ELECTIONS : Venice and Neighboring City May End a 68-Year ‘Marriage’

Should Beauty and the Beast patch up their differences, or will divorce roil the waters of the fabled Venetian lagoon? Sunday will tell, when voters in the delicate island of Venice and the brawny mainland city of Mestre decide whether to remain together as one metropolis under the same mayor.

The two cities have been yoked administratively since 1926, when Venice was Venice and Mestre was a fledgling factory town. The tide has turned. Today, if Venice is soul, Mestre is strength.

Venice’s population, a dwindling 100,000, is less than half that of Mestre, a throbbing, modern center for factories, shipyards and Italy’s largest petrochemical plant.

In recent decades, Mestre has become a magnet for tens of thousands of young Venetians lured by better jobs, better housing, cars, accessible entertainment and neighborhoods not besieged by tourists and tourist prices. While Venice was busy being La Serenissima, Mestre acquired its own dynamic and etched its own identity.

Now, the decisive--and divisive--question is whether the two partners would be better able to grapple with big-city problems that are at once common and diverse if each had its own government. Battle lines are sharply drawn, and polls say the election is too close to call. The votes will be counted Monday.

In context, the election is a shard of national political splintering after nearly half a century of rule by party barons who manipulated a corrupt, closely held system mortally wounded by scandal. Old ways, old rules and old faces are all hostages to reform that will climax in landmark national elections March 27-28.

In Venice, many concerned citizens, such as lawyer Mario D’Elia, believe that their museum city would be better off if it didn’t have to share resources with blue-collar mainlanders little concerned with resisting the sea, preserving art and dredging canals.

“Mestre is terra ferma; Venice is acqua ,” D’Elia said in an interview. “Their problems are different. Venetians have a right to Venetian political leaders. Mestre, a forgotten city, has never been properly structured. It has the same right to local leadership.”

Separating Venice and Mestre has been an issue for decades, but divorce failed in 1979 and 1989 referendums. This time, there is more support both in Venice and in Mestre, where the make-or-break ballots will be cast, given the relative weight of the electorates.

Some Mestrini bought a full-page newspaper advertisement this week to support separation as in the best interests of both communities. “Autonomy is a general principle of freedom and democracy which allows self-determination by communities with the aim of evaluating their individual characteristics,” their ad proclaimed.

Opponents of Sunday’s call for separation cite both political and practical objections. “We’d both lose, especially financially,” said Venice Mayor Massimo Cacciari, a philosopher and stalwart of the former Italian Communist Party who won office in December. Cacciari denounces the referendum as an attempt by the dying political Establishment to divide and conquer as a means of preserving its power.

Paolo Costa, an urban economist who is rector of Venice’s Ca’ Foscari University, said separation would “be a giant step backward.” He argued that a metropolitan government with broad decision-making powers could better protect both Venice’s heritage and Mestre’s development. People should live and work under the same administration, he said, noting that 40,000 workers commute daily from Mestre to jobs in Venice.

The two communities share problems seen from different perspectives, Costa said in an interview. Both are anxious to reduce lagoon pollution, but one is a tourist city and the other an industrial port. Venice has the tourist attractions; Mestre has most of the tourist hotels.

On Sunday, the temperamental differences of the two cities will be manifest. Amid the start of Carnival, many Venetians will be dressed in period costumes: Masked revelers will be allowed to vote in some precincts.