What Venice is like without tourists
Before COVID-19, the city’s matchless beauty had become all but indiscernible in the high days of summer. But things have changed.
On July 2, a warm, breezy bluebird afternoon, I walked out of the back garden of the Palazzo Papadopoli – more commonly known these days as the Aman Venice – and began the familiar labyrinthine stroll to Ristorante Al Covo for a late lunch.
Al Covo sits where the sestiere of San Marco dissolves into the more prosaic, historically working-class surrounds of Castello; it’s more or less across town from where the Palazzo Papadopoli adorns the Grand Canal, in San Polo.
That day my route was, by design, slightly indirect. It took me north through the Rialto Market and over the bridge of the same name; it then bent southwest, past the Palazzo Grassi and the Salizada San Samuele, where some of the city’s finest one-off galleries and shops are, and threaded behind the Gritti Palace, up onto the Salita San Moise and into Piazza San Marco. In the inky gloom of the Procuratie Nuove arcade, I admired the perennially spectacular jewel displays at Nardi and exchanged smiles with the waiters at Caffè Florian, before stepping into the dazzling brightness of the square, the gilded winged lion on the basilica’s façade flaring. I took my time negotiating the Riva degli Schiavoni’s enfilade of bridges – Ponte della Paglia (from which the Bridge of Sighs can be seen); Ponte della Pieta; Ponte del Sepolcro. To my right, the expanse of the Giudecca canal glittered like quicksilver all the way to the dome of San Giorgio Maggiore.
Sun reflecting on water and gold; hot light becoming cool shadow becoming light again. For me, they are the forever signifiers of Venice. Like its singular beauty – aristocratic, exotic, crumbling, haunting and vaguely haunted – they re-imprint on my consciousness (and, I sometimes think, on my spirit) every time I return.
That said, in any other July of this second decade of the 21st century I’d have opted for the shortest route to my destination, and beauty be damned. Possibly I’d have opted to not even be here – on a bluebird day or any other. Because Venice in July has, these past few years, become one of the most over-subscribed places on the planet. It’s estimated that anywhere from 12 million to a staggering 25 million people per annum now visit the city, which is only about one-sixth the size of Manhattan – much of it built almost a millennium ago, across a scattering of tiny lagoon islands made to cohere with thousands of alder-wood piles sunk into alluvial silt and some 400 bridges. It is an ancient, finite, fragile place. Squeeze that many people into it, year after year, and Venice’s dazzle is going to be just one piece of the inevitable collateral damage.
In Italy in 2020, however, nothing resembles a normal summer – Venice least of all. The country went from being Europe’s pandemic tragedy to, by the first days of June, its success story. With nationwide lockdown measures and extensive testing-tracing, Giuseppe Conte’s government brought, and has kept, Italy’s COVID-19 numbers admirably in check. Tourism numbers are a different story: Italy is seeing between a quarter and a tenth of the normal summer influx, depending on the region. This has had devastating economic consequences, not least in the hospitality and restaurant sectors.
But here’s a curious thing: in Venice, alongside the concern over these economic straits, I’ve also perceived an undercurrent of contentment; even a quiet sort of joy. It’s a joy you’d understand if you too had emerged into the Piazza San Marco from the dim of the arcade and witnessed the spectacle of emptiness – the exhilarating phenomenon of seeing perhaps a dozen people scattered across a space often crammed with thousands. Those waiters at Florian? They’re not normally given to exchanging conspiratorial smiles with foreigners in midsummer. The Giudecca Canal, usually a scrum of traghetti and water taxis and tugs and the hideous behemoths of the cruise ships, was almost devoid of boat traffic. Hence my indirect route that sunny July day; I meandered because I could – because, for the first summer in recent memory, there was the space to.
“I ran into a friend the other day, a Venetian who’s a bit older than I am – mid-50s – and he said to me, ‘This is what it was like here when I was a child; this peace.’” I’m talking to Alma Zevi, a contemporary-art consultant and dealer who moved to Venice with her family in 2016; her eponymous gallery is one of the highlights of the Salizada San Samuele. “A couple of weeks ago, I actually went to have aperitivo in Piazza San Marco, which is something I never do. And it was a Friday night, no less. We were at [Gran Caffè] Quadri, and we ran into quite a few people we know – Venetians. Honestly, I think we were all a bit giddy with having the city sort of given back to the people who live here.”
