Venetians Say to Hell With Hordes of 2000 Expo-goers

Back in the 990s, there was a lot of talk about the world ending at the millennium. People interpreted a passage from the Book of Revelations to mean that in the year 1000, the Devil would be “unchained,” return to Earth as a terminator and everyone with bad report cards would perish. There were feverish preparations and reparations; never was a New Year’s Day so dreaded. Purgatory had not yet been invented as a remedial staging area, and the alternatives--Heaven or Hell--were pretty cut-and-dried.

So far there has been no talk about the world at large ending in 2000. But there has been talk, more ominous each day, of the end of one of Earth’s most blissful cities, Venice, at this millennium’s close.

People living on the Italian peninsula long ago said Venice would never last, with those crazy Venetians building man-made islands, stringing together sand bars in what seemed to be the middle of the sea. It was a lagoon fed by sea and river, actually, and that moat gave the Venetians military security--and the chance to do things their own way. They piled up great wealth in sea trade and used those riches to build more islands, eventually resulting in what was, and still is, a city of nonpareil beauty. (They also found time to set up, for about 800 years, Europe’s only haven of civil liberties.)

Venice’s prospective demise in 10 years’ time is being programmed by mainland politicians in the Veneto region. Their leader is Gianni De Michelis, Italy’s foreign minister, a 49-year-old native Venetian of great vision. It was his idea to hold a world’s fair, or expo, in Venice in the year 2000. Expo sponsors foresee 30 million additional visitors to Venice during the show’s four-month run. Critics say this will be more than the fragile shell of the once-great city can sustain.

De Michelis, who took Italy’s foreign portfolio last summer, is a consummate globe-trotter and lover of life in the fast lane (he has written a guide to the world’s 100 best discotheques). After a visit to the Tokyo expo in 1985, he pushed for a similar Venice extravaganza. Italy’s Socialist Party leader and then-prime minister, Bettino Craxi, gave his personal imprimatur to the notion, in a speech delivered at the Doge’s Palace. Italy’s majority Christian Democrats, who need Socialist support to stay in power, seconded the expo proposal. Padua and Verona on the mainland were told that they could hold simultaneous year-2000 expos. De Michelis says he will have no problem getting the $1.4 billion from Parliament to stage the expos, even if the events are expected to earn only $690 million.

Last fall the Venice City Council, long stymied by multiparty indecisiveness, asked Venice University economists to do a tourism projection for the next 10 years, along with projected expo earnings. The experts predicted that Venice this year will have 6.4 million visitors; in 2000, without an expo, the number climbs to 8.6 million. The number of days when arrivals will exceed 20,000 are put at 203--or about 50 more than now.

The projection said that if the expo is held from March through June, 2000, as now planned, visitors would reach 28.5 million--or an average of 71,000 a day. At present, when there are as many as 20,000 tourists in Venice at the same time, streets and bridges become almost impassable; water-buses wallow in the lap of the tides.

It might be possible to stand 100,000 people in Venice’s squares and narrow, alley-like streets--if they didn’t move. If they decided to head in the same direction, the wooden pilings that support the city’s structures below street level might give way; dozens of islets, strung together by bridges, might tilt.

Expo promoters plan to put the heart of the show in Venice’s Arsenale--the city’s 12th-Century boat-building yard. This was Europe’s original industrial complex, the first to produce boats, or anything else, on an assembly-line system. The old brick buildings are deserted now, preserved as a relic of the city’s past when it was a major sea power. People who protest use of the Arsenale for a high-tech sideshow are reminded by De Michelis that they don’t own the facility--it was taken over by the Italian navy in 1866 and is state-owned.

Venice is also the regional capital of the Veneto region. Socialist Party officials, piqued by Venetian dissent, have threatened to move the capital elsewhere.

The ultimate decision on holding the expo rests with the Bureau for International Expositions in Paris; the jumping-jack political wisdom of the Socialists and Christian Democrats in the Veneto region, and, finally, with the government in Rome.

The Paris bureau must decide whether the Veneto region or one of two other locales, Toronto in Canada and Hanover in West Germany, will have permission to hold an expo in 2000. Last December the bureau summoned members from 43 nations to review the three bids. Venice itself was not consulted--Rome presented the expo bid.

The mayor of Venice, Antonio Casellati, once favored the expo but then must have realized what the visitor numbers meant. He and 80 other Venetians took the night train to Paris in December to stage a “no expo” demonstration outside the bureau’s office. Unfortunately the 43-nation meeting was being held elsewhere in Paris. The Italian Embassy, controlled by De Michelis, neglected to tell the mayor that his delegation would be demonstrating in front of a deserted bureau.

The bureau will award the 2000 expo prize this spring; some reports say Venice is favored.

Italy’s Green Party, once only an ecology lobby, has been growing rapidly at each election in the past five years. It is among the expo opponents and has proclaimed De Michelis as winner of the party’s 1990 Attila Award.

Tenth-Century Europeans may have misread the Book of Revelations. The Apocalypse, seemingly predicted by St. John the Divine, was postponed. But then there’s the often-reliable Nostradamus, the 16th-Century French astrologer, whose rhymed predictions held that in July, 1999, “From the Heavens a great terror shall come / to restore the great King to Angouleme / before and after Mars shall reign happily.”

The only king who could be “restored” to Angouleme, a town in Charente, France, near another town called Cognac, is Attila the Hun, who once encamped there.

Mars, of course, was the pagan god of war. Many lovers of Venice have declared war on Gianni De Michelis, fearing the trampling hordes of expo-goers. Should the foreign minister lose the war, he can take his Attila award to Charente, to enjoy there to the end of his days the local champagne and cognac. Starting, please, earlier than 1999.