It is a May morning on the Grand Canal in Venice. The flag on the vaporetto, the Venetian canal bus, flutters gently in the glorious sunshine. Shiny, black gondolas, complete with gondolier in straw hat and striped T-shirt, weave their way in and out of the seemingly chaotic water-traffic.
Horns honk and greetings are shouted from one side of the canal to the other as vaporetti, gondolas, rubbish barges, ice-cream barges, construction work barges and motor-boat taxis all weave in and out of one another's way. A taxi-boat driver with impressive crop of long, blonde hair and glowing tan makes a big show of driving at high speed with one hand. He overtakes a delivery man who is busy reading his order sheet as he leans on the barge tiller, apparently able to steer a straight course with adept buttock movements and without lifting his head to see where he is going.
This is Venice. Even for those of us fortunate enough to have visited it many times before, Venice remains a city of beguiling beauty, a quasi-magical place caught between land and sea. The sheer majesty of the palazzi of the former Serenissima Republic, the lack of motor cars, the relatively slow pace of life when transport is either by boat or foot - all make Venice awesomely unique. One likes to imagine that, here, the strains and stress of the modern world have been left far behind.
Imagine, if you like - but you could be wrong. Everyone knows and has known for years that Venice is in danger of disappearing out of sight, under the waters of an ever-rising lagoon. As if that long-standing threat was not bad enough, early this year Venice-watchers (and there are a lot of them, in Italy and around the world) received an unpleasant surprise from media reports (in particular, Italian weekly Panorama) that parts of the lagoon were not only in danger of serious flooding but that they were also radioactive.
Those reports may have been unnecessarily alarmist but they nonetheless served to remind us one more time of the precarious state of Venice, caught in a transitional, unstable and now polluted environment between land and water. To begin to understand that environment, however, one has to look far beyond the splendours of Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal to get an idea of the complexity of the problems facing modern Venice and its surrounding lagoon.
It is easy to point the finger at inept, inactive and corrupt local government in the post-war period (and Venice has indeed had many such disastrous town councils) but it is worth recalling that safeguarding the lagoon's eco-system has long been problem No 1 for the city fathers. As far back as 1381, the Serenissima Republic set up a special authority to oversee the protection of the lagoon's littoral strips while the Venice Water Authority was founded by the Consiglio Dei Dieci in 1501.
The point about Venice is that it is much more than just the centro-storico of Piazza San Marco, the Rialto, Grand Canal etc. The city of Venice is situated in a 550 square kilometre lagoon whose ecosystem is determined by three entities - the drainage basin, the Upper Adriatic and the lagoon itself. The lagoon's always delicate eco-balance is now seriously threatened by the conflicting requirements and effects of heavy industry, intense agriculture and mass tourism.
Let us put that into layman's language. The city of Venice is situated in a bit of an inlet from the sea. That inlet could go one of three ways. Firstly, if erosion and sedimentation continue to compensate each other then it will survive, albeit in a precarious equilibrium.
Secondly, if solid materials (including pollution, even radioactive pollution) discharged from the rivers and sea predominate, then it could silt up and become part of the Po Delta - no more Grand Canal and no more gondoliers. Thirdly, if the erosive forces of waves and tides prevail, then the lagoon may just become part of the Adriatic and Venice would sink under the waves, glug, glug. For the time being, the smart money is on the third option.
The problem is indeed complex. Take for example the lagoon's drainage basin - this is a 1,877 square kilometre area, inhabited by 1,460,000 people and 234,000 cows and pigs. With 62 per cent of the drainage basin devoted to agriculture, there is an awful lot of pig slurry, cow slurry and fertiliser flowing into the lagoon. Take the lagoon itself - it comprises not just those 550 square kilometres of water but also 40 square kilometres of reclaimed land, 92 square kilometres of fish farms, countless islands and 47 square kilometres of saltmarshes. More critical is the fact that in the early 1920s, two wealthy industrialists called Count Vittorio Cini and Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata opted to develop the lagoon, in particular the port of Marghera.
Count Volpi was a man whose star blossomed under dictator Benito Mussolini and he eventually became finance minister in "Il Duce's" fascist regime. From the commercial and employment viewpoints, his policies on the lagoon were a success, reviving an area that had been in different states of commercial decline ever since the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453. But in some senses Count Volpi's policies were too successful. He left behind him an industrial infrastructure on which subsequent generations proceeded to build with breathtaking irresponsibility.
