Another voice
Venice unimperilled
Auberon Waugh
Venice On Christmas Day the Patriarch of Venice preached a sermon at pontifical High Mass in St Mark's Basilica urging his flock — who consisted, for the most part, of enchantingly polite Japanese tourists, armed with four or five cameras apiece, chiefly concerned to photograph the candles from various artistic angles — not to regard themselves as sassolini sulla spiaggia, pebbles on the beach, washed this way and that by the tide.
He was speaking metaphorically, of course, and using the tide as a symbol for all the evil and horrible things happening in our time, but his message was essentially a modern one — that the Christian has a duty to arm himself as a soldier of Christ, fight the good fight etc. It is a message to which few Christians naturally respond. Any Christian society. would be unendurable on those terms, and such a doctrine is calculated to discourage the vast majority of good Christians who see themselves, if not as pebbles on the beach, at any rate as some form of burrowing mollusc a baby clam, a c/ovis or a vongola — which might easily be mistaken for a pebble.
It was the' sort of message that one might have expected from a scoutmaster, or even from some muscular clergyman at an adolescent Retreat, but not from the Patriarch of Venice at High Mass on Christmas Day. Perhaps,one had no right to expect that the Church which is crumbling into futility everywhere else should somehow survive untouched in Venice, although it is a central part of my argument that Venice arouses such expectations. But it was a disturbing thing, on the evening of the Cardinal's sermon, to see a rat running down the Calle San Zulian — the first such creature had seen on many visits. What disturbed me was not so much the thought that Venice might be about to suffer another plague — in her long history, she has survived more plagues than most of us have hot lunches. It was after the mildest of plagues in 1630— accounting for only 47,000 deaths — that they decided to put up the gigantic church S. Maria della Salute in thanksgiving. What alarmed me about the prospect of a new plague was the thought of the hideous modern church they would build in thanksgiving as soon as it was over.
It is an uncomfortable fact that Venice, as well as being a taste of heaven for English visitors, a Conservative Dream, an inspiration to the whole world of how a civilised existence can survive in ancient, beautiful surroundings even in the present day — is also inhabited by citizens of the modern World. One had thought that all the brutality, wrongheadedness and plain stupidity of modernism had been contained by the subtlety of the City Fathers in their abominable Biennale, but one had forgotten the pervading influence of post-Conciliar Catholicism working away to destroy anything it can touch. '
But few Italians are so feeble-minded as to be taken in by the international frenzy over Venice's survival. The miracle of Venice survives, to the amazement of the world. Her beauties are as little spoiled as it is possible to expect after so many hundreds of years, her shops as varied as ever, her hotels as welcoming, her natives as dignified and obliging. Everything about Venice belongs to another, happier age, even if it is an age which belongs only to the imagination. I do not really believe that life in Venice has ever been so agreeable (apart, perhaps, from a few months of the summer) either comparatively or absolutely as it is today. To stay in the Daniell Hotel, as I am staying, for something around £12 a night is to enjoy nearly all the advantages of a great palace, in greater comfort and with fewer inconveniences than any Giustinian, Loredan or Dona delle Rose ever knew.
Which must surely answer Jan Morris's point that since Venice has outlived its function as a great imperial capital it should be allowed to sink into the Adriatic. What survives as a centre for gaping tourists and cretinous modern art enthusiasts is an insult to its former greatness, she argues, if I understand her aright. But Empires have always been futile, fugitive things — won by humourless, blue-eyed visionaries in shorts, maintained by horrible, long-trousered emotional cripples from the wrong sort of public school.
Just as it is no disproof of the existence of God to argue that if He had never existed, we should have had to invent him, so it is no denial of the threat to Venice to say that even if there were no threat, we should he bound to imagine one, It is an essential part of the city's charm that it should be threatened. No Conservative Dream is complete without elements of nostalgia or anxiety for the future. The abiding testimony of all of us who have visited Venice is that we have seen the past — and it works. Nobody who lives outside Venice in the world of senseless change and general deterioration can easily reconcile themselves to Venice's survival.
But I remain sceptical about the urgency of the rescue operation. In the week before our arrival, the Sunday Times carried a long story by its floods correspondent, Mr Dalbert Hallenstein, under a four column picture of St Mark's Square under about two feet of water— no doubt taken from past files. Its sense was contained in the second sentence: 'The city will survive only if there is massive and immediate government action to contain its ruinous tidal flooding.' With great respect to Mr Hallenstein's undoubted know-now, and that of all the other Sunday Times journalists who have yet to spend an enjoyable week in Venice on expenses, this is nonsense. The truth is much less dramatic. Venice was built to withstand floods up to the first storey, and only twice in its history have the first floors been breached — on both occasions in the 14th century, when first floors were generally lower. Throughout previous centuries, the city has sunk at the rate of four and a half inches per century. As the result of water extraction from the city's foundations — now under control — this has increased to the rate of 121/2 inches per century. The mean level of the lagoon is now rising at the rate of four inches per century, largely as the result of dredging which has not yet been brought under control.
It is true that flooding has increased quite dramatically in the past 20 years. Between 1867 and 1957 there were 28 occasions on which the water rose three feet or more above its normal level at high tide; between 1957 and 1967 this happened 30 times. Since the flood of 1966 there has been one comparable occasion, in December last year. This was reckoned by Hallenstein to have cost £3.9 million (all my other figures come from the Encyclopaedia Britannica) which is chickenfeed to a municipality of nearly 370,000 inhabitants. No works of art were affected, since none is situated on the ground floor. The problem of air pollution by sulphuric acid from the glass factories of Murano — mot from the industrial complex of Mestre, as people despairingly suggested — is entirely separate, and not yet acute.
Mr Hallenstein's article seemed to prepare us for a Christmas under water, so I was not surprised to find the sun shining and water level exceptionally low on our arrival at the Danieli in a speedboat from the airport. Perhaps the redl problem, I thought, was that Venice is losing water fast, and will soon be land-bound and motorcar infested like Taunton. Then great committees of international pansies and journalists on expenses can come and agonise about that. But it is undoubtedly true Venetians have to paddle more often than formerly. I do not see that this is necessarily very bad for them. Like the dog messes, which are another important feature of life in La Serenissima, this paddling may even be good for their pride.
Obviously I do not wish to discourage those who would subscribe towards the Venice in Peril fund. Our age knows only one way to express these strong emotions. No doubt within 15 to 20 years the Italians will construct a dam or two to reduce the water pressure in the lagoon — not 'a very major engineering operation, to be compared with the road and rail bridge already built, or the proposed hydroelectric scheme in the Severn estuary. But there is no need for hysteria or panic. The threat to Venice should be food for pleasant philosophical musings, not a call to action.
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