Death Francesco's Venice

Venice. The most beautiful city in the world

had grown from bleak marshland to become a great trading power...

with an empire that stretched across half the known world.

It had created some of the most beautiful art ever seen.

It had become a place of adventure, sex and pleasure unlike any other city.

But one man had brought the party to an end.

His name was Napoleon Bonaparte...

and his armies had left Venice a looted, crumbling, forgotten backwater.

The great city had fallen into poverty and decay,

and it seemed there was no way back.

This is the point where many stories of Venice end.

The great empire was dead,

and Venice was rotting away.

But I'm going to tell you a story about what happened next,

about how the great artists of the 19th century

created the romantic image of Venice

that is recognised and reproduced all over the world.

The world now comes to Venice and Venice comes to the world.

This is Venice in Las Vegas.

It's a hotel and casino -

an architecturally faithful version of Venice in the middle of America.

Cars drive under the Rialto Bridge.

Moving walkways take people over it.

But it's too clean

and it's much too antiseptic.

It's...surreal.

These people are visiting Las Vegas,

but they have come because they love the idea of Venice.

Venice has become more than just a creation of bricks and mortar.

It has become a city that lives in everyone's imagination.

Yet the real Venice is still a place where people live,

a city caught between its past and its future -

between the people who live here and the tourists who visit.

This is the age that has defined my life -

an old city caught up in modern times.

And it all started with you British,

and your romantic sensibilities. In the 19th century,

your poets, your painters and your writers would come here

to forgotten, poverty-stricken Venice,

and be intoxicated by the atmosphere.

Venice attracted the romantics because they were in love with decay -

something of ancient beauty forged through time and left to wither.

They believed Venice would be at its most beautiful

the moment it was about to die.

The marriage of Venetian architecture and nature

had always been a fragile one.

So for centuries, we had repaired and strengthened our great buildings.

Now poverty meant building work was left undone.

The city was poised...

between beauty and decay,

between power and fall.

One British poet was to discover Venice

as a haven from change...

a refuge in the romance of history.

The poet was Lord Byron...

..and he would immerse himself in the city.

"My beautiful, my own, my only Venice -

"thy breeze, thy Adrian sea breeze, how it fans my face.

"The very winds feel native to my veins!"

Venice, for Byron, was everything he needed.

It was inspiration and romance.

He fell in love with its crumbling ancient palaces,

with their resonance of the past.

This is Palazzo Mocenigo...

Byron's home on the Grand Canal.

Here he would revive the glory days of Casanova

and indulge his love of Venice.

But there was a difference.

For Casanova, it had been a party.

For Byron, Venice was a state of mind.

He called it "the island of my imagination".

"In Venice,

"silent rows the songless gondolier

"Her palaces are crumbling to the shore

"But beauty is still here

"States fall, arts fade

"But nature doth not die.

"She to me was as a fairy city of the heart

"Even dearer in her day of woe

"Than when she was a boast, a marvel...

"..and a show."

Byron's libido and his affairs

became notorious throughout Venice and Europe.

They became the hot gossip in English society.

He had women, literally all over Venice.

He had a fling with Marianna, his landlord's wife.

Then there was a fiery affair with Margerita, the wife of his baker.

Giulietta...

Miss Tarruscelli...

Miss Spinola... Miss Aloisi...

Miss Glettenheim and her sister.

Byron only caught a disease once.

And that, I am ashamed to say,

..was from one of MY ancestors...

Elena Da Mosto.

Buon giorno.

Almost nothing is known about Elena da Mosto.

All we know is from Byron himself in a letter.

He says he didn't pay her, so she wasn't a prostitute...

but "era di modi facili", as we say in Italian.

"My whore hold has been much extended

"since the masquerading began and closed. But I was taken aback

"by a gonorrhoea gratis.

"A girl - a gentle donna named Elena da Mosto - was clapt,

"..and she has clapt me."

Byron's epic poem Childe Harold

was a bestseller all over Europe.

But his success and swagger around the city made him enemies.

A local roused him to a challenge.

Luckily for Byron, it wasn't a duel.

The race would be from here on the Lido all the way to Venice.

But not just to St Mark's Square over there.

They would swim to the other end of the Grand Canal.

That's four-and-a-half miles.

BANG!

"I won by a good three quarters of a mile,

"knocking the Italian all to bubbles!"

It was as if the Englishman and the Venetian were competing for the soul of Venice.

And we had lost!

