In this post - everything you wanted, but were afraid to find out about sewage in beautiful Venice :) Why is the flooded Piazza San Marco in the title photo? Yes, because high water and the system of drains in the sinking beauty are directly connected.
Where do you think the contents of antique Venetian chamber pots go? Don't you think? :) That's right - I didn't ask myself this question either until September 26 of this year.
However, on this fateful day, an entry appeared in my journal "And yet she is sinking" (about sinking Venice, if anyone is interested). The post unexpectedly attracted a lot of comments. Among them was this one: “Does the author of the post know that in Venice until now, like many centuries ago, there is no sewage at all, and its role is played by canals and sea currents, and all, excuse me, the waste of the life of the Venetians is joyfully carried away into the Adriatic Sea during high and low tides, which completely suits the cheerful Venetians. Against this background, tenderness at the sight of children frolicking in this very water, to put it mildly, is incomprehensible."
With great aplomb, I replied that the author knew everything ... but I did this only after shoveling the entire Internet in search of a worthy refutation. That is, like this, there is no sewerage system, I thought, - after all, I have seen repair work in the canals many times (they are blocked for this time, they completely drain the water and poke around there unhindered). There are many pipes laid at the bottom of the channels - one of them must be a sewer - I had little doubt of this.
What was my surprise when, from the mass of information about plans to improve the sewer system, new knowledge crystallized - Venice really uses the same method as 500 years ago. The method, by the way, is quite effective: in all Venetian palazzos there are so-called septic tanks - in other words, sedimentation tanks, at the bottom of which accumulates ... uh ... well, in general, a natural product :) And everything that is lighter than this waste really falls into the canal through holes in the wall (by the way, sewage boats work very efficiently in Venice :).
Twice a day in the Venetian Lagoon there is an ebb and flow, so that all the water in the canals is constantly cleaned, or rather replaced by new clean water. Therefore, stories about the terrible smell of Venice are greatly exaggerated. However, some amber is really felt during strong low tides, which occur mainly at night. Then these sewer holes are above the water level and, accordingly, a smell appears, which in the literature has a veiled name "eau du canal".
By the way, I laughed very hard when, in my research, I stumbled upon the blog of an Italian guy who "came in large numbers" to Venice (apparently, a student). Shortly after the move, he also had a question: is there any sewerage in Venice (I translate literally, shit pipeline)? He only formulated it with youthful spontaneity: "Is all Venice constantly pooping into the canal?" moreover :) The guy cheered up a little, not seeing solid residues floating into the channel, but the experiment did not end there. Then he poured dishwashing detergent into the toilet, drained the water and again ran to the window - foam flowed from the sewer hole exposed by the tide! Oh horror - the connection turned out to be direct and immediate!
As a very impressionable person, I immediately shared a terrible discovery with my husband, which caused him an attack of great fun. Well, you give, he laughed, but how do you think the sewerage system is generally arranged in big cities? Well, imagine - there are pipes, they lead to the same settling tanks, but somewhat larger and somewhat more advanced, and then the water (purified, but not sterile in any way) is still discharged into rivers, seas and other places from which we drink and in which we bathe. And indeed, I remembered my recent walk not far from the discharge of such water into our mountain stream - the smell of detergents is still very noticeable!
At first I was upset, and then I remembered Vladimir Voinovich with his Ivan Chonkin :)
By the way, all this applies only to the historic center of Venice, newer peripheral areas are connected to the city sewerage system. The islands seem to be connected too.
As illustrations, I took photographs of winter, autumn and spring floods in a completely random order. After all, the post was written specifically in connection with the floods, so I don’t have other pictures :)
3.
9.
So everything is fine, gentlemen tourists! And floods are, perhaps, even a blessing, because they cleanse beautiful Venice better than any sewer. I read an interview with one of the former Venetian mayors about the protective structures being built. So the mayor there expressed a timid fear that these structures, by stopping the water exchange in the canals, would cause another problem - stagnation of water and, accordingly, its pollution. Oh, eternal dualism :)
The moral of this fragrant fable is simple: I still love Venice, I will go there as often as before. But! I will splash around during high water on San Marco exclusively in high rubber boots - away from sin :)
Where do you think the contents of antique Venetian chamber pots go? Don't you think? :) That's right - I didn't ask myself this question either until September 26 of this year.
However, on this fateful day, an entry appeared in my journal "And yet she is sinking" (about sinking Venice, if anyone is interested). The post suddenly got a lot of comments. Among them was this one: “Does the author of the post know that in Venice until now, like many centuries ago, there is no sewerage at all, and its role is played by canals and sea currents, and all, excuse me, the waste of the life of the Venetians is joyfully carried away into the Adriatic Sea during high and low tides, which completely suits the cheerful Venetians. Against this background, tenderness at the sight of children frolicking in this very water, to put it mildly, is incomprehensible."
With great aplomb, I replied that the author knew everything ... but I did this only after shoveling the entire Internet in search of a worthy refutation. That is, like this, there is no sewerage system, I thought, - after all, I have seen repair work in the canals many times (they are blocked for this time, they completely drain the water and poke around there unhindered). There are many pipes laid at the bottom of the channels - one of them must be a sewer - I had little doubt of this.
