Is it possible to write about Venice and not to be instantly inundated in a wash of received experience? Once, in the impossibly distant past, to be a Venetian was a glorious boast; thrown up on the shores of the Adriatic by the tidal wave that resulted after the foundations of the Roman Empire cracked, Venice was a shipwreck that became a legendary treasure house, a brothel and a labyrinth of intrigue. Like a starlet catapulted into the upper echelons of celebrity, her talent was no match for her self-promotion; she foundered as she rose and was poisoned on her own distorted sense of invincibility. Now she lies on her impossibly romantic deathbed, visited by an unending succession of pitying admirers, admiring her wasted face in the mirror of the waters that rises to suffocate her.
See how easily the pen bleeds purple as soon as you approach Venice? Is it a museum, a ruin or the largest artifact ever put on display? Even when the city was the navel of a huge muscular body of commerce stretching from Lisbon to the Far East, it luxuriated in myths. The Doges, gilded puppet rulers of the city, sailed out in their opulent barges to toss a precious ring into the waters of the Adriatic, symbol of the marriage of Venice and Neptune. Meanwhile, the city was ruled by an imperial rabble of merchant politicians, emeshing themselves into the story of their hydropolis like rats swarming aboard a sinking ship. The pillage of the Fourth Crusade heaped more artistic and aesthetic wealth on the city than it could bear and, wholly understandably, it began to sink. And it continues to subside in what must be the most lengthy and elegant decline that any great diva has ever been forced by circumstances to orchestrate.
Cliches abound; the city is a shivering mirage, a fleet of stone sails, a network of sewers, a graveyard, an empress, a courtesan, a scintillia of light and shade, the most durable and glorious error ever conceived. It was raining a thin cold sleet when I arrived. The winter breezes, laden with water, pushed and slid insistently up my trouser legs and trickled down my neck. Impossible to keep it out, the small gelid gusts provoked small moans of disbelief that anything so slight could be so icy. But one cannot arrive in the presence of the bride of the sea (see, there it goes again) huddled in the covered fibreglass compartment of a comfortless vaporetto; its perspex widows, dulled and scratched by salt and wind, making a foggy blur of the lights on the shore. Except there is no shore. No land to speak of at all. The buildings rise directly out of the black water (O, imagine falling in, imagine the icy pain!) like a Gothic stage effect: the ghost of the drowned maiden ascending from the tomb. Where are the foundations? A whole college of engineers can lecture me for a decade and I’ll still be shocked that the envious water doesn’t simply rise swiftly through the stone and bricks of the pallazzi and temples and tear them down, like a sugar cube set in a saucer of hot tea. No wonder the Romantics dashed themselves on reefs of rhetoric trying to describe it; it is the soul of the 19th century sublime; a castle of Otranto, a drowned Gormenghast. Beauty distorted and paralyzed by terror, a princess on the rack.
It is late November. We are not staying in the city herself, but on the relatively solid land of the Lido, which actually qualifies as land and not some fairy reef. I’m glad. When I was younger, I read The Phantom of the Opera, proving that young people will often struggle with books that adults will shun as obscure and laborious. To be a Lloyd Webber musical is a fate that it thoroughly deserves. Yet the mental image of a Paris undermined by a labyrinth of warrens and vast caverns persists and even today, walking through the boulevards, those imaginary gulfs yawn under my feet. Likewise Venice feels as though it is spread on an impossible sheet of the thinnest ice over bottomless fathoms of dark water. You walk gingerly. One of the greatest persistent threats to the city is the boats which are its circulation and life; it has been found that the vibrations from the engines of the vessels which ply the lagoon are slowly, infinitesimally shaking the foundations of Venice to pieces. The ancient wooden piles that were sunk into the marshy islands, impervious to microscopic attack, are being slowly shivered to atoms. The sea-city is being killed by boats. Venice is the paramount example of an irremediable situation; the city cannot in the long term be saved, yet it must be. Priceless is to Venice as warm is to a supernova.
And nothing can be truly priceless that is safe; this is the pathos of beauty; it must decay or be defaced. On the third day of our stay, I saw a terrible sight that has become an everyday one to the Venetian; those who have elected to stay. Crossing the Piazza San Marco, chilly ranks of ogival arches pacing around the perimeter like cowled monks attending on the gorgeous parasitic bulk of the basilica, a thin layer of water was creeping across the smooth stones. Tourists stood on the makeshift gangplanks that are pulled out at these times, holding their little silver cameras up to capture the reflected light of the street lamps, admiring the mirror-effect. This is now a common occurrence; the waters used to rise twice a year; the average is now forty. This is terrifying. There is a famous modern painting that shows the end of the world. An everyday row of sepia houses occupies the left hand side of the canvas, and on the right; a vast motionless sea, rising by millimeters. No towering waves, no tempest, no Great Day of His Wroth. Just the familiar sea, rising and rising, refusing to retreat. One remembers a memorable quotation from the catastrophic Asian tsunami of this year: ‘it just wouldn’t stop. It just kept coming’. It just keeps coming.
If the wooden walkways are flimsy, other schemes to save Venice are magnificent and hopeless. Shortly before I arrived, the ‘amazing science’ story of the week was, coincidentally, a plan to pump vast quantities of water into the seabed deep under bneath the city. Seawater, ironically. It seems impossible: an intricate and fragile network of buildings being floated to safety, like a raft. But it is a certainty that the impossible be made possible if Venice is to be ultimately saved.
The goldoli of Venice are all crooked, expertly joined to curve gently to the right. Their shape offsets the effects of the oar, which is mounted on a rowlock on the right, pushing to the left. Their glossy, luxuriant and uniform black is the result of a venerable decree of the old Venetians that they should not become vehicles for displays of personal wealth and status. Writers inevitably liken them to coffins.
Venice: All the World is Drowning
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