Impressions of Venice after seven days
Still astonishing for the engineering fete of persistence that keeps a city built on mud flats standing after 1500 years. Piazza San Marco floods with a rising tide every twelve hours but what’s a little water in the foyer? A true Venetian would never abandon his city to a fickle tide.
If anything the ground is giving way to the centuries of history that saturate the buildings and streets above it. Yet it’s sad to see such a marvel, once ‘the liquid frontier between the east and the west’ transformed into a tourist attraction. Although it’s probably been that way since long before my time, each year more citizens are forced to relocate to affordable suburbs away from their beloved canals and bridges. Tourists we come and spend and drive up prices, we leave trash and take away photographs and silly souvenirs, but we don’t keep the city standing; the citizens do and they’re the ones tourism forces out. After a while we’re bored and we leave and the citizens that are left go about their business. They work on renovations funded in part by our lavish pleasure-spending and do their best to keep their city standing, flooded or dry, infested by tourists or not. A simple task to master the fickle tides! The true engineering fete of persistence for Venice would be not to abandon the city to the flood of tourists, either.
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