What was my surprise when, from the mass of information about plans to improve the sewer system, new knowledge crystallized - Venice really uses the same method as 500 years ago. The method, by the way, is quite effective: in all Venetian palazzos there are so-called septic tanks - in other words, sedimentation tanks, at the bottom of which accumulates ... uh ... well, in general, a natural product :) And everything that is lighter than this waste really falls into the canal through holes in the wall (by the way, sewage boats work very efficiently in Venice :).
Twice a day in the Venetian Lagoon there is an ebb and flow, so that all the water in the canals is constantly cleaned, or rather replaced by new clean water. Therefore, stories about the terrible smell of Venice are greatly exaggerated. However, some amber is really felt during strong low tides, which occur mainly at night. Then these sewer holes are above the water level and, accordingly, a smell appears, which in the literature has a veiled name "eau du canal".
By the way, I laughed very hard when, in my research, I stumbled upon the blog of an Italian guy who "came in large numbers" to Venice (apparently, a student). Shortly after the move, he also had a question: is there any sewerage in Venice (I translate literally, shit pipeline)? He only formulated it with youthful spontaneity: "Is all Venice constantly pooping into the canal?" moreover :) The guy cheered up a little, not seeing solid residues floating into the channel, but the experiment did not end there. Then he poured dishwashing detergent into the toilet, drained the water and again ran to the window - foam flowed from the sewer hole exposed by the tide! Oh horror - the connection turned out to be direct and immediate!
As a very impressionable person, I immediately shared a terrible discovery with my husband, which caused him an attack of great fun. Well, you give, he laughed, but how do you think the sewerage system is generally arranged in big cities? Well, imagine - there are pipes, they lead to the same settling tanks, but somewhat larger and somewhat more advanced, and then the water (purified, but not sterile in any way) is still discharged into rivers, seas and other places from which we drink and in which we bathe. And indeed, I remembered my recent walk not far from the discharge of such water into our mountain stream - the smell of detergents is still very noticeable!
At first I was upset, and then I remembered Vladimir Voinovich with his Ivan Chonkin. And also the immortal phrase about the cycle of shit in nature :)) But you can’t argue against the classic :)
By the way, all this applies only to the historic center of Venice, newer peripheral areas are connected to the city sewerage system. The islands seem to be connected too.
As illustrations, I took photographs of winter, autumn and spring floods in a completely random order. After all, the post was written specifically in connection with the floods, so I don’t have other pictures :)
5.
9.
11.
So everything is fine, gentlemen tourists! And floods are, perhaps, even a blessing, because they cleanse beautiful Venice better than any sewer. I read an interview with one of the former Venetian mayors about the protective structures being built. So the mayor there expressed a timid fear that these structures, by stopping the water exchange in the canals, would cause another problem - stagnation of water and, accordingly, its pollution. Oh, eternal dualism :)
The moral of this fragrant fable is simple: I still love Venice, I will go there as often as before. But! I will splash around during high water on San Marco exclusively in high rubber boots - away from sin :)
Venice. Look into the well and don't die. December 9th, 2015
It is impossible not to notice that wells in Venice are everywhere. Despite the fact that now water has been brought to the city, no one is going to destroy the wells, of which there are over 2,000, and moreover, they are still an urgent need. Although now all of them are sealed just in case for sanitary reasons, the liquid in them is too manure with microorganisms that are harmful to health. But there is no doubt that in case of urgent need, the wells will be opened and water will flow from them again. 
By the way, they were sealed quite recently, 50 years ago. Although water was brought to the city much earlier, wells were still the most necessary of all the structures that were once erected in Venice. Moreover, the builders were pursued by two dangers: how to find fresh water in the middle of the salty sea, and how to protect wells with drinking water from flooding during floods. The ancient architects brilliantly coped with the first task. 
The wells are not as deep as they seem. It was difficult to break through to the aquifers beyond the silt and scree rocks on the islands, and most of the wells are ancient cisterns, still known from Roman times, where rainwater was drained through pipes, filtered and exited into the main part of the tank. 
Most of the wells in Venice are public, located in the squares - campos - or streets, the smaller ones are private, in courtyards, patios or basements of houses. But there were also deeper wells that passed through sedimentary rocks into aquifers and selected drinking water. 
Even in the courtyard of Palazzo Ducale, the Doge's Palace, there are huge marble-bronze wells. Of course, they were sealed long ago, and no one knows the state of the water in them today, but you can be sure that in case of urgent need they can be easily cleaned and put to work. 
Another interesting observation: the beautiful bases and rings of wells are nothing more than worn-out bases and capitals of columns of various buildings. sometimes Roman, which, for their power and beauty, it was decided to preserve. Practically, looking at the wells, you see the history of ancient Venice, and even the whole of Rome. 
Floods were a real disaster for wells. If everything was in order with them on the high islands, then in the low-lying part, just in the area of the often flooded Piazza San Marco, the water could overflow over the edge and then trouble would come. It was very difficult to clean the cisterns and wells from sea water. 
