How can Venice be saved from flooding and even sinking into the Adriatic?
Posted in Architecture, Art, Conservation, Engineering, Historical articles on Wednesday, 30 May 2012
This edited article about Venice originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 714 published on 20 September 1975.
Twentieth century progress has for years been undermining one of Europe’s most historic cities, Venice, the city on a lagoon, whose picturesque image of romantic gondolas on narrow canals is being threatened by a strange disaster
After years of dilly-dallying, the Italian government has ordered a £200 million rescue operation to save Venice from sinking into the sea.
For decades, this city of gondolas, medieval palaces and 20,000 fabulous art treasures has been descending inexorably into her lagoon. The rate may have been measured in millimetres annually, but Venice’s doom has been as certain as the wind that blows from the south-east, sending tidal waves sweeping into the canals, across the squares and streets.
For at least 20 days between October and April every year, when the flood threat is at its height, Venetians still roll up their ground floor carpets and move their furniture upstairs. They know, too, that Venice is actually rotting as she founders from the pollution of oil-discharging ships, the tankers that ply across the sea to the mainland, and the smoke and effluent from chemical factories on the distant horizon. The story of the gradual disaster is made complete with the realisation that in ten years, the romantic gondola may well have vanished, a victim of rising costs and the competing motor launch.
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