Venetian masquerade

Is it true that Venice is sinking under the rising waters? You hear a lot of news and speculation about this theme: suppliants who adore the Queen of the Adriatic working themselves up into hysteria; campaigns calling for help in all the languages of money; but some suspect all this is no more than a maneuver to dissemble an obvious fact: what Venice is sinking under, is the weight of millions of tourists.

They come in industrial quantities. Every day, on the average, there are 60,000 of them — as much as the whole population of the city of canals. But averages, as we know, are deceptive. There are days in February when we, the tourists, are far fewer in number; and days in August when they number in the hundreds of thousands, and the central streets are about as pleasant as the subway at rush hour. 60,000 is quite a lot: 5,000 metric tons of live tourist meat every morning, on the hoof, restless, in search of permanent wonder. They don't just arrive: the richer ones stay, purchase things and elbow out the locals. More and more, the famous palazzi on the water's edge go empty 11 months of the year, because the owners are an American financier, a Teutonic German and a Chinese Communist. In 1980 the city had 120,000 inhabitants; now, as I have said, about half as many remain.

Some of them, however, hold out. To begin with, there is a silent resistance, which never speaks its name. It consists in ripping off the tourist in a thousand ways: choking him with the worst pizzas south of Mont Blanc; selling him kitsch bibelots in technicolor Murano glass; cramming him sardine-wise into the meanest hotel rooms in a continent famous for mean hotel rooms; in short, subjecting him to every variety of contempt, cheating and vexation, always delivered with a smile.

It must be an ugly thing to live on the remains of what your dead ancestors built, and know it; to resign yourself to the condition of being a bloodsucker on a remote past

This rancor, like all rancor, makes sense: it must be an ugly thing to live on the remains of what your dead ancestors built, and know it; to resign yourself to the condition of being a bloodsucker on a remote past; to decline from proud admirals to glorified cabin servants and waiters, or not even glorified ones.

But from time to time they attempt some gesture of open resistance: a way of saying that, for just a while, Venetians revert to being the proud admirals of the past. Recent months have brought signs of protest, hung out of many windows on eroded walls: No grandi navi (no big ships). They mean they are opposed to the brutal huge cruisers, these Facebook-filling machines, marine monsters 300 meters long, 15 stories high, 300 passengers aboard, being allowed into the canal of La Giudecca, their sirens sounding in your ears while you sip a cocktail on the Riva del Schiavoni. They also aggravate the erosion of the walls, and, it seems, the subsidence already mentioned.

The authorities are now forbidding small vessels to go beyond certain points, and large ones from even approaching the center of Venice. The war is a muted, masked one: a Venetian carnival. The cruise lines threaten: they are going to take Venice off their itineraries, boycott it, etc. The passengers whine: they don't want to be deprived of the most photogenic moment on the tour. The Venetians bluff: they have ecological concerns; the tourists will go on arriving just the same; the ones on cheap cruises don't spend all that much, anyway. But they know that, even so, they stand to lose thousands of buyers of junk knick-knacks every day. To compensate, they try other tactics: lately, for example, the boat fare to cross the Grand Canal near the market, which had always been 50 cents, has been jacked up to two euros, only for foreigners. Included in the price is the irritation of paying four times as much as the local beside you.

Venice, even sinking into the water, remains the city that, like no other, was built at the expense of other people's money bags.