Another thing that dictated the careful separation of drinking water from sea water was the TOTAL lack of sewerage in Venice. Moreover, as such, there is no sewage system in Venice to this day. 
Yes, yes, you understood everything correctly, even today the sewerage from the houses of Venice merges directly into the canals and into the lagoon. It seems incredible, but it's true! This is dictated by two considerations: firstly, in Venice there are no harmful industries to poison the waters of the bay, and the only large plant - an oil refinery - is located on the mainland dadeco. In addition, it makes no sense even today to pull sewage pipes into the city, they safely go into the sea and get lost in it without a trace. The city itself was built quite competently from the very beginning, and all its sewage was carried out into the lagoon with constant ebbs and flows, so that the canals always have the purest water. The very mechanism of the currents existing in the city, thanks to properly laid channels, is arranged like gas exchange (oxygen - carbon dioxide) and air ventilation in the lungs of a person. Small sewers carry sewage into the Grand Canal, which, in turn, into the lagoon. The lagoon is separated from the Adriatic Sea by a sandy spit, which has three straits - Chioggia, Lido and Malomokko. The above three straits, thanks to the currents they form, clean all the channels available in the city, thereby allowing the city to successfully do without the usual city sewerage. Therefore, you will never find any poop, no slop and a heavy smell of rot in the waters of Venice. A healthy city is like a living organism - it lives and breathes in full force.
It seems that in this city, at any time of the year, packed with tourists, there are no local residents at all. But this is an erroneous impression. The Venetians have not yet died out, although everything is moving towards that.
“No, I can’t imagine my life without this city yet. Maybe someday I will move to the metropolis, but now my whole life is here. With Elisabetta, who owns two small bookshops near the main Venetian Rialto bridge, I am talking in Piazza Santi Giovanni e Paolo, famous for its white lions on the pediment of the Venetian hospital and the Gothic church of the same name, which is essentially the Venetian pantheon. Half past five in the evening. At four fifteen minutes the doors of all Venetian schools swing open, and from there children pour out to meet their waiting parents. If the weather is good, then usually Elisabetta, together with the one and a half year old Agatha, having met her five-year-old Jacobo at the school (he goes to the preparatory class), goes to the nearest square, where the son drives football with the boys, and the mother chats with her friends.
Elisabetta and her husband Claudio, a former security engineer, are native Venetians. Now Claudio and his wife are engaged in the book business. They share the household chores equally. Claudio's job is to travel every Tuesday to the vegetable market in Piazzale Roma (Venice's central transport hub) for fresh vegetables brought in from the mainland once a week by farmers. Although I had to get up very early, I asked for it as a travel companion. As we stood in a long line of Venetian old women to the greengrocer, Claudio spoke about his life: “I graduated from the Faculty of Engineering in Padua and lived and worked near Vicenza for many years. A large company, managed a division of 500 people, but at some point I was so tired of all this that I decided to live in peace. I went back to Venice and met Eli almost immediately.”
Unlike Claudio Eli, she never left Venice - she studied Russian language and literature at the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, worked in a travel company, and then opened her own business with three friends. Things went well, a few years later Elisabetta bought out the shares of the companions and became the full owner of the bookstore, and with the advent of Claudio she opened another one.
City funeral
Loaded with greenery, Claudio and I head to his store, located almost on the most central tourist artery that connects the Santa Lucia train station with the city's main square, San Marco. The time is early, and the windows of most shops, cafes and restaurants are closed with blind metal blinds. This completely changes the appearance of the streets - even well-known places seem alien. But the lack of crowds pleases, here it is perceived as a miracle. It is no coincidence that no matter how you take an art or photo album dedicated to Venice, there are almost no people in it - only the city itself, except that the gondoliers come across, but they are rather a detail of the landscape. This "open-air museum" is really suffocating with tourists - ordinary residents feel less and less comfortable here.
A company of citizens grouped around the website Venessia.com held a symbolic funeral for Venice in November 2009. In that month, a psychologically important mark was passed - for the first time the population of the city fell below sixty thousand people. A funeral gondola with a coffin covered with a Venetian flag, accompanied by a whole flotilla of boats, proceeded through the Grand Canal to the palazzo, where the commune (city administration) meets. The ceremony itself took place there, with funeral speeches obligatory in such cases. I am sitting in a pizzeria with one of the organizers of the "funeral", the seller of souvenirs Stefano. “My business depends on tourists. It would seem that I care about the locals? But without the Venetians, the city would die, turn into decorations that would not attract tourists. These, in the commune, do nothing, and we have forgotten how to make revolutions.”
Not for the Venetians
Formally, not only those who live in the city are considered Venetians, but also 30,000 inhabitants of neighboring islands plus 180,000 inhabitants of Mestre, the mainland suburb of Venice, an important financial center. The island Venetians held a referendum four times in order to split into two communes - Mestre and Venice, but they were invariably defeated. Massimo Cacciari, who left the post of mayor of Venice in March this year, believes that the problem is in the Venetians themselves - the city needs young, energetic professionals. But where do they come from? Moreover, finding housing here is not at all easy, and this problem is faced primarily by young families. Firstly, real estate in the city is one of the most expensive in Italy. Rich people from all countries and continents buy apartments in Venice to spend a week in the city during the carnival and two or three weeks in the summer. Hence the exorbitant prices.