Zevi’s connection to Venice is not a casual one; her mother, Marie-Rose Kahane, helped create Le Stanze del Vetro, the glass exhibition space on San Giorgio Maggiore (a collaboration between Pentagram Stiftung, her Swiss foundation, and Venice’s Fondazione Cini museum). Kahane, besides being a collector of 20th century Murano glass and a sometime Venice resident herself, designs and produces her own line of glassware, called Yali. Normally Le Stanze puts on two shows a year; it is, notes Zevi, “pioneering for the city, in that it’s a very modern foundation that’s partnered with a very old museum, and participates in keeping a tradition alive, in a dynamic way Venetians, not just tourists, are encouraged to partake of. It’s free for locals; they can come and be proud of what Carlo Scarpa did with Venini, but they can also learn about, say, glassmaking traditions in Finland.”
Despite the tourism inundations, Zevi takes a positive view of being a full-time Venetian – a designation that today only around 50,000 to 55,000 people can claim. Several times during our chat she emphasises the breadth and variety of cultural initiatives here, from the success of the youth programs at the Benedetto Marcello music conservatory, to local artist-run spaces and initiatives – such as Autonoma, the “exchange program” created on Murano island by 28-year-old Marcantonio Brandolini d’Adda, of Laguna B, which brings glassmaking masters and innovations from across the world to the lagoon. She notes the international prestige of Ca’ Foscari, the city’s university, and that of the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) and the University of Architecture (IUAV) – institutions whose graduates many locals have long wished would begin to feed a larger base for creative industry and entrepreneurship at home. Post-COVID, a compelling property situation supports that; Venice is full of empty flats that had flooded the market in recent years with the short-term Airbnb visitor in mind. Government-supported schemes to flip some of them to longer leases for students and faculty are already being discussed. “The hope is that more and more graduates will choose to stay here, and make their work here,” Zevi says. “The city is just full of potential for this.”
Venice’s food scene is a conspicuous manifestation of that potential; a cohort of restaurateurs and chefs, young and old, is working to champion the preservation of micro-local cooking and farming traditions. It’s a crucial cause in a city whose rich gastronomic heritage has been denuded by the demands of a mass market conditioned to clamour for pizza margherita rather than be curious about sarde in soar (sweet-sour sardines prepared with vinegar, onions and pine nuts – a quintessentially Venetian dish).
They’re among the small businesses that have suffered most acutely, but this hasn’t stopped them from piloting creative responses to these leaner times. Luca and Benedetta Fullin, the 30-something, third-generation brother-sister team behind Ristorante Wildner on the Riva, are among them. Wildner has bona fides going back to the early 19th century; under the Fullins, it became a founding member of the 16-strong restaurant alliance La Buona Accoglienza, which privileges traditional products and preparations of the Venetian lagoon. In 2015, they opened Local, their own restaurant in Castello – a sleek, spare space where that remit gets kicked up a notch: the culinary-sommelier team, with experience from as far afield as Japan and Scandinavia, creates menus based around products almost entirely sourced from within the Venetian lagoon, embellished with a handful of ones boasting exotic provenance (as would have been the form centuries ago, when Venice was the gateway to the East). This summer, Local hasn’t been able to open; the demand is too sparse. So from Friday to Tuesday, it “pops up” instead at Wildner – along with other pop-ups, showcasing chefs the Fullins want to support.
Equally enterprising are the three young entrepreneurs behind Edipo Re. Before I checked into the Aman, I’d spent a couple of nights at the fabulous Belmond Cipriani, where managing director Giampaolo Ottazzi had sorted me what he promised would be a memorable experience – an evening aboard a vintage fishing boat that has been upcycled into a stunning sailing yacht (it once belonged to Pier Paolo Pasolini, who entertained Maria Callas aboard). Its current owners, Sybille Righetti and Enrico Vianello, with their business partner Silvia Jop, have parlayed the boat into a pioneering experiential tourism business, marrying culinary entertainment and excursions to parts of the lagoon most people never visit. They’ve equipped it with a state-of-the-art open prep kitchen on deck, so meals become an interactive part of the experience.
A tramontana that blew down unexpectedly from the Alps, scuttling the prospect of a sunset cocktail hour under sail, barely fazed them; we had our little party anyway, there at the Cipriani’s private dock. It featured a salad of outrageously sweet and meaty tomatoes from the orto on Vignole island, and spritzes made with Nostrano, an uber-local aperitif created by Luca de Vita, the owner of Ristorante Alle Testiere (it combines the flavours of Sant’Erasmo artichoke, samphire and seawater from the Adriatic – sketchy sounding on paper but totally delicious in reality). While we watched whitecaps kicking up just beyond the gardens of San Giorgio Maggiore, Vianello and Righetti described their cruises: north towards Santa Cristina island and the wilder marshes, or south to Poveglia, off Lido island, where Vianello dives for crabs or fishes for your supper.
