Venice's Menace

The man took our picture leaning against the ponte and his partner did not seem very amused. Reason why at times I prefer to be exploring a certain new places by myself or in the company of other photography junkies. That way, we can possibly take all the time in the world, keeping completely to ourselves during the journey.

This is not the best picture I took of Venice from my trip 5 years ago, but this shot relates too very well with what I've come to learn today.

I was watching documentaries on Venice earlier tonight, in the midst of my roommate's vocal practice in the same room.

One documentary, explains about the marvelous architecture of the man made port city. This majestic city was built on, if I can recall accurately, a total of a hundred million tree trunks, and clay, as its foundation. I'm imagining them moving a whole forest from up north into the depth of the wetland lagoon. Such very massive project could only be indulged with money, insanely lots of it.

To avoid corrosion from the sea salt on the brick walls, layer beds of lime stones were placed at the bottom of each building atop the foundation. That's the white bricks above the water in the picture.

Human ingenuity at its best. 

Then came the difficult part; the menacing rising of sea water level over the years is made even more complicated for various of reasons.

Aside from the known global warming effect, the effect of motor boats speeding along the canal created waves against the building walls. With the rising water level, the wave reaches above the limestone layer and splashes against the building bricks. The impact is the hardening of salt on these bricks from the sea water, creating additional weight in the structure over time.

The green algae build up at the base of the building shows the rising of water level from the changing of tides. This huge rise and fall daily is an effect from the industrial activities nearby, modifying the nature's structural layers on the lagoon's seabed.

Evidently in the picture, the tide, along with the global warming and speeding motorboats, the sea water is getting very close to the first layer of the building bricks.

On top of the hardening of sea salts on the bricks, the waters eventually overflow into the buildings as well, making many of the buildings' first floor uninhabitable. Not to mention the more and more frequent flooding episodes.

Restoration works are rather expensive. Workers have to clear the canal water along a maximum of only 50 meters at a time to perform the restorative works, by hand. Regrettably, the water that are cleared are impacting other nearby buildings.

How complicated is this? Extremely.

Check out this interesting documentary here, link.

Thank you for reading.

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