gates closed for 100 or 120 days a year, with two-thirds of them in the
three-month flood season,” says Ammerman, seated at a terrace in
Rome, where he spends much of the year. He predicts the resulting
pollution crisis will shorten the project’s lifespan to 30 or 40 years.
“The building companies are happy to build something that’s going to
be obsolete in 50 years because then they can just build another,” he
says. The Consortium, he insists, should go back to the drawing board
and revamp its designs.
Not surprisingly, that is not how the Consortium sees things. “The
problem of sea-level rise is very real, and the designs take it into
account,” says spokesperson Monica Ambrosini. The gates will only
have to be opened an average of five or six times a year a decade from
now, she says, once all the improvements to canals and flood defenses
are taken into account. The Consortium started construction in May
2003 with the support of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. It expects
to finish construction in 2011, but the process could be delayed by var-
ious legal challenges that remain.
Some supporters of the gates argue that the situation has become
dire, and Venice can no longer wait. “If you want to preserve the city as
a museum for tourists, you don’t need to build the gates,” says Andrea
Rinaldo, a University of Padua engineer who has watched his native
Venice lose nearly half its population since the 1966 flood. “But if you
want a living city with real residents, decent jobs and everyday shops
and stores then you must build these gates and protect the city.”
Rinaldo remembers the 1966 flood, how his childhood home
remained impregnated with oil months later. Since then he and many
of his friends and neighbors have moved to the mainland. “People get
tired of having to wait 40 minutes in a passageway for the tide to go
down so they can walk home,” he says. “You’re afraid that you will die
in the ambulance because [the ambulance boat] had to wait until the
water got low enough so that you can pass under the bridge and on to
the hospital. Have you even seen a grocery in town? It’s all T-shirt
shops now.” The gates, he argues, will give city residents some cer-
tainty about the future and hopefully lead to its rebirth.
“They’ve protected Rotterdam from precisely the same threats, so
why not protect Venice?” he asks, gesturing at a map of the lagoon on
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