Secondly, the owners of apartments simply do not want to rent them to the Venetians, since they are practically deprived of the opportunity to raise rent or evict a permanent resident of the city. Under Italian law, this can only be done if the tenant is provided with an apartment on the same or better terms. All municipalities in Italy have low-cost social housing funds that solve this problem. But the trouble is that in Venice there is nowhere to build cheap houses - there is no free land. As a result, almost all advertisements for rent (and 48% of all apartments in the city are rented) have a note “only not to the Venetians”. Because of this, young couples are forced to live with their parents or leave for the continent.
My friend Matteo, like most Venetians, blames the municipality for everything: “There are the former Manin barracks. You saw them, big dominoes with bricked up windows near the Gesuit Cathedral. For five years they have been telling us that there will be social housing here, and nothing happens! They would like us all to die out, then they open hotels everywhere!” These accusations are not entirely justified - the commune is trying to provide the townspeople with inexpensive housing (for example, whole blocks of new houses were built in Giudecca), but where to get the land?
Don Marco Scarpa, pastor of both the Venetian parishes of Tolentini and San Pantalon (the Venetian episcopate is in dire need of priests), says he thinks the only way to stop the depopulation of the city is to raise property taxes dramatically for those who own housing. in Venice, not the main thing: “Then the commune will be able to build affordable housing with the proceeds. Otherwise, soon there will be no one in the city not only to bake, but also to sell bread.”
emigrants
In Venice, according to official data (clearly underestimated), there are about 3,000 of them. You can’t even call many emigrants, they are so deeply integrated into local life. Igor Silich, a professor at the local IUAV University of Architecture, came here from Yugoslavia on a student exchange in the 1960s, and he stayed that way. Now he has a large apartment on Strada Nova, the main tourist artery. In addition to those who live in the city, hundreds, if not thousands, of emigrants arrive every morning with the first buses at Piazzale Roma and go to work - washing dishes in restaurants, floors in hotels. Many of them are from Bangladesh. They mostly specialize in making pizza. This is hard work, locals, as a rule, do not go for such work. There are large Moldovan and Ukrainian diasporas in the city. Women mostly look after the Venetian old women, husbands usually work at local construction sites. Africans, as usual, sell counterfeit Luis Vuitton on bridges, but not only. Not far from the church of San Simeon Grande, an African has opened a workshop and makes Murano glass decorations there.
Daily bread
So far, there is no shortage of local rolls and croissants - at three or four in the morning, the city fills with the aroma of freshly baked bread, which will be delivered to bakeries and cafes by seven. You rarely meet a Venetian in bakeries, mostly emigrants work - painfully hard work here. Local residents buy goods in several supermarkets, which the tourist will not always find. There is also a fish market open in the mornings near the Rialto bridge (there is also a vegetable market, but it is smaller than that on Piazzale Roma). The fish here look like they've just been caught in the lagoon. But only a third of the goods are of local origin, while most of them are imported - yesterday's or even the day before yesterday's catch. Vegetables are delivered not only from the continent, but also from the neighboring island of Sant Erasmo, whose several hundred inhabitants continue to farm and even produce wine, but mostly for domestic consumption. In the north-east of Venice, near the Cathedral of San Francesco della Vigna (“Vigna” means “vineyard”), vines are visible behind the bars of the Venetian Institute of Ecumenical Studies. Wine is also made here, but the church uses it for its needs.
Recently, vineyards have been planted on the neighboring island of Burano (where traditional Venetian lace is produced) of Madzorbo. But the first harvest here will be harvested only in two years. However, the city has enough wine shops, vineyards, where draft wine from the continent is sold for 2-2.5 euros per liter.
Non-working hours
Venetian bars and cafes live in two dimensions - they, like all local businesses, are primarily focused on tourists, but, like everywhere else in Italy, they are an important socialization tool, a kind of non-virtual chat where you can always chat with a friend over a glass Spritz - a local cocktail made from vermouth, white wine and sparkling water. Residents of the city are given significant discounts here, which causes displeasure of many tourists. “So what,” shrugs my Venetian friend, “I eat at this restaurant a hundred times a year, everywhere in the world they would give a discount to a regular customer.”
The main hangouts for Venetian students are located on Piazza Santa Margherita, where inner city life has shifted away from the tourist crowds. Also a popular place for young people is the bar Paradiso Perduto on the Fondamenta della Misericordia. Jazz students of the local conservatory play there for their evenings.
But a real nightlife, like the one in Rome or Barcelona, is absent in Venice. And with entertainment for the townspeople, things are not in the best way: there is only one disco for the whole city, there is also one cinema.
In summer, the Venetians spend their free time on the Lido. This is a chain of sandy islands separating the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic. The family usually rents a small beach cabin, a kapanna, for the season. The price is very dependent on the location. On the beach next to the "aristocratic" hotel Excelsior, they can ask for 12,000 euros, but there are also for one and a half thousand.