Byron was just the first.

So many of your 19th-century writers and painters would come here.

For the British, Venice was a city of fantasy,

a city of the mind.

This place inspired painters

to paint what they felt as much as what they saw.

St Paul's Cathedral on the Grand Canal. Very strange! What is it about you British?!

It was as if painter William Marlow saw Venice

as just another outpost of your growing empire.

Did we see it as a compliment?

I'm not so sure!

More and more British artists would shape the identity of my city.

And you were about to give us

the most spectacular images of Venice we had ever seen.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was the greatest British painter,

and in Venice, he had found his greatest subject.

No-one ever saw Venice in quite the same way after Turner.

Turner would push the Venetian marriage of architecture and nature

further than anyone,

into a mystical fusion of light and weather with bricks and mortar.

It was as if nature was engulfing the city.

He visited three times, late on in his career.

These trips resulted in hundreds of images of Venice -

visions of the city unlike anything that had been painted before,

as blurred and imprecise

as Canaletto had been meticulous.

Turner would give us the truest picture of the city -

of the feel of the city - of any artist.

Yet he would also dramatically change Venice

to suit his own ends.

And there has always been something of a mystery

about his vantage point.

This was once the Hotel Europa.

Turner stayed here during his trips to Venice.

Now the building is offices,

most traces of its past ripped out.

But we do know he stayed on the top floor.

In this painting of his room,

the only surviving clue is the view from the window.

And this is the closest match I can find.

Who would have thought...

one of the most important places in the history of art

would end up a bagno?!

And searching for Turner's vantage point

turns out to be something of a problem over and over again.

We need to see the door of the church.

Just a little further round and...

and maybe we have...

the right perspective.

Seeing that we are in the right position...

here we have the door of the church of the Salute,

here, the campanile of St Mark.

The campanile is much taller than in reality.

Here there is a building that doesn't exist.

Strange. OK, we'll have a look.

I think here we are in the right place for the Dogana.

Here is the Dogana, the buildings.

But the rest...

the ducal palace, St Mark's Square - that doesn't exist in the reality.

In the painting, yes.

Nothing seems to fit.

Turner has moved the great monuments of Venice around

to suit himself.

Now we are in the island of the church of St Giorgio.

Here we have the first point of view from the Dogana

where we were, there.

Now we are in front of St Marco. We can see the Doges' Palace,

the Campanile of St Marco, and the palace of Zecca.

Two points of view for one painting.

Turner was not painting the Venice I know.

His paintings were idealised, romanticised versions of the city.

British artists had brought Venice back to the attention of the world,

yet every image of Venice was romanticised, unreal.

The true poverty and suffering of the people who lived here

was never part of the picture.

And your greatest writer was no better.

Surely his love of the city

should have revealed the real misfortune of the Venetians?

His name was Charles Dickens.

Dickens was far from being a Byron or a Turner.

His novels were gritty chronicles of downtrodden Industrial Britain.

But Venice turned this tough chronicler of social reality into something else.

It turned Dickens into a romantic.

It was as if Venice was a drug.

He wrote about the city

as if he were experiencing a strange, hallucinogenic dream.

"I could not think but how strange it was to be floating by a dreamy kind of track

"marked out upon the sea by posts and piles.

"I came upon a great piazza,

"anchored, like all the rest, in the deep ocean.

"On its broad bosom was a palace.

"Cloisters and galleries, so light they might have been the work of fairy hands,

"so strong that centuries had battered them in vain.

"Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast palaces, I wandered on from room to room.

"The old days of the city lived again, about me.

"But welling up into the secret places of the town crept the water always:

"coiled round and round it, in its many folds, like an old serpent:

"waiting for the time, I thought, when people should look down into its depths

"for any stone of the old city that claimed to be its mistress."

British artists had created a Venice in the popular imagination

that was a place of infinite wonder.

More than that - a place that would change your soul

if only you could get there.

Not surprisingly, the number of travellers to Venice began to rise dramatically.

Dickens had made the trip from Italy by gondola.

But, with more and more people seized by the Romantic dream of Venice...

..things were about to change forever.

The rail link between Italy and Venice was completed in 1846.

More than three-and-a-half kilometres long,

supported by 222 arches.

Now Venice was easy to get to,

physically connected to Italy.

This was the greatest disaster.

Although Venice had ceased to be an independent state half a century earlier,

it was this bridge

that truly put an end to Venice's independence.

Come un pesce preso all'amo.

