The Venice they drew thomas mann Y Luchino Visconti it was wretched and dark. He was going through his umpteenth cholera epidemic, and the set was simply spooky and dramatic. Sweetened only by the ephebic beauty of the young Tadzio, with whom the composer falls platonically in love Gustav von Ashchenbach , still limping from his last cardiac crisis. Imagine him at the movies with the face of Dirk Bogarde and Gustav Mahler's sepulchral melody.
A little over a century has passed since that miserable 1911, but Venice this again about to collapse, to put on a new mourning for herself. And it is that according to Institute of Marine Sciences of Trieste , the Adriatic –since 1890– has risen almost thirty centimeters (eustatism).
Venice.
To this we must add that the marshy terrain of the lagoon has yielded because of the thousands of daily boats that cross it, whose propellers significantly damage the retaining walls of the canals.
The historic Italian photojournalist was not exactly joking Gianni Berengo Gardin when he captured in his SLR those cruise ships that for decades and decades fed so much on Venice until they ended up devouring it, drying it, shaking it and contaminating it . Also money.
Rialto Bridge, Venice.
It is no coincidence that from the summer of 2022 you have to pay to enter it (tickets will range between three and ten euros). A hard measure for precisely protect your levees, nurture your soul.
Do it one more time to recover that brilliant brilliance it had in the 9th century with the Republic of the Sea of the Serenissima... Or even in the XI, where she was already queen of the Mediterranean and arrogantly and vainly exhibited her conquests exposed in Piazza San Marco. the bronze lion , for example, she looted it from Turkey.
Image of Cecil Beaton from Louis Vuitton's Fashion Eye 2021 book.
THE AMPHIBIOUS CITY
Venice rises in an area of more than 500 square kilometers of not too deep lagoon. It has almost 120 islands a very short distance from each other . Some even slightly above sea level. It was founded by the Romans when, in the twilight of the Western Empire, they fled in search of a territory not too far from the sea.
It was there, in the fifth century, that they gave unleash all the ingenuity and talent, madness and drama to create a dream world using new construction techniques. They wanted to protect themselves, but always being unique, the best at it.
Beyond the clichés, Venice keeps an enviable legacy.
That totetimo archipelago ( Burano and murano they are unique in the world ) is sustained today thanks to an enormous plantation of trees on the contrary. That is to say, the Venetian jungle is under water, and it is the one that precisely sustains the city and its sisters, that gained so much notoriety in history books thanks to the adventures of Marco Polo, Casanova , Canaletto, Otello and a good handful of other geniuses. Because Venice is history.
Has patches of light present like the lido film festival the Biennale , but mainly it is history, nostalgia for its past. City of Jewish bankers and big merchants, of luxury and sin, of invisible magic tricks so that it floats for a few more decades. "In the past, To contain the mud, thousands and thousands of trunks were nailed on which the supports were later supported. to build Venetian houses.
Punta della Dogana (Venice).
Those sticks give it stability. They could last hundreds of thousands of years without rotting because there is no oxygen there. On the other hand, if they come afloat they would not last even two days, ”explains (in a SKY documentary) the Irish writer and historian Michael Scott, who spends long periods there.
They are endless rows of tree trunks – also hardened thanks to salt water – to serve as support while they ensure some firmness and stability to swampy and shifting terrain. An underwater geological treasure.
This image is history (luckily).
WITHOUT SOLUTION
It is not all so simple or so difficult as to summarize it in that Venice dies of itself, already irremediably damaged by ingestion of massive tourism or by climatic changes of the present. No, because precisely the alterations of the Adriatic date back more than a century ago.
The old Marine Republic is depopulating, and the MOSE experiment ( a huge system of mobile levees intended to protect the city from high tides causing so many floods) has been unsuccessful.
And if that was not enough, the waste of public money that it has entailed ended with an important group of politicians and businessmen in prison. A hive of speculation and corruption with far less elegance than Casanova's sinful parties of old.
Always Venice.
Important engineers or architects have recently worked in Venice. From Calatrava to Rafael Moneo passing through Stefano Boeri (author of the wonderful Vertical Forest in Milan ). It was precisely he who spoke last summer with Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi about architecture and spirituality, about geometry and the spirit.
The Church already knows what it means to participate in the Venice Biennale, what it means assembling apparently antagonistic concepts such as tradition and modernity, contemporary spaces with sacred rites. The pragmatic and the supernatural, a metaphor for this floating reality and submerged forests and floating palaces. With gondolas, seagulls and requiems.
Eternal Venice.
venice is the beginning and the end of human history. Condemned to die over and over again to remain herself. To be born in other lives, perhaps. It is not by chance that her umpteenth near death has happened again in the midst of an epidemic who, by the way, seeks to redeem himself with platonic beauty.