Aqua Alta
On November 4, 1966, Venice experienced the worst flood in the history of the city. The water rose 194 centimeters above sea level and stood for three days. The first floors of most houses were flooded. Venetian small businesses were the first to suffer - many merchants lost all their goods. The poorest part of the population also had a bad time - "social" housing at that time was provided on the ground floors. If such large floods are rare, then ordinary aqua alta, that is, a rise in the water level above 80 centimeters, occur regularly, mainly from November to February, when the sirocco, the wind from the Adriatic, blows. As soon as the water begins to rise, a siren sounds in the city, and special services begin to lay out the decks stacked in piles - passerelle. “You get used to the floods. I heard the sound of a siren, which means you need to wear rubber boots, says Don Marco Scarpa. “However, when the water is standing for several days in a row, you get tired of it.” Whether because of global warming, or for some other reason, but compared to the beginning of the last century, aqua alta began to happen four times more often. If the water level rises by 1.2 meters, which happens not so rarely, almost 40% of the city is flooded. Merchants have to be on duty at night in their stores, in which case they raise the goods higher or turn on the pumps that pump out water. Each aqua alta costs approximately one million euros. It is apparently impossible to solve the problem of floods once and for all, although the state has spent more than one billion euros on the construction of the MOSE protective structures. It should be completed in 2012, but it can only protect the city from large floods. Residents have mixed feelings about this project. And without it it is impossible, but who knows what such large-scale work in the lagoon will turn into.
By land and by sea
Claudio and Elisabetta in the morning, taking the children to school and kindergarten, go to work on their own. Despite the fact that water trams, vaporettos regularly run along the canals, and for locals, travel on them is six times cheaper than for tourists, Venetians walk a lot on foot - this often turns out faster. Boats, contrary to popular belief, have only 40% of families, but they are usually used for summer trips along the lagoon and to those islands where there are no tourists.
Finding a parking space for a boat is far from easy, and it is not cheap - about 150 euros per month. They are very dear to them, and if the boat is not in operation or there is no money to repair it, it is still kept there in a semi-submerged state. In addition to parking, there are no other problems with boats - for small (up to six meters) and low-power (up to 40 hp) boats, even a driver's license is not required.
It is forbidden to drive around the city by car, and you will hardly go anywhere. German sociologist Kremer-Badoni, who interviewed dozens of Venetians in 2004, writes in his book Living in Venice that car problems are one of the reasons young people leave the city. The feeling of lack of freedom, the realization that, unlike the inhabitants of the mainland, you cannot at any time get into the car and go wherever you like, encourages many to look for another place of residence. They keep cars, who have them, in parking lots that still need to be reached. There are two of them in the city - the "Saint Marco Garage" in Piazzale Roma (there, however, there have been no places for many years) and a huge parking lot on the artificial island of Tronchetto in the southwest of the city. Since it is located very inconveniently, since April 2010, from Piazzale Roma, a line of the elevated “light metro” - People Mover was launched there. This parking costs the townspeople 140 euros per month.
travel needle
In the film Death in Venice, Visconti explains to the main character why everyone hides the truth about the epidemic from him: “The inhabitants are frightened, but they are silent - and do you know why? Tourists! Can you imagine Venice without tourists?! Venice has never been overlooked by tourists, but a massive flood swept the city in the 1930s, when Mussolini launched cheap "people's trains" (treni popolari) between the country's hinterland and the coast. Crowds of villagers filled San Marco and Riva degli Schiavoni. In the photographs of that time, you can see the peasants, on whose side a flask of wine or water dangles - they were sure that the Venetians drink directly from the canals where sewage flows.
Since then, the flow of tourists has been steadily growing - if 30 years ago there were about 6 million of them a year, now there are about 20.
Marcello Brusegan, in The Extraordinary History of Venice, is extremely pessimistic about the fate of the city - tourists will destroy the city.
Professor of the University of Venice, Ignacio Musu, in a book on the city's exit strategy from the crisis, expresses the point of view that the main problem is not tourists, as such, but the fact that most of them are "one-day". If not for them, there would be no such crowds, such mountains of garbage in the city. In addition, tourists who come for one day spend about half as much in the city as those who stay in hotels (in terms of a day's stay). No one knows yet how to solve this problem, but in any case, the city will not be able to get off the “tourist needle”. As one Venetian somberly remarked: "Without tourism, Venice will die sooner than with tourism."
fire protection
“We have a unique experience: nowhere in the world firefighters face such problems. I'm not talking about responsibility. Every building here is a museum,” explains Matteo, a 35-year-old Venetian firefighter, as we tour the garage. It has three large, about 10 meters long, fire boats. They are made very flat to pass even during high water under any bridges. It would seem that extinguishing a fire in Venice is a simple matter, there is plenty of water. But Matteo says that the use of sea water from the lagoon is allowed only in the most extreme cases, when there is no access to fire hydrants, because the salt destroys walls and furniture. Matteo himself is from Mestre, but since firefighters in Italy can be sent to serve anywhere in the country, he had to work in Milan for a long time. He is very pleased with his current place of work - there is nothing to get home, and the work is interesting.