If a tourist in Venice stops to look across the lagoon from the centro- storico, he or she will see the unmistakable and grimly ugly shape of an oil refinery. The remarkable thing is that the petro-chemical industry arrived on the lagoon only as recently as 1972. Even by 1985, various industrial lobbies were still struggling hard to increase the size of the port of Marghera.
Perhaps now you begin to see the problem. Take a lagoon with an average depth of under four foot. Pour in pig slurry, cow slurry and fertilisers and add a good topping of petro-chemical and other industrial waste products. What have you got? You have a potentially heavily polluted environment which survives thanks only to the cleaning effect of the Adriatic's tidal flows. Yet - and here's a further rub - even the Adriatic tide has to be controlled carefully. You need it to keep flushing out the lagoon but you cannot have too much of it or it will soon be above your head. Some problem, heh?
Nor is that all. Those old enough will recall the famous images of Venice under floods in November 1966. On that occasion, the entire city was overrun by more than three feet of flood water. Spectacular as that was, though, it is the now ever-more-regularly recurring small floods (on average 40 times a year) that give greatest cause for concern.
The problem is not just that Venice is literally sinking but also that, at the same time, the sea is literally rising. Let me, again, put it in layman's language. Thanks largely to the greenhouse effect and the melting of the polar ice-cap, the sea level around Venice has risen by approximately 11 centimetres since 1900. At the same time, the land base on which the city is built has subsided by 13 centimetres, partly because the mudflat floor of the canals and the lagoon has begun to silt up and also because mining for methane gas and water wells on firm ground has worn away at the land base.
So, we are all agreed that things have reached a pretty pass. So, what are we going to do now? This being Italy, you might be tempted to answer - not very much, not very quickly. After all, the Venetian Doges spent almost 100 years arguing about what way they wanted to build Piazza San Marco before they finally gave the project the go-ahead.
In truth, much vital preservation and conservation work is currently being undertaken in Venice. Walk around the city centre today and you will find that various canals (or ri as the Venetians call them) have been closed off and dried out and are now under the process of being cleaned of unwanted silt and thus deepened. Furthermore, while this work has been undertaken, the Venice Town Council, under a specially created authority called Insula, has taken the opportunity to relay all the canal sidewalks, raising them by 14 or 15 centimetres. So, with the canals deeper and the sidewalk higher, the flood threat is being fought, bit by bit.
Consorzio Venezia Nouva, the Ministry of Public Works concessionary which since 1984 has had a government mandate to implement all protective measures in the lagoon, currently employs more than 1,000 people on 25 preservation and conservation projects, including the reinforcement of the lagoon's coastline, the defence of town centres other than Venice city itself and environmental schemes intended to arrest and reverse processes of deterioration.
Even as perennial a critic of local and national government as Green Party leader, Prof Stefano Boatto at the University of Venice, has to admit that finally things are beginning to move, telling The Irish Times: "The debate is on and it is happening in a serious manner. Some things have been done, just look at the canal-cleaning project and the raising of the land level. These are important steps forward . . . As for other questions re the lagoon, well, given the complexity of decisions to be taken, it could still take a long time . . ."
What other "questions"? Ah, here we come to that old faithful, sea defence - better known to the reader as flood gates. While there is agreement about the canal cleaning project and while Venice Town Council has clearly made some small progress in limiting pollution from the heavy industry plants in Porto Marghera, the question of large scale sea defence remains unresolved. (Incidentally, environmentalists and Green Party activists claim that many companies, including semi-state Enichem, continue even today to pump industrial waste into the lagoon. These claims have prompted an ongoing judicial inquiry).
IN other words, the town council, the Consorzio Nouva and the Veneto Regional Authority have yet to agree as to how best safeguard the lagoon's future from being flooded out. Consorzio Nouva argues for some form of floodgate to be imposed at the three lagoon entrance points (the modern lagoon is walled in by a huge beachhead-cum-dyke with three "gates" or entrance points).
The environmentalists argue that floodgates would provoke an ecological disaster since they would cut off the cleaning-out effect of the Adriatic's tide while the lagoon itself continues to fill up with agricultural and industrial waste. The environmentalists suspect that the private industry components of Consorzio Nouva are more interested in remunerative industrial megaprojects than in saving Venice. An exasperated Franco Miracco, spokesperson for Consorzio Nouva, shakes his head ruefully at this latter accusation: "Let us just do something, let us get to work . . . You know, before we can get a project up and running, it has to undergo 25 bureaucratic passages. Sometimes I think Venice and Venetians are losing their self-respect."
Let us hope that they don't lose their city, too.