With the threat of rising seas, many countries may consider a Delta
Project of their own. In fact, Italy has been stumbling toward a very
similar solution to save the world’s most famous piece of sinking real
estate.
VENICE UNDERSIEGE
It is a clear, calm night—no storms, no wind, no unusual weather of
any kind—but Venice’s Piazza San Marco is flooding.
As the tide crests, seawater begins pouring from storm drains,
forming a growing pond in the middle of the city’s most famous
square. The vestibule of the sumptuous San Marco Basilica begins fill-
ing with water, amusing tourists, some of whom are laughing as they
wade through the ankle-deep pond.
But Venice’s flooding is no laughing matter. The Adriatic Sea is ris-
ing, the city is sinking, and floods are becoming more and more com-
monplace. During the first half of the twentieth century, Venice was
inundated by nineteen serious floods; in the second half, over 150. In
1996, Piazza San Marco, one of the lowest spots in the city, was flooded
by high water on more than eighty occasions. The cumulative damage
to the city’s historic buildings, bridges, and art works is becoming
increasingly apparent. Green algae now grows on the porous brick-
work of many of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century palaces along the
Grand Canal because the flooding sea frequently tops the building’s
waterproof stone foundations.
Venetians have to replace their front doors regularly, as their bot-
tom edges rot or corrode away. The ground floors of most buildings in
the historic city have been abandoned for decades. Increasingly, the
Venetians themselves are abandoning the old city, where the popula-
tion has fallen from 175,000 after World War II to only 70,000 today.
“People go away because it’s more and more difficult to work and do
normal activities,” says Paolo Gardin of Insula, which works to reverse
flood damage to the historic center. “We fear that the town is becom-
ing only a museum for tourists.”
Like the Netherlands, Venice has been sinking under its own
weight for many centuries. Built on a series of swampy islands in the
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