Self cleaning
The abundance of garbage in Venice is a common place, Goethe writes about it in his diaries, and Thomas Mann writes about it in Death in Venice. But today, Venice manages garbage quite effectively. In the morning, scavengers pick up packages left outside and load them onto garbage barges. The Iris system is working properly - over the Internet or by mobile phone, any citizen can "signal" about any urban disorder - from a pile of garbage to broken paving stones - and city services eliminate everything. This is surprising, but, like many centuries ago, there is really no sewerage in Venice. Human waste products are dumped into canals, and every 12 hours at low tide, all this is carried away into the Mediterranean Sea. True, according to the new rules, houses under construction and restoration, as well as hotels and restaurants, must be equipped with bio-reservoirs-settlers. In general, those rare fishermen who fish in the canal do it, as they themselves admit, out of purely sporting interest. Unlike the sewerage system, the plumbing in Venice is in perfect order. The water conduit is stretched from the town of Scorze on the continent - the mineral water San Benedetto is bottled from the same wells. Before the 1966 flood, Venice was drilling its own artesian wells. But, as it turned out, drawing water from underground layers causes the soil to sink, and this practice was banned.
Craft and business
Elisabetta does not think much about the problems associated with tourism (especially since visitors are the main buyers in her bookshops). She is more concerned about the high cost of renting premises: “Major luxury brands use Venice as a showcase. They don't care that their boutiques don't make a profit here. Therefore, the price of rent in the center is exorbitant, unaffordable for the owners of small shops.” Interestingly, 45% of all leased space in the city belongs to the episcopate, and many are outraged that he is tearing three skins from tenants. However, Don Marco Scarpa believes that the church has no other choice: “Just imagine how much it costs to repair all these temples, to restore the masterpieces hanging in them. But there are very few parishioners, and therefore donations.”
The director of the furniture store, Luana, with whom I talked in a cafe, believes that it is a sin to complain about high rents with such an abundance of customers. “The trouble with the Venetians is that they are corrupted by tourists. We have become bad businessmen. Try to let a Venetian manage a hotel in any other city and you will see how quickly he will go bankrupt.
It's hard to say if that's really the case. For example, the products of traditional artisans, unlike mass production, cannot be cheap.
The city is doing its best to preserve the traditional craft business. For this, a "craft quarter", quartiere incubatore, has even been created in the Giudecca area. I came here specifically to talk with Ruggiero Torri, the famous craftsman who makes the metal S-shaped bows of the gondola - dolfi n, which has become a kind of symbol of Venice. I did not find Ruggiero, but in the workshop they told me that he had not been doing dolfi ni for a long time, he switched mainly to metal shelves. This is the general picture: over the past 30 years, the number of traditional artisans has halved. True, some crafts are being restored under the care of the municipality. In the center of tourist life, on Piazza Santa Margherita, a shop of traditional Venetian cuisine Mi e Ti has recently opened. Behind the counter, the owner is an elderly Iranian, a former architect. He says that the city no longer gives permission to open a kebab or pizzeria, but if you are ready to make traditional Venetian dishes: fried fish, polpette di carne, or squid rings, it is very easy to get a license.
In the north of the city, just 250 meters from the Cathedral of San Pietro, there is a little-known island of Certosa, also part of Venice. A mini-shipyard is located on it, as well as the Vento di Venezia navigation school. This is one of the rare examples of a successful and non-tourist Venetian business.
The military base, which was on the island, was closed, for many years it stood abandoned and gradually fell into complete disrepair. In 2004, the commune handed over the island to private investors. Now there is parking for 120 yachts, a summer yacht school for children, a dock where Venetian water taxis are built and repaired, a small hotel for two dozen places and a restaurant for yachtsmen. Filippo Barusco, who captained a large yacht for ten years before becoming the director of a navigation school, points to a large map of the island hanging on the wall of the hangar: “Here, in the place of the ruins of the monastery, there will be a sports complex with a swimming pool, and here ...” But while most of the island is still in the same condition as 20 years ago - in an abandoned vineyard grass to the waist, a herd of goats grazes and a strict sign hangs: "Hunting is allowed only for self-defense." Herons roam the shallow water, where several hulls of sunken boats can be seen. It's hard to believe that you are a stone's throw from Venice.
Saturday. Plaza Santa Maria Formosa. I help Elisabetta carry a bundle of unwanted items to the parish building. It's kind of like a neighborhood club. Sunday school, various kinds of circles work here. Things will then be distributed to the poor. Saying goodbye to her, I go to wander around the city. In Piazza San Lorenzo, a respectable lady walks her cats, there are at least ten of them. Putting a laptop on a Venetian well, pozzo (they have been closed for many years), a young man reads his Facebook - there is wireless Internet throughout Venice, and every member of the commune has free access to it - the so-called Cittadinanza Digitale, digital citizenship. A beautiful city and very comfortable for life, at least by our Russian standards.
