One

of life's subtlest acquired pleasures is the Venice of

winter, of mists and puddles, umbrellas and empty alleys and gondolas

in the rain. This book magically acquires the pleasure for

us—and no less miraculously—enables us to enjoy it

all the year round.

—Jan Morris, author of style="font-style: italic;">The World of Venice

The

new book href="http://www.veniceinwinter.com" target="_blank">Serenissima:

Venice in Winter style="font-style: italic;"> is the work of husband

and wife photographers Frank Van Riper and Judith Goodman—a

unique combination of fine art and journalistic photography twinned

with lyrical text to capture the visual magic that occurs when

“the most serene republic” reclaims itself as a

living, breathing city and once more becomes a place “of

water-filled streets…velvet shadows and footsteps echoing

off paving stones in the post-midnight silence…”

style="font-style: italic;">

Six

years in the making and shot entirely in black and white, Serenissima:

Venice in Winter style="font-style: italic;"> combines architectural

imagery with documentary photography in the tradition of Henri

Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and the great Italian photojournalist

Gianni Berengo Gardin. Frank Van Riper's text reflects the

same literary mastery that won him a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard and

national acclaim as a biographer, political journalist, Washington Post

photography columnist and bestselling author. style="font-style: italic;">

Their

love of Italy and things Italian comes naturally to Frank and Judy.

They honeymooned in Italy (starting in Venice) in 1984, and rekindled

their love of La Serenissima in 1998 when they led a photography tour

there during Carnevale. In addition, Frank is half-Italian, his

maternal family coming from Monteleone di Puglia style="font-style: italic;">. In October, Frank and

Judy will return to Italy—this time to Umbria—to

lead style="font-style: italic;"

href="http://www.experienceumbria.com" target="_blank">a

photography workshop style="font-style: italic;"> headquartered in Cannara

at the fully restored 17th-century villa Fattoria del Gelso.

Here's an excerpt from the book followed by information on how you can

get a discounted, signed copy:

When it was The Most Serene Republic, a community of art and

achievement that valued the individual and barely tolerated href="http://www.dreamofitaly.com/public/307.cfm">the

Pope in href="http://www.dreamofitaly.com/public/department56.cfm">Rome;

when it was the undisputed nexus of eastern and western trade; when

Lord Byron or Wagner or Dickens tarried in creative leisure among its style="font-style: italic;">palazzi and

canali--when

Thomas Mann's doomed, depressive Aschenbach came to seek

solace, only to find death--the traditional approach to the city was by

boat and virtually the only point of entry was through the plaza that

honors St. Mark.

Today, all but the final journey into href="http://www.dreamofitaly.com/public/department57.cfm">Venice's

pulsating, floating heart can be made by train, plane or automobile,

and the final leg of the trip across the Adriatic lagoon will not

necessarily take one into style="font-style: italic;">Piazza San Marco--through

what Napoleon famously called the drawing room of Europe.

The traveler by train will cross a rail causeway from the

mainland—built by Venice's onetime Austrian rulers

in 1846 to considerable local displeasure—and disembark at

the severely functional Santa Lucia railway station, built nearly a

century later, before boarding a lumbering water bus.

The air traveler will descend into Marco Polo airport and, after a

frenzied, yet reassuringly human-scale, scramble to retrieve luggage,

also will board a style="font-style: italic;">vaporetto 

(diesel-powered now, but once powered by vapore, or steam) or perhaps a

private water taxi.

Those who come by car will have the least romantic time of it. They

will make the journey from style="font-style: italic;">Mestre

(the mainland, or style="font-style: italic;">terra firma)

along a motorway parallel to the rail line and deposit their cars at style="font-style: italic;">Piazzale Roma,

a mammoth nondescript car park in the northwest corner of the city,

whose security and available space never is

guaranteed.            

Only then, shorn of all connection to fast modern travel, will these

wanderers finally, perhaps even gratefully, immerse themselves in

Serenissima's ancient, liquid tranquility.

