01/09/2009

Vanishing Venice

Cathy Newman, National Geographic

The world tugs at the lovely hem of the city Thomas Mann called "half fairy tale and half tourist trap."

Nowhere in Italy, where calamity comes embellished with rococo gestures and embroidered in exclamation points, is there a crisis more beautifully framed than Venice. Neither land nor water, but shimmering somewhere in between, the city lifts like a mirage from a lagoon at the head of the Adriatic. For centuries it has threatened to vanish beneath the waves of the acqua alta, relentlessly regular flooding caused by the complicity of rising tides and sinking foundations, but that is the least of its problems.

Just ask Mayor Massimo Cacciari, broody, mercurial professor of philosophy, fluent in German, Latin, Ancient Greek; translator of Sophocles' Antigone; a man who raises the level of political intellect to just short of the stratosphere. Ask about the acqua alta and Venice sinking, and he says, "So go get boots." Let them wear boots.

Boots are fine for water, but useless against the flood that causes more hand-wringing than any lagoon spillover: the flood of tourism. Number of Venetian residents in 2007: 60,000. Number of visitors in 2007: 21 million.

In May 2008, for example, on a holiday weekend, 80,000 tourists descended on the city like locusts on the fields of Egypt. Public lots in Mestre, a mainland part of the municipality where people park and take the bus or train to the historic center, filled and were closed. Those who managed to get to Venice surged through the streets like schools of bluefish, snapping up pizza and gelato, leaving paper and plastic bottles in their wake.

La Serenissima ("the most serene one"), as Venice is known, is anything but. The world steps into the exquisitely carved font of the city, guidebook in hand, fantasies packed along with toothbrush and sturdy shoes. Splash! Out spill the Venetians. Tourism isn't the only reason for the accelerating exodus, but one question hovers like a haze: Who will be the last Venetian left?

"Venice is such a lovely city," said the director of a cultural foundation. From his window you could look across the San Marco Basin-with its unending flotilla of speedboats, gondolas, and water-buses called vaporetti-and beyond to the Piazza San Marco, epicenter of Venetian tourism. "Really, it is a huge theater. If you have the money, you can rent an apartment in a 17th-century palazzo with servants and pretend you are an aristocrat."