As Tourists Frolic in Venice's Rising Waters, Locals Fear for the City's Treasures.

[elleng]

VENICE, Italy — Near the Accademia Bridge, a corridor of thin trees lay horizontal, as if hit by a nuclear wind. Vaporetto tickets, pigeon feathers and candy wrappers floated in stagnant pools around St. Mark’s Basilica. Saltwater seeped into the private gardens and poisoned rose bushes behind stone walls.

And children sidestepped the spillover from the canals as they trick-or-treated in Venetian masks and witches’ hats under the Rialto Bridge.

On Wednesday, Venice’s lagoon subsided and revealed the damage a violent storm had wrought on the city earlier in the week, one of the worst episodes of flooding in decades. Windblown tides reaching 61 inches above sea level had submerged more than 70 percent of the city.

On Thursday the water returned again.

Some tourists frolicked in the filthy water and dined in restaurants as it lapped at the calves of their rubber boots. Locals instead worried about the saltwater eating its way through the city’s treasures.

“Here it’s solid,” said Pierpaolo Campostrini, a member of the board responsible for managing St. Mark’s Basilica, as he knocked on the marble facade of the structure, as if listening for a secret passageway, “But here it’s empty. We have a splitting here in the brick and the plaster. The water did this.”

He explained that “unlike an earthquake where you see the damage right away,” the constant water infiltration, accentuated by dramatic events like this week’s flood, would reveal itself only over time.

The building’s bricks sponged the water up, and as the water rose, the danger became more acute to the 8,450 square meters, or about 91,000 square feet, of fingernail-size mosaic tiles that give the basilica its stunning golden shimmer.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/world/europe/venice-flooding-tourists-tourism.html?

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

1. Pretty sad.

I hope they get those gates completed. A have a sickening feeling that the gates may be an afterthought for this historic city w climate change. Seems to be just the beginning of this kind of stuff, unfortunately.

[3Hotdogs]

2. How long will the preventative measures suffice?

London? Holland low lands? Venice?

Many other places like N.Y.C., Jersey City, San Francisco and Elizabeth, N.J. were build on landfill.

[EX500rider]

3. Too many cruise ships

Venice, which this year logged a new low of fewer than 55,000 inhabitants—down from 164,000 in 1931 - registers up to 30,000 cruise ship passengers tramping through the small, ancient city per day during peak season.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/09/29/venice-is-fed-up-with-cruise-ships-and-angry-protesters-are-blocking-them/#1331bb583f61

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