-----------

It is the only city in the world built for beauty, not defense.

A city of water-filled streets and of water-borne commerce; of velvet

shadows, and footsteps echoing off paving stones in the post-midnight

silence—a walking city for random wandering in surprising

safety.

A human-scale place of welcoming mystery.

There can be a palpable sadness about Venice, reinforced by times of

gloom and fog, by rumors of its seemingly inevitable demise, and

reinforced too by a history that, for all its worldliness, cannot deny

medieval brutality and autocratic rule: by its powerful dukes, or

doges, and later by its French and Austrian conquerers. Yet one also

senses a feeling of abandon and freedom in Venice—an air of

possibility, triggered perhaps by what Henry James called

Venice's unique role as a “repository of

consolations” for any who would visit.

Today that difference is manifest in something as simple as silence and

in the inevitable slowness of life lived on the breast of the sea. The

pace of life is different, the body clock set more to the tides than to

a timetable. No cars, no subways, no crosstown buses. Lunch is three

hours (the shops and offices are closed during that time) and a coffee

break can just as easily involve a quick ombra (a shot of young wine)

as it can a single style="font-style: italic;">espresso.

Above all, there is separateness--from the rest of Italy, if not the

rest of the world. Which is understandable given

Serenissima's unique geography.

Before the Austrians and their land bridge, Venice in its lagoon was

like a castle surrounded by a gargantuan moat, impervious to attack,

disdainful of threat. Though it produced a formidable navy in its

storied Arsenale, these ships went all over the known world to conquer

and to trade, not to protect.  

Venice, which now retains its grandeur amid genteel ruin, fashioned its

palaces and its courtyards, its squares and its churches, with scant

regard for the fortifications of medieval and Renaissance Europe. The

grand Piazza San Marco, for example, is beautiful for its openness, not

for huge gates or high walls. Not only does one side of this great,

lopsided rectangle open to the sea, it does so confidently, even

arrogantly, as if daring the visitor to enter and not be overwhelmed

and conquered. Over centuries, different styles of architecture have

lived together in Venice cheek by jowel, mortise to tenon. Yet somehow

today the mixture works splendidly.

The happiness of accident, or perhaps more correctly, of miracle,

accounts for this, beginning with mud, water and barbarians some 1500

years ago. That is when inhabitants of the southern European mainland

began fleeing a succession of marauding tribes laying waste to the

remnants of the once-formidable Roman Empire. For more than a century,

Huns, Visigoths, Ostrogoths and finally the Germanic Lombards plundered

this part of Europe, forcing frantic mainlanders into the sea. What we

now call Venice grew out of the thick ooze of the Adriatic lagoon and

flourished there because the water that enveloped the malarial mudflats

where the mainlanders huddled was too deep for marauding armies to

follow; too shallow for enemy ships to lay siege. [Even today it must

be remembered that many of Venice's canals are not more than

six feet deep.]

Originally this was to be a place for the mainlanders to hide and to

wait out the latest plunder before returning home to rebuild amid smoke

and ruin. These were, after all, town dwellers---urbanites, if you

will—not the primitive fisherpeople who already lived there.

But few mainlanders wanted to risk the tender mercies of any straggling

invaders. Ultimately, a larger community took root in the mud, one

alder pole at a

time.            

 Amazingly, the architectural antecedents of the style="font-style: italic;">Doges' Palace,

Ca' Foscari and

the magnificent Church of style="font-style: italic;"> San Zanipolo

were literally huts on stilts. These stilts were rough-hewn poles of

alder driven by hand through the muddy sediment into solid earth to

provide a crude but remarkably strong building foundation for

Venice's early dwellings. First by the dozens, then by the

hundreds, and finally by the hundreds of thousands, these poles became

Venice's invisible support. Centuries later, and much

thicker, they would underpin palaces. In each case the airless vacuum

of the underwater mud would make the  poles

stronger--virtually petrified. And, in the muddy, plastic medium that

was and is the lagoon, this meant that glorious buildings sitting atop

thousands of individually placed poles could withstand natural

disasters like earthquake far better than if they had been built on

comparatively more brittle solid foundations.

