was once Italy’s third largest port and a major center for shipbuilding and manufacture. Industry is moribund, and nontourist business is sick, stoking the flight of white-collar professionals and businessmen.

Tourism now accounts for 35% of economic activity in the entire city, but it is the overwhelming mainstay in Venice itself, according to Augusto Salvadori, longtime tourism boss on a Christian Democratic city council replaced by the leftists early this year.

Many Venetians believe it is too late to imagine that their city can ever recover an original big-village flavor bred by its port and shipyards, its love-hate rival neighborhoods, smoky cafes and canal-barge markets.

“This is like Disney World where people live,” exulted an enchanted 8-year-old American girl after a recent visit.

That is precisely the problem.

Countess Loses Hope

After decades as a reformer, Countess Foscari Foscolo now says there is no hope for the Venice she loves. Baker Rizzo wants tax incentives for those who live and work in Venice. Professors Zanetto and Zanon see a future of high-tech businesses and educational centers.

Admitting that the city has more money available than it can effectively spend, Vice Mayor De Piccolo talks of luring young people back with new housing and restoration. Environmentalist Rosa Salva hopes for restoration of Venice as a port city.

Ex-councilman Salvadori, who, in office, warred without mercy on the back-pack-and-sleeping-bag crowd, dreams of gilt-edged tourism. Massimo Cacciari, a professor of philosophy, envisions Venice reborn as a center for research and international conferences.

“Venice’s problems, from flooding to depopulation, are all solveable. What is lacking is the political will,” said Cacciari.

Said Gian Antonio Stella, resident correspondent for the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera: “Among the dozen political parties, and especially within individual parties, there are sharp divisions between those who want to act and those who urge caution because Venice is at once fragile and unique. ‘Venice is not like Madrid or Los Angeles,’ they say. ‘In all the world there is only one Venice. Here we cannot afford mistakes.’ The cautious ones command. Nothing is done.”

A Graceful Compromise

Once, when it was more of a living place than it is today, Venice had a flourishing professional soccer team. Recently, Venice’s lackluster team was merged with Mestre’s by a mainland promoter who bought them both. The team plays in dynamic Mestre, of course, but how to dress it became an aesthetic and incendiary civic issue.

Not even the best Italian designer could find an acceptable way of blending Venice’s historic black and green with Mestre’s uppity black and orange. Today, the team plays in white shirts, a graceful compromise when seen from Mestre, perhaps, but one more symbol of surrender in the eyes of the endangered Venetian species.