If things go on with the present speed about 1,500 Venetians are leaving for good every year, and in another 20 or 30 years it will actually be the thinking man's Disneyland, a millionaires' playground. But there won't be actual people there, it will just be a sort of museum city. Venice is now becoming very uncomfortable city, largely because there are so many tourists in the summer. They outnumber the natives about five or six to one.
I point out to people always that you only have to walk about five minutes in any direction from St Mark's Square and you've got the place practically to yourself. At night, you've got it completely to yourself. I never went to bed in Venice without going for a long night walk for an hour and a half. Going nowhere in particular, just trying to get lost and most of my knowledge has been acquired that way, simply through walking through Venice at night.
My father was a tremendous Venice lover like me and he was just about to start writing the history of Venice when he died. And then from that moment Venice had really taken my life. I'm spending a half of my time writing about its past and the other half trying to protect his future.
My favourite memory is hearing two American ladies discussing their past trip and they were discussing all the places they'd been. And they had a sudden misunderstanding. One said to the other: “No, no, dear! Venice, Venice, you remember Venice? Where we had the omelette?”
I mean, they join a ten days tour of Italy and they're in Venice because it's Tuesday. Apart from buying some little souvenir and a bottle of hugely priced Coca-Cola, and more and more birdseed for those revoltingly overfed pigeons, they spend very little money. And Venice just gets worn away, and gets no compensation virtually at all.
The only way you can find these enormous stone and marble palaces and churches on the soft soggy mud of the Venetian lagoon. The only way that works is: you get this enormous number of wooden piles like telegraph posts, which are hammered to the soft mud of the Lagoon. They go in obviously very easily. Touching each other, I mean, like as close as cells in a beehive. And this gives the basis for the building, so it just gives that a little bit of elasticity.
One of the great buildings of Venice is, I think everybody knows, is a great Clock Tower of St Mark. Which unfortunately collapsed in 1904. This is just a bit of the original pile of the Twelve century, when that held up the Campanile. And it's got a sort of seal of the Venetian Municipality to authenticate it, to say it's genuine. So, it's just, you know, it's not typically beautiful, but it is...it's genuine. And to me it says Venice.
So, that's what they got out of Venice. An omelette!
videos