Photo by Gulliver Theis
The brilliant queen of the Adriatic has never been the city of my dreams. Walking along the banks of the brown Moscow River, alas, I did not imagine how good it would be to walk along the Grand Canal or admire the green waters of the Venetian lagoon. Already these notorious gondolas .... One has only to start talking about Italy, as everyone who has not been to Venice dreamily rolls his eyes and recalls hitherto unseen swimming facilities. The very name of the gondola is already so stuck on my teeth that at the age of 17 I made a promise to myself: if fate throws me to Italy, I will never sit in any gondola, I will not drink coffee on Piazza San Marco and in general I will open my own Venice.
I didn’t intend to go to the dying museum city on purpose, but it’s a sin not to take the opportunity and not make a sightseeing trip to Venice from Rovinj, since Russians are allowed to go from Croatia to Italy without a visa for one day.
However, the trip could not have taken place: the Rovinj travel agency suddenly found out that they would not let me into Venice, because even though I am a citizen of the Russian Federation, my place of birth in one of the once fraternal republics of the USSR is a seal of rejection for Italian customs officers. Of course, I was upset by such news, it always becomes very insulting when you are not allowed to go somewhere. Fortunately, the agency's employee, a very nice young man and also a passionate admirer of Venice himself, decided to help and offered to make a personal request to the Italian customs. The next three days were spent bombarding the Italians with faxes and impatiently waiting for their decision. The day before the flight to Russia, when it seemed that there were no chances, a confident “YES” came from Italy and I began to prepare for the trip.
Friends who had already managed to “discover” Venice provided me with a map of the city and complained about the poor organization of the tour. On the day of their trip, the Russian group consisted of 50 people, which negatively affected the quality of its conduct. And most importantly, the girls paid 14 euros for lunch, but got lost and were late for 5 minutes at the meeting point. The group did not wait, well, it doesn’t matter, but they categorically refused to return money to their friends. In addition, the girls took all the proposed additional excursions: gondolas, boats, the same lunch, and could not freely walk around the city, for fear of not being in time for the next entertainment.
Taking into account everything I heard, at the appointed time I went to the bus that was supposed to take me from Rovinj to the port of Poreč, from where the ship "Princess of Dubrovnik" sails. The transfer went without incident. Safely passing the Croatian customs, all who arrived from all over Istria boarded. We sailed on time and for the next 2.5 hours the sea mercilessly shook our boat along the waves, checking the strength of the vestibular apparatus of tourists. For the last half hour, we sailed slowly along the unusually beautiful Venetian lagoon, although I saw that it was beautiful on the way back, but on the way there, only one thought reassured me: a little more and there will be solid ground .... During the trip, the guide actively persuaded to buy gondola rides, boats, lunch and cards, naturally at inflated prices. So, for example, a 30-minute trip along the Grand Canal on a boat cost 16 euros, and near the Rialto Bridge you could buy a vaporetto ticket for 5 euros and enjoy riding for as long as 90 minutes. Well, enough about the boring - after all, we are already in Venice!
I went through customs quickly, handed over my passport, received a card with a number and ended up on the territory of coveted Italy. Despite any weather forecasts that promised heavy rain, the bright sun was shining outside, the weather was conducive to walking. The Russian group numbered 15 people, we didn’t have to wait for anyone and we moved to the main square of Venice - San Marco. On the way, fellow citizens were noisily indignant about why the city had not been brought into proper shape by their arrival and all the buildings were so shabby, unkempt and colorless. However, as we approached the bridge of the Academy, the indignant exclamations began to change to enthusiastic ones and some compatriots began to lag behind, carried away by the surrounding beauties. Having improved the minute, I drew the guide's attention to the signs with the names of places and found out that Venice is very easy to navigate: in the center there are signs to all the main streets. On this organized tour for myself, I finished and went for a walk wherever my eyes look. And they looked at the signs leading to San Marco, however, I did not forget to look around.
Here is a Venetian wedding: he and she get out of a motor boat littered with flowers and, under the life-forming creation of Mendelssohn, march to the church. Near the entrance, the couple parted: he goes inside, and the father comes up to the bride. The guests begin to congratulate the girl, the tourists applaud loudly, the father and daughter, embarrassed and happy, enter inside: the wedding ceremony will begin soon.
To the right of the church, I notice a picturesque Negro group, wow, these are clearly not tourists, but apparently ordinary illegal immigrants: they sell cheap bags, pester tourists, suddenly one of the blacks utters a battle cry and the whole group hurriedly grabs the goods and runs in different directions : somewhere means close to the police. There were a lot of blacks selling bags and souvenirs in Venice, apparently they are a new modern look of the Venetian Moors
Meanwhile, I approach San Marco, take a step, find myself in the square and suddenly I clearly feel the spirit of Venice: for a minute there is complete silence, everything disappears: a huge motley swaying crowd, and scaffolding, and hundreds of tables and chairs, and I am stunned I find myself alone with the ancient city, my heart beats harder, but these magical sensations pass quickly, first sounds appear, then people and modern Venice comes into its own.