This is the greatest symbol of Venice's lost supremacies.

Now the city was nothing more than an extension of the mainland -

a fact many Venetians could not accept.

We even insisted the bridge include its own means of destruction

in case it was used by an invading force.

Inside the bridge, there are 48 spaces

especially built to house dynamite.

If the bridge ever needed to be destroyed, it could be,

and Venice once more would retain her independence.

But there WAS an invasion.

An ever-increasing army of tourists streamed across the new bridge.

And they brought with them a new attitude.

They were in love with the romance of the city,

like the artists who had come to Venice before them.

But they did not want the city to die -

they wanted to keep Venice standing.

So change was inevitable.

The big question now was, what sort of change would it be?

Renovate or modernise? Repair or demolish?

Once again, you British would define the argument.

John Ruskin had visited Venice as a young man,

and when he returned in 1849,

he was horrified to see the deterioration of the city.

Ruskin believed Venice was the greatest architectural creation on Earth,

and yet, he said, the city was disappearing

"as fast as a lump of sugar in hot tea".

In his great work, The Stones Of Venice,

he would attack the Romantics' vision of the city,

and their love of decay.

Instead he argued that Venice was in peril and must be saved.

But like many conservationists,

he didn't know when to stop.

Ruskin got so worked up about Venice,

it was as though he wanted to preserve us in aspic.

He even objected to street lighting in Venice.

He said cast-iron gas lamps

reminded him

of Birmingham!

But it was in cast iron

that Ruskin's view of the city would be challenged

by another of you British.

Bridge-builder Alfred Neville was a moderniser,

and he would fill Venice with modern bridges -

replacing bridges built of stone.

Today they look charming

but to the 19th-century eye they were shocking signs of change.

Neville would go on to confront the very heart of antique Venice

with the most uncompromising structure the city had ever seen.

The Accademia Bridge was built in 1854.

It was only the second bridge to be built across the Grand Canal

in Venice's long history.

Its straight girders spanned the 48 metres of water

in one great heroic length.

But, ultimately, the forces of conservation would triumph

and Neville's modern Accademia Bridge was taken apart

and carted off for scrap.

It would be replaced by a temporary wooden structure.

And the temporary bridge has stood there ever since.

We Venetians just cannot face the challenge

of choosing between an old or a modern design.

This would be the first of many such battles

between the old and the new.

Ruskin and Neville

were on opposite sides of the argument.

They had fired the first shots in the battle for the soul of my city,

a city which was inescapably connected to the modern world...

..but which could never belong to it.

Now a terrible event

would spark off the most ferocious argument

between the conservationists and the modernisers

that Venice had ever seen.

At eight minutes to ten

on the morning of the 14th July 1902,

our crumbling city really started to fall down.

Venice's great Campanile collapsed.

Visitors were still climbing the tower just days before,

even as the cracks were appearing.

Luckily, the only casualty was the caretaker's cat.

Venice had lost its most important symbol of the city

seen from the lagoon.

It was said a Venetian captain sailing home

went mad when he failed to find the campanile on the horizon.

So what would fill the gaping hole in the Venetian skyline?

Many architects were keen to see

a new and modern structure rise in place of the old Campanile.

It would be a great symbol of Venice embracing the new century.

But these designs met strong opposition from those who wanted to preserve Venice as it was.

The slogan they developed in the face of the Modernists

was "Dov'era, com'era."

Waving the flag for the modernisers was this man - Otto Wagner.

He was an architect from Vienna,

where his work had won him fame and fortune.

He claimed it would be a falsification of history

to rebuild the Campanile in the old style.

The mixture of building styles in this square from many different ages

gave the place its charm.

And a new building could only add to that charm.

"Yes," said the authorities,

"but 'Dov'era, com'era'."

The Campanile was rebuilt almost exactly as it was before.

But just as the city's conservatism was growing stronger and stronger,

alternative voices for change were getting louder too.

The argument was going to get nasty.

The Industrial Revolution had changed the face of Europe.

But we had been immune -

the city's narrow canals and tightly-packed buildings

left no space for modern factories.

It seemed as if we had no place in the great plan for the future.

And on the whole, we were pleased.

But something was happening in art -

and we Venetians could never ignore art!

In Italy, a new movement was growing,

and its followers were staging a revolt against the past.

The Futurists believed that Italian art had become stagnant,

and called for a new art glorifying modern technology and energy.

On the 27th April 1910,

a man ran across St Mark's Square.

