Venice: That Sinking Feeling
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 05.16.02 | 8:12 PM ET
The tourist masses continue to flock to Venice to ride the gondolas and marvel at the architecture, but the crowds can be deceptive. Venice is far from a healthy city. It’s sinking. World Hum contributor Frank Bures (“On Tanzanian Time”) recently reviewed a new book on the problem – John Keahey’s Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged—in the Christian Science Monitor. The book paints a bleak portrait. “Today, Venice has become a living museum, filled with treasures from other lives, rather than a city with a life of its own,” Bures writes. “You can’t even find a good pizza there. But more recently, and more ominously for the city, are the growing episodes of acqua alta or high water, that force Venetians to walk on duckboards and in golashes. Keahey writes with this premise: Over the coming decades, the condition will only get worse.” Potential solutions, such as a plan to build gates to control water levels, have proven too controversial, so the problem continues unabated. As for the book, Bures praises Keahey’s reporting but laments that some big questions do not get addressed.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
