Authentic Venice
Last night Nicola Zingaretti, the governor of the Lazio region, secretary of the Democratic Party and a recovered COVID-19 patient said :
“The Italians have done very well, we have been an example for the world and now we must continue. We need to do three things: wear masks, maintain safety distance and always wash hands. Those who do not are irresponsible and put Italy’s recovery at risk.”Those who do not are very few. The ever-slimming trend in mortality, with recoveries continuing, are cheering Italian statistics.
Most everyone I know in Italy is making summer plans — some going to Sicily, others to Tuscany, others to the Dolomites. Some are staying home to enjoy their terraces, and to visit museums, taking advantage of the overpowering number of cultural venues that for the first time in decades can be explored in serenity.
“It is a golden opportunity” says my Roman friend Paola. “I am going to spend my whole vacation in a city I never get to enjoy, Rome, going out for lunch and spending one whole week in different sections of the Vatican Museum. Bliss !” Last Sunday she was at the Pantheon, where no more than 80 visitors may visit at a time. Not even when I was a little girl, 50 years ago, did that ever happen !
Venice is where I would spend the summer if I could. So many of my favorite hotels are reopening, and beloved restaurants too.
On weekdays, you can have Venice largely to yourself, a treat which is hard to describe. Gone for the foreseeable future (and forever I hope) are the diabolic cruise boats that overtook the St Mark’s basin and made mockery of Venice’s scale and elegance.
Gone also for the foreseeable are the tens of millions of day trippers from all across the European continent and eastern Europe who brought nothing to the city but chaos, leaving as much environmental damage as do the regular high waters.
On weekdays especially, when it is not drowned out by Italian, Venetian dialect is heard on the streets.
Every Venetian I know loves this – and longs for a progressive new model of an educated, thoughtful tourism that will bring back only those visitors who understand that Venice is not to be exploited. An educated tourism that focuses on appreciating the city’s heritage, museums and art, while sustaining good restaurants and real artisans.
Our guide Antonella introduced me to the Marangona group, concerned Venetians who share her vision of what Venice needs to be. The civic group, named for the only one of Venice’s five enormous belles that survived the catastrophic 1902 collapse of St Mark’s bell tower, sees COVID 19 as a mandate for fundamental change.
They support a Venice based new economic model, one severed from partisan and short-term commercial interests and that stitches touristic enterprise into a broad reaching civic and economic plan that gives equal priority to permanent and healthy residential communities in Venice.
The group, which is selecting a candidate for mayor for the next elections, wants a conciliatory, balanced urban equation. Tourist-servicing water traffic will be allowed but not at a cost of a compromised lagoon environment.
The Marangona group is realistic, they present proposals only if they are achievable, and are acutely aware that implementation is feasible only if the new city council is competent and of moral integrity.
Among the group are artisans, urban planners, the elderly, the young, journalists, entrepreneurs, those already in the tourism field. Every single one of them is determined to bring back a Venice that is no longer all tourism-dominated, and to capitalize on the potential of residents, and to return to them a living city.
As they say so plaintively, “like native Americans, we now risk being forced out of our environment, and this is what happened already to almost 100.000 native Venetians in the past 60 years: ‘forced’ out of the lagoon, to live ‘on the other side of the bridge’ (the mainland) because of the cost of living and the lack of appropriate job opportunities.
Venice is so successfully attractive as a tourist destination that prices have rocketed to sky and the only jobs available risk being those related to the one industry of mass tourism, which are not remunerated enough to afford living in the houses where our parents and grandparents used to live: those houses which were built on water hundreds of years ago and survived to everything, until now. This is not what we dream for our children: being a waiter in a restaurant, or having to move somewhere else.”
If you love Venice, how can you not be moved by its fragility and its plight and want to contribute to a solution ? Its isolation was its strength for so long and prevented it being successfully conquered until Napoleon arrived in 1797 and terminated 1,000 years of independent existence. Pre COVID-19, on an average day, close to 80,000 daily visitors were in Venice, a city with a permanent population of 51,300. This daily number of visitors is close to the total city population of Lucca or Como, to give you a sense, and the overwhelming majority walk around the city for just a few hours.
In the meantime, back to an authentic Venice, as Antonella calls it, and the joys to be had in these next immediate months — and, if the Marangona group can prevail — into the foreseeable future.
The Accademia gallery is open, as are, or will be within the next days and weeks, all civic museums including the Palazzo Ducale, with major rooms to yourself. This luxury is not lost on Venetians, who are taking advantage… and as should, as soon as you can, you.
The Guggenheim is open, wonderful news, but we are saddened that they will only allow their own guides to take you around. Visiting the Guggenheim with Antonella is a remarkable treat (but next year please plan on visiting the Architecture Biennale with her, another delight, or the Art Biennale in 2022 !)
Celebrate ! Caffe’ Florian, the oldest caffe’ in Europe, this year celebrating its 300th birthday, is open ! This intellectual-social-artistic caffe’ is renown for its spectacular interiors and for a permanent orchestra that today continues to add unique pleasure to the Florian atmosphere. When you come to Venice, I am sure that they will again begin to play.
If you have never seen Venice from the air, then you must fly into Marco Polo, one of Europe’s best organized airports and functioning, with European flights now arriving from Amsterdam, Rome and Paris, and more to follow. Pre COVID-19, 76 destinations were served by Marco Polo.
For those who have been to Venice before with Insider’s Italy, take out the wonderful Touring Club city map I sent you and think about this magic, improbable city, some 121 shifting islands linked by 436 bridges, built on a foundation of parallel wooden pilings hammered one after another vertically down into the water, and into the sand and mud.
And for those who have not, we can hardly wait to plan your first trip here.
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