In his hands, he had a pile of pamphlets.

It looked an innocent scene

as he climbed to a high balcony overlooking the square.

But the pamphlets he carried

were entitled "The Manifesto Against Reactionary Venice".

The man's name was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

He was a poet, leader of the Futurists,

and he was about to perform the most outrageous attack on Venice

in the 20th century.

To these art revolutionaries, Venice was an insult -

everything they stood against.

We feared they might even smash the city to pieces!

IN ITALIAN

Italy was about to be thrown into a futurist nightmare.

Benito Mussolini had plans to make Italy

into a futuristic fighting machine, and Venice was a part of them.

Here he is with Adolf Hitler

in St Mark's Square.

Mussolini built a big new bridge from Italy to Venice

alongside the train bridge.

The new bridge was for motor cars.

But where on earth are all these cars going?

Ever since the late 19th century,

there had been people

who wanted to fill in Venice's canals and make them into roads.

Occasionally, it even happened.

This canal was paved over. Look!

This stone was the original border between the canal and the pavement.

Throughout the 20th century,

modernisers dreamt of the motor car penetrating to the very heart of Venice.

Imagine what might have been.

Luckily, the cars never made it further

than one square at the back of Venice.

But Venice couldn't keep ALL motorised transport out of the city.

The last century saw the city's canals fill up with heavy-goods vehicles -

ambulances and fire engines...

..buses and taxis all travel by water.

But the city pays a high price.

SIREN WAILS

In the 1930s, strict speed limits were introduced.

If we want to use motor boats,

then no-one, except the emergency services,

can travel more than about twice the speed of a gondola.

It's a simple but incontrovertible fact

that now the fabric of Venice can't stand the pace of modern life.

The wake created by motor boats

destroys the delicate structure of the canals

and the buildings that line them.

But one day, more than any other,

made us Venetians realise just how perilous everything had become.

A catastrophe was to change everything.

It was the moment the debate stopped being about a crumbling city

and became instead the nightmare of our home disappearing beneath the waves.

Throughout 1,600 years of existence,

Venice had conquered cities,

it had defended invasions,

it had defied great tyrants and empires.

Throughout the 20th century,

it held back the tide of the modern world.

But nothing was to prepare Venice for what happened on the 4th of November 1966...

Torrential rain and a sirocco wind blowing at 100 kilometres an hour

stopped the morning tide leaving Venice's lagoon.

Then the afternoon tide rushed in,

flooding the city

to a depth of two metres,

the most terrible floods in the city's history.

In St Mark's Square, the water got up to here.

The ground floor of every building in Venice was full of water.

Here in my house, the water came quite high.

I think it was something to the fourth or the fifth step.

And it's quite incredible.

I was young - I was five years old -

and I think my mother took me here with a pyjama

and looking from here all flooded.

Could be a place for a boat,

not a room to live. Strange!

When all this happened, I was five years old -

small enough to be engulfed by the waves and carried out to sea.

My memories of the event are a bit hazy,

but my father remembers our experience of the day like it was yesterday.

HE SPEAKS IN ITALIAN

Of course, Venice has always flooded a LITTLE with the tides.

It's something all my ancestors were used to, and WE are used to.

But in 1966, it was different -

a tragedy, a catastrophe, il disastro,

more than the city could cope with.

The electricity failed,

and the floodwater burst the underground oil tanks,

carrying a thick black sludge through the city.

The flood had devastated Venice.

People thought there was even a real possibility

that some of our great buildings would collapse.

It seemed the sea had turned against the city

with a fury nobody had foreseen.

Worse than that,

it looked as if the balance of architecture and nature

on which Venice had thrived for more than 1,000 years

had collapsed.

Over the centuries, buildings had shifted in the marshy ground.

It was the sort of thing the early builders expected.

Now the flood of 1966 had tipped the balance

in favour of volatile nature.

But it wasn't true. It was not nature's fault.

It was man's fault.

So...what exactly was going on?

Decades before, industry had begun to overwhelm the Italian coast of the Venetian lagoon...

..a vast industrial complex around the town of Marghera.

Pollution was poisoning the fish in the lagoon,

upsetting the delicate ecological balance.

The dredging of deep channels for oil tankers

brought stronger currents.

These currents accelerated the Adriatic's high tides

towards Venice,

worsening floods and eroding the lagoon's salt marshes.

The creation of artificial islands and huge fish farms

made the lagoon system ever more vulnerable.

