Arts

Venice crumbling to the shore

Richard West

This week's flooding in Venice, ten years to the month since the flooding that almost destroyed it, lends grim topicality to a new book, The Death of Venice by Stephen Fay and Philip Knightley (Andre Deutsch £4.25).

These two very good journalists, whose articles in the Sunday Times caused worldwide concern for the future of Venice, have now set out in full the outrageous story of how the most beautiful city ever built has been allowed to decay because of the greed, indolence or stupidity of property sharks, industrialists, bankers, politicians and lawyers—the last two being, in Venice, almost always the same thing.

It is widely and wrongly believed that Venice has been steadily crumbling into the sea for the last four or five hundred years. In fact its physical decline, as distinct from its loss of political power, began to be serious only after the second world war with the establishment of an industrial complex at Porto Marghera on the mainland. This site was chosen, apparently, because Venice was the nearest big port to the Middle East from which Italy could obtain cheap oil. As a result, the authors explain: 'Chemical discharges polluted the sea and the air. Factories sank bores and pumped water from underground, upsetting the foundations on which Venice rests. More and deeper canals were dredged for more and deeper ships until one ship, per hour, day and night, was passing Venice en route to Marghera. Reclamation had removed the marshy shore, one of the important buffers to abnormally high tides. The balance of the lagoon was disturbed and Venice paid for it'.

The city began to settle into the sea, with the result that high waters, once rare perils, became increasingly frequent. The flood of 1966, that formerly would have been looked on merely as a nuisance, came close to sweeping the city away. A minority of Venetians are keen to preserve the old city but most practical help has come from abroad. The British 'Venice in Peril' group raised money to have a church restored and other valuable work; the Germans financed the repair of a synagogue; the French saved one of the brothels for which Venice was once so beloved by wandering lechers like Byron and Goethe. A cantankerous American, Colonel James A. Gray, executive director of the International Fund for Monuments, became convinced that 'the greatest damage to the stone of Venice is caused by the pigeons which the Austrians unwittingly introduced during the occupation about 150 years ago'. At first he thought that treating stone surfaces could render them impervious to the pigeon droppings. Then methods were proposed for getting rid of the pigeons themselves by stopping their feed, by netting, by oral contraception or, by Gray's pet idea, of exchanging 1,000 Venetian birds for 100 of Emperor Haile Selassie's Ethiopian pigeon hawks. He dropped even this last plan after hearing from Ravenna that several falcons released there killed only one pigeon a day each, while their droppings were much larger and more corrosive than were those of their prey.

The city as a whole could only be saved by drastic and very expensive measures like building a sea gate and stopping the damage from Porto Marghera. This could only be done by the politicians, both locally and in Rome; they did almost nothing. Many Venetian politicians, like many of ours, stand to benefit personally from knocking down and rebuilding houses. Even the Communists, who are good conservationists, were susceptible to the argument that it was not right to sacrifice jobs on the mainland to keeping up buildings on the island. As one might expect it is the Social Democratic Party that is willing, indeed eager, to destroy anything beautiful for the sake of a few jobs in some loathsome factory that will probably have to be closed in a few years anyway.

Listen, for instance, to Gianfranco Pontel : 'We have always maintained that if Venice was not to be turned into a museum —and it should not be—there must be a site for industrial activity, and the fulcrum would be Porto Marghera. Venice was the first commercial port in Europe, and the development of the petro-chemical industry was natural. Now Venice must become the great container port of the Common Market, one of the two great Mediterranean outlets of the Nine, along with Marseilles'.

The roguery and lying of recent Italian governments—worse even than ours—are shown in the chapter entitled 'The Loan that never Was'. Late in 1973 the government introduced a Save Venice law whose operational cost was reckoned at 300,000 million lire or 8500 million. An organisation called Crediop, which had been set up by the government to raise money for public spending, issued a loan contract for that exact amount entitled: 'A pre-financing loan agreement in connection with the preservation project of the city of Venice'.

It was revealed that the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bank of Tokyo, Security Pacific of San Francisco and the European Banking Company would put up the money. The merchant banks who would manage the loan for Crediop were Lehman Brothers and Kuhn Loeb, both of New York, and N. M. Rothschild of London. An aide to George

Ball, a partner at Lehman brothers, told the authors: 'The transaction was alwaY5

. referred to in the office as "the Venice loan' • A partner at Kuhn Loeb's London office remembers that Venice's name gave the loan an advantage: 'It persuaded certain banks to subscribe'. It also persuaded them to sub' scribe at an unattractive interest rate, that as Fay and Knightley remark : 'Every' one seemed pleased. Crediop had a great deal of money reasonably cheaply and the banking community felt it had done some' thing useful for Venice'.

Certainly Kuhn Loeb and Rothschilds were not bashful about their role in seeking to help Venice. When a special supplement on the city appeared in The Times (2 February 1974) both banks took public relations 'prestige advertisements' to show their pride in the Venice connection. That of Kuhn Loeb showed only the name of the bank surrounded by white space, while Roths

childs printed its name and address under the headline 'VENICE PRESERVED'.

These merchant bankers of Venice achieved a public relations success, the Italian government got its money, but not one lira out of the 300,000 million ever arrived at Venice. Apparently there was rid clause in the contract specifying that all or any part of the loan was to be spent on Venice; therefore the government simplY used the money to meet one of its manY balance of payments crises. What is more, thanks to the laws of the Common Market, 15 per cent of all money contributed by the British public to 'Venice in Peril' went not to the city but to the treasury at Rome in VAT to help keep Italy at a level of public spend" ing even higher than ours.

The 'Venice Loan' helped save the Italian economy in a crisis rather like ours at the moment. London, I learn from this book, 15 sinking, relative to the Thames, at about the same rate as Venice; it is also subject td North Sea floods. Any day now I expect t° hear that our government, peeved with the harsh terms imposed by the IMF, will ask the international banking world for an urgent, low interest £4,300 million loan t.° stop the North Sea drowning historic London.

The suggestion is not merely frivolous. Our British government, with its persistence in gross overspending, is acting much like the Italian government at the time of the 'Venice Loan'. The Italians on the other hand have learned some of the lessons of past folly, and now have imposed a reginle of the utmost austerity. Having realised that, oil accounts for much of their balance 01 payments problem, they put up the price of petrol to £1.65 a gallon, banned cars frool many parts of the cities and slapped on 3 thirty mph speed limit. This austerity rnaY be the prolongation of life for Venice, pro' vided it is not destroyed by flood. For cutting back on the purchase of oil will mean cutting back on production at Porto Marghera. as well as the use of motor boats in the old city. For Venice, 1977 could be the year of the gondola.