Thus the first Venetians and their builder descendants produced what

became the first of Serenissima's confounding

contradictions—bedrock that bends. It is not too far wrong to

say that the same technology that gave early settlers a simple place to

sleep and eventually to live, also was the means by which builders

centuries later created the most beautiful city in the world, that

seems to float on the water, and which, as a commercial and political

dynasty, would flourish for a thousand years.

Doomsayers to the contrary, Venice is not sinking. It is settling, as

the thick layer of silt that forms part of Venice's base

compresses.

But the water surrounding its stunning architecture is rising, at an

alarming and ever-increasing rate. And that in the end may be much the

worse catastrophe, that threatens Venice in ways never imagined by her

ancient enemies.

-----------

The low moaning of the sirens gives the first public warning, though,

like sailors taught to divine the weather from the clouds, Venetians

know from experience—and perhaps even in their bones--when

the water is about to rise.

High water, style="font-style: italic;">acqua alta,

is a continuing presence in Venice, most often occurring with the

confluence of high tide, full moon, high winds and rain. And, though

rarely flooding sidewalks or squares more than a foot or so, it can

force pedestrians in low-lying areas to don boots or to traverse

boardwalks to get to and fro. It is an increasing phenomenon, too, if

one tracks the weather and the tide charts over decades. Where once

measurable high water occurred mostly in winter, today it is possible

to experience a submerged Serenissima in summer and fall as well, even

under clear skies.

One need only troll the worldwide web to find pictures of hefty

Hawaiian-shirted tourists (one assumes they are American) wading

through Piazza San Marco, or to see an enterprising person in a T-shirt

paddling a brightly colored kayak through the drawing room of Europe.

Venetian photojournalist style="font-style: italic;">Gianfranco Tagliapietra

once made a colorful shot of the American movie star Julia Roberts,

attending the Venice Film Festival, splashing happily through the

Piazza in a light summer dress and high rubber boots.

Because high water in Venice has been around for centuries (and since

it affects only the lowest-lying, albeit some of the oldest and most

historic, parts of the city) locals seem to regard high water with a

nonchalance bordering on disdain. “Venice welcome[s] water in

any form, at home with drizzle or downpour,” novelist Michael

Dibdin notes. With glass in hand and ensconced in a friendly bar or

bacaro, locals can wait out the deluge “secretly glad of this

assurance that their great ark [will] never run aground.”

Still, as seemingly routine as acqua alta may be to many

locals—when the weather is bright, you often can see people

taking the sun as they sit or recline on the emergency boardwalks--it

can and does have serious repercussions on daily life. Children have

difficulty getting to school and adults to work, and most important,

Venice's fireboats, ambulances, police launches and other

emergency vessels may be thwarted in reaching their destinations

because where the water is highest they no longer can pass under the

city's myriad pedestrian bridges.

Still it is Venice's blessing and curse (a curse because it

encourages inaction) to  weather high water with aplomb. Even

in the devastating style="font-style: italic;">Acqua Grande

of Nov. 4, 1966—a Perfect Storm of high winds and rain

creating monster flooding that brought the city to a halt, laid waste

to many of Venice's art treasures, devastated many of its

ancient buildings, and, in its only salutary effect, helped create the

worldwide Save Venice movement--nobody died. Further south in Florence,

the same storm exploded the Arno over its banks and the death toll

stood at a hundred.

And so the concierge at the style="font-style: italic;"> Danieli routinely

hands out boots and umbrellas to patrons worried about venturing into

the wet. Those who do not dwell in palaces or in luxe

hotels—which is to say all the other people in

Venice—deal with rising damp and rising water with a becoming

practicality. Virtually every street-level doorway in sections of the

city likely to be dunked features tell-tale metal grooves into which

residents insert  two-foot high waterproof baffles at the

first sounding of the sirens. These rubber-edged metal barriers, placed

in front of exterior doors, allow for dry entry and exit, albeit with a

little dexterous high-stepping in and out….