So Venice was certainly sinking, seriously sinking.

At the same time, the sea was rising,

the effects of global warming

making a bad situation worse.

The Adriatic has risen ten centimetres in the last century.

But worst of all, the lagoon BED was sinking -

not just the city, but the entire Venetian lagoon bed.

In just 50 years, it had dropped by 12 centimetres.

And the culprit was Italian industry -

the factories of Marghera pumping fresh water out from under the lagoon bed.

Have a look now there to have an idea what is happening.

Look at these bricks.

At the water rose up,

the water went over the level of the stone

and, touching the bricks,

the salt of the water got into the bricks and caused them to explode.

Something had to be done.

As the gravity of the situation was realised,

the freshwater drainage by industry was stopped.

And since the 1970s,

money has poured in from all around the world.

The spirit of Ruskin

is abroad again.

The world must save Venice from environmental catastrophe.

But there is still controversy about how to do it.

A set of enormous flood barriers at the entrances to the lagoon is planned -

and the barriers look likely to put an end to serious flooding of the city.

But no-one can be sure if this will help or worsen the unbalanced state of the lagoon eco-system.

And many argue

that the closing down of the heavy industry in Marghera is much more important.

The eyes of the world are on Venice now.

And it stands as an extraordinary scientific, engineering and ecological challenge to all of us.

With money and the new technology, the problem will be stabilised.

But the truth is that sinking is no longer the biggest threat to Venice.

Now the biggest threat is tourism.

Visitors are over-running the city.

The pilgrimage to Venice that began as a trickle of British artists

at the start of the 19th century

is now a tidal wave of tourists from all over the world.

Life goes on

but for us Venetians, it is increasingly difficult to live here.

But it's all I have ever known.

As a child growing up, I enjoyed the mood of pleasure-seeking -

I felt almost part of it - the endless stream of visitors.

In the '60s and the '70s, Venice was groovy.

As soon as I walked out of my door,

I could meet people from all over the world.

Then, suddenly, it all seemed just a bit fake...

and I realised all my friends were leaving.

90% of the people are not Venetians!

Gondolas... Tourist town...

Glass!

This one, I hate them... I hate.

They are all going around with those things.

Hats...hats...glass.

Our ancient traditions have become tourist pageants.

This is the historical regatta - a celebration of our great history.

It looks more like a pantomime on water.

They are selling Venice everywhere.

Gondola...and masks...

The plastic gondola on top of your television!

At Squero Tramontin,

the same family has made gondolas for centuries.

Tourism keeps the business going,

but the exodus of Venetians means it won't be long before there's no-one to make them.

This is Venice now - a tourist destination.

A place recognised all over the world.

An important survivor from another age.

But also my home,

still home to lots of Venetians... angry Venetians!

We wonder if what you British started will kill our city.

In my local barber's - one of the few places not selling souvenirs! -

me and my friend Franco often grumble about what Venice has become.

Since 1945, Venice has lost more than half of its population.

And now we have the highest average age of any city in Europe.

Many say that Venice is closer to death

than it has ever been.

We are heading for San Michele - Venice's cemetery island.

It is the last journey we Venetians take.

Here lie our dead.

But the connection of every family to the city is becoming weaker.

And Venice is slowly losing touch with its past.

This is my family tomb -

here lie many of my ancestors.

Andrea da Mosto, 1879...

Antonio da Mosto...

Carlotta Bartakowicz...

Andrea da Mosto, 1960 - he was my grandfather. I never met him.

Eugenia de Vito Piscicelli.

She was my grandmother.

And my uncle, Antonio da Mosto, in 1998.

And it's difficult to imagine

what will become of Venice when I'm lying here.

But the city's future doesn't lie in MY hands!

All my life,

the fight has been to stop Venice from sinking,

to save this unique slice of history.

But what about the people who live here? What about me...

my family...?

Venetians and their trades are dying out.

The fabric of the city is intact,

but its soul

is slowly dying.

My children go to school in Venice,

but many fear they may be part of the very last generation of Venetians.

Throughout its long history,

Venice has time after time emerged triumphant

from misfortune and adversity.

In the children, I see hope that this unique city can be saved.

Maybe they will even live in a Venice that is independent again -

free of the confusion of modern Italy -

so we can settle our own future!

Most important of all,

for the city to survive, I hope they make it their home.

I pray they will!

Subtitles by Judith Simpson BBC Broadcast 2004

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