Ahh, Venice

For 1,400 years Venice, the city with more monikers than naturally grown food products, (‘the city of light, ‘the city of bridges,’ ‘the city of water’ etc.) has been steadily sinking. While it is a city, it consists of 118 small islands in the saltwater marsh of the Venetian Lagoon adjacent to the Adriatic Sea, and was built by man from piles of wood. What I was fascinated to learn when I visited the magical place eleven years ago was that wood doesn’t decay under water, but petrifies because of the minerals surrounding it in the sea. The geniuses who constructed it made it so the wood piles were stacked closely enough together and sort of fused to become nearly concrete. What they probably didn’t anticipate was global warming and decades of sea change.


This morning I woke up just as NPR’s Weekend Edition went live to Venice to their long-time Italy reporter, Sylvia Pujoli, giving an in-depth update on the latest being done to combat the sinking problem. (You can read her report at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112995748)

Since I’m not an engineer and this is not the space to go into it, the important part of the story is that Venice has been sinking probably since it was built and for decades has had to deal with the high and low tides of the day--no one inhabits the first floors of their own buildings any longer. The rising sea level and life or death predicament of this drowning city has been the preoccupation of some of the most prestigious scientists, some of whom say it’s simply easier to raise the entire city itself rather than keep the water out.

But, the largest project to help save the city has been underway for years and I think of it as being a New Orleans type of levy construction, only done properly and on scientific steroids. Or, probably using technology that engineers trying to make sure the Katrina disaster doesn’t happen again should be using.

The project acronym is MOSE -- (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), which is also the Italian word for Moses, recalling the biblical parting of the sea-- and involves laying a series of 78 mobile flood gates across the sea bed at the three entrances to the lagoon. The idea is that these mobile devices sit at the bottom of the lagoon and when a high tide is forecast, the gates rise up from the water and shut out the incoming water. Work on MOSE is set to be complete in 2014.

It’s controversial, as no one knows how keeping the natural ebb and flow of water will impact local ecosystems, or if it will work. I’m fascinated by all of the plans people have had over the years to help save the city and was so enchanted by the place itself, wrote this piece about the place. What’s more, something I didn’t fully realize until today, is how much news items and scientific developments influence what I like to write about. While I walked and glided upon the sinking city of Venice in 1998, visiting islands where men blow into tubes of fiery glass that then expand and twist it into beautiful shapes, I also learned that ice was found on the moon. What an interesting world we live in.

Venezia

City of masked players

two-headed, three nosed,

skin surrenders to this

eyes-only cover of plaster

drilling the excrements of time

through ice blocks on the moon.



Lifeline possibilities

frozen expectations

oxygen trapped within.

The ambitious mold of its surface,

two-toned attempts at perfection

fused halves of comedy

and hollow tragedy

wring color out of gray



Under the mask

germinates chalk,

a dust bin of atoms

churn beneath milky skin.

A thin finger

moves behind the lampshade soil

a shadow of what was

and a sliver yet to live,

preserved in solid apprehension

like skin across the face

and ice blocks on the moon.



This place is sinking,

soon to disappear,

buried by tidal sand

and seaweed shells

that swam the tides Shakespeare wrote

and garnished Caesar's crown,

in times where tales of Homer sang

all glanced upon the moon-

the very moon swallowing the city now,

laying it to rest

in a saltwater coffin-

a catastrophic masquerade

oversaturated death of bones

and teeth and people hair.

The iceblocks comb the city straight,

split canals open wide

and end this carnival of faces.