But the increasing frequency and intensity of acqua alta, combined with

the unfortunate compression of Venice's marshy subsoil,

inevitably raise the question: Could Venice actually sink, if it is not

sinking already?

“Streets full of water. Please advise,” the late

humorist Robert Benchley said in a telegram back to the States decades

ago. Benchley's famous wire, to the then-editor of the New

Yorker, the legendary Harold Ross, reflected the quaint charm of the

floating city to the first-time (and not really that naïve)

visitor.

Ironically, the water that gave birth to Venice and protected it for

centuries now threatens to destroy it.

Venice really is but a series of more than a hundred small

islands—mudflats, actually--held together by bridges and

canals at the center of a 200-square mile lagoon. Several factors, some

natural, some Venice's own doing, have contributed to its

perilous condition and have put Serenissima at the greatest risk it

ever has faced in its long, long history.…

Project MOSE (inevitably called Project Moses, as in parting the Red

Sea) is a system of 78 huge hollow steel floodgates (each measuring

some 6500 square feet) that will lie out of sight on the floor of the

Venetian lagoon, then rise hydraulically at the first indication of

severe high water. (“MOSE” actually refers to one

of the project's experimental prototypes: modulo sperimentale

elettromeccanico.) The idea will be to mitigate, if not actually block,

the incoming tide. When completed, the 78 gates will stretch across the

mouths of three inlets on the eastern edge of the lagoon, ready to rise

literally at the flick of a remote switch. That feat will be

accomplished by forcing compressed air into the hollow interior of each

gate, thereby causing the gates to rise on their submerged, anchored

hinges.

The idea of floodgates to protect cities at sea-level hardly is new.

One drawbridge-style invention to hold back the water was designed by

Venetian engineers in 1740. Much more recently, in the 1980s, both

London and Rotterdam completed their own floodgate systems to protect

their low-lying cities. [A sobering realization in London following an

ominous overflowing of the Thames in the 1970s was that a really

disastrous flood would inundate the city's storied

Underground, and potentially kill or injure thousands.]

Though hailed at its inception by Italian Prime Minister style="font-style: italic;">Silvio Berlusconi

as “the most important environmental protection measure in

the world,” MOSE has been dogged by critics for nearly three

decades, less on grounds of its multi-billion dollar cost than on its

potential negative impact on the Venetian lagoon's already

fragile ecosystem….

For all the romantic imagery of Venice as a floating city reveling in

its connection to the sea, the hard economic fact remains that

out-of-control flooding not only costs the city millions each year, it

also makes Venice less attractive to any people or businesses thinking

of returning or relocating there. There is no escaping the fact that

Venice's population has been shrinking, falling by more than

100,000 people in recent decades to its current level of merely 60,000

damp, hardy souls.

“Flooding paralyzes the city and our life,”

declared mayor Paolo Costa in 2003 as he labored to cobble together the

coalitions and other political support that ultimately helped get

Project MOSE started. “If you consider acqua alta as an

attraction, fine,” he went on, “but that is

Disneyland. And then Venice is not a city for people.”

At its current rate of population decline, the most beautiful city in

the world will be virtually empty in a generation—an image of

urban death even more troubling than that of a stagnant, if tamed,

Venetian lagoon.

To those who love the city, either prospect is unthinkable.

--

Frank Van Riper

Photos by Judith Goodman and Frank Van Riper

Note:

Serenissima:

Venice in Winter is available

through local booksellers and through BarnesandNoble.com and

Amazon.com. Those wishing to purchase a signed and inscribed copy of

the book (at the special 20% style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Dream

of Italy discount price of

$40 plus $5 s/h) can contact Frank and Judy directly through 

www.veniceinwinter.com

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