I am walking along San Marco, there are a lot of people and birds around. Feeding pigeons is a kind of initiation into the tourists of Venice - it is a very exciting and even intimate process. The gray pigeon brotherhood in Venice does not suffer from any complexes at all: sitting on a tourist’s hand, shoulder or head, opening his mouth, and noisily demanding food from birds is not considered something shameful or dangerous. On the contrary, pigeons actively fight for bread places, push each other with good hands, squeak joyfully and allow themselves to be squeezed and stroked.
Every year, the population of Venice is reduced due to unfavorable living conditions, the city often floods, the water level in the canals is constantly rising. Now there are no more than a hundred thousand inhabitants left in the city, most of whom are employed in the tourist service sector. And really, as soon as I moved a little later from places with recognized sights, I saw a completely different Venice: narrow deserted streets, uninhabited cracked and shabby houses. One of the houses somehow attracted my attention, and I ventured to open the door and look inside, and there, among the remnants of former luxury, there were ruins of the very bags that are sold black on the streets and the sellers themselves sleeping peacefully. Quickly retreating, I hurried back closer to San Marco. And on the way there, I wandered into another magnetic place: the Palazzo Contorini del Bovolo with its graceful and majestic staircase. There are almost no tourists near the Palace, which allows you to calmly see this, in my opinion, the most perfect architectural masterpiece. Even if Venice did not have the Doge's Palace, the Cathedral of San Marco and much more, the city would still be worth visiting just for such an extraordinary work of art as Contorini del Bovolo.
In Russia, there are several myths about Venice that I will try to refute: Myth one: “Venice is like St. Petersburg”.
The statement does not correspond to the truth: architecturally, Venice is not similar to St. Petersburg, in style they are completely different cities. Although indeed both cities are located on islands and are connected by bridges, but this is where all the similarities end. Croatian Rijeka is much more like Peter, despite the fact that there are absolutely no canals in Rijeka. Myth #2: “Venice stinks of sewage.”
In May, the city smelled exclusively of the sea and there were no less pleasant smells. Significant funds were invested in the sewer system of Venice and the sewers are no longer drained into the canals. In the autumn they say in Venice there is a smell of stagnant water, but certainly not sewage.
Myth #3: “There is a lot of rubbish in Venice”
Here I can’t say for the whole of Venice, but I can’t remember anything about garbage at all. In addition, a couple of years ago, an additional tax was introduced in Venice, and the collected funds are directed specifically to cleaning the city.
However, back to the sights of the city: we will pass over the Rialto Bridge, which I remember with a picturesque view of the Grand Canal and the delicious smell of freshly brewed coffee. Here, on the embankment, you can eat inexpensive and truly Italian pizza and buy souvenirs to remember Venice, and in this place of tourist pilgrimage, beautiful girls in ancient costumes walk and bow to living statues with which you can take pictures.
Speaking of bridges, I can't help but recall the infamous Bridge of Sighs, the one that leads from the Doge's Palace to the prison building. Oh, this is not how I imagined it, I thought that there was a lot of open space and, of course, stone arches, between which lovers kissed. Of course, there is nothing of the kind: you can get to the Bridge of Sighs only from the Doge's Palace, it is a small closed bridge, narrow on all sides, and I can’t even imagine who could kiss there ... ..
Throughout the city, tourists are being harassed by anti-drug campaigners. They ask for money to fight this evil, the activists are quite arrogant and sometimes aggressive beggars, in communicating with them it is better to portray a complete misunderstanding of the language and their intentions.
It is a pleasure to walk around Venice in good weather: the Venetian Lagoon is unusually good: rich emerald green water, islands with towering bell towers, strings of gondolas waiting for customers. There are a lot of gondolas in Venice, as expected: it is understandable - after all, we say a gondola - we mean Venice and, accordingly, vice versa. Riding on symbolic boats is an expensive activity from 80 to 120 euros per hour, depending on the place where you agree: it will be cheaper away from the center. As they say: if you didn’t ride the canals on a gondola, then consider Venice and didn’t visit, I didn’t ride, I decided not to go by the stamp, but I climbed the gondolas in a special - ship cemetery.
A parking lot of broken gondolas .... cracked boats get there, with broken noses, holes and broken seats, many are half-filled with water. I accidentally found this romantic place not far from the maritime station, there were at least two dozen boats, they have served their purpose to tourists and now they are rocking, recalling almost like Andersen about their past youth.
Another Venetian impression: I remember a concert in one of the small squares, street musicians played, using crystal glasses and glasses as instruments. Wonderful music poured from the glasses, in the figurative sense of the word, and I did not want it to stop.
I won’t discover America if I say that 5 hours for Venice is negligible: everything is the same as smearing chocolate on your lips. But the tour time was over, I went through customs, took my passport and the "Princess of Dubrovnik" sailed back to Croatia. Around 10 pm, tired and completely happy, I returned to the hotel, where I met the manager of the agency who organized this trip for me. We settled down on a sofa in the hall and, interrupting each other, remembered Venice for a long time - this is an ancient elusive city, one of the most beautiful places on earth.