Edipo Re’s new project for 2020 has proved to be exceptionally well timed: hosting private dinners on board that feature some of the city’s most lauded chefs, among them Al Covo’s Cesare Benelli and Diane Rankin, Alle Testiere’s de Vita, and members of the team at Antiche Carampane (an unofficial canteen for Biennale d’Arte big shots as well as one of the city’s top tables). Privacy, Righetti notes, is at a premium these days; many visitors still aren’t keen to be in and out of multiple public spaces – a part of the post-COVID New Normal that might endure. She and her partners are transposing Venice’s finest dining experiences into its most precious natural environment, the lagoon, in a singular fashion.
What’s increasingly clear is that the lagoon is the protagonist of Venice’s future. To a greater degree than ever, the wellbeing of the city relies on the wellbeing of the waters that surround it. One adoptive Venetian deeply versed in this topic is Jane Da Mosto, founder and executive director of We Are Here Venice, a non-profit association created to, in her words, “address Venice’s challenges as a living city”. Da Mosto’s training is in environmental biology; she spent years studying the lagoon ecosystem before becoming officially one of its most ardent, and respected, defenders. “Venice and the lagoon are literally inseparable elements of a single system,” she says. “So many of the organisations dedicated to preserving Venetian heritage have traditionally focused on frescoes, churches and monuments. but if we lose the fundamental balance in the lagoon, ultimately none of it will be saveable.”
South African, with a degree from Oxford University, Da Mosto brings a global perspective, and network, to bear on the issues here, from taking on the cruising industry (one of her most passionate causes), to enlisting the arts communities that descend on the city for its various festivals to contribute their talents to WAHV’s messaging.
Most recently, Da Mosto has partnered with Laguna B’s Marcantonio Brandolini d’Adda to create a pioneering carbon-sequestration initiative in the lagoon’s barene, or salt marshes. “Marcantonio got in touch with me some time ago about the environmental impact of glass-making, which is one of the most energy- intensive industries here and generates some fairly toxic by-products. To make that whole process carbon-neutral is a very ambitious goal, so he started with wanting to at least offset the emissions associated with exporting about 90 per cent of Laguna B’s merchandise.” The barene, Da Mosto told him, were the solution – an ecosystem that naturally acts as a powerful carbon sink, around 40 times as powerful as forest, and one in urgent need of protection.
Unlike some of the far-flung carbon-offset schemes to which, say, major airlines direct consumer donations, this “will be very local and tangible for Venetians. It’s kilometro zero offsetting; you can get in our boat and we’ll take you out there and actually show you where your money has gone.” And, she says, it’s simultaneously a legitimate environmental rehabilitation project: along with taking carbon out of the air, the salt marshes propagate biodiversity, they help attenuate water levels, control and reduce waves, and improve the quality of the water.
Da Mosto and Brandolini d’Adda will begin piloting the scheme this month, with a research team comprising scientists from the University of Padua, Ca’ Foscari and Da Mosto’s alma mater, Oxford. The hope is that by the end of this year they’ll have a body of legitimate data supporting its validity; in the first quarter of 2021, they plan to begin business-to-business engagement with major transport and hospitality players in Venice.
Brandolini d’Adda spoke to me about what it means to be part of the solution, not the problem, here. Laguna B, which was founded by his late mother, Marie Brandolini d’Adda, in 1996, had always been about translating Venetian traditions in ways that looked forward – “creating positive impacts for future generations” is how he phrased it. Hence his acknowledgment that manufacturing glass, however true to his (and his city’s) cultural heritage, was adversely impacting the environment on which its legacy relies.
Brandolini d’Adda believes it takes lateral thinking, and occasionally the unorthodox perspectives that come from outside (in his case, that of a South African-born, English-educated scientist), to shift the paradigm of potential. Venice, everyone I spoke to agrees, is at a crucible moment. COVID has pressed the pause button on a tourism phenomenon that was slowly destroying the city even as it fed its coffers.
“A lot of people have a lot of ideas,” he says, about how to fill that void – how to keep Venice a living city. “What’s been missing is people who will really act on them.”
It will involve innovative thinking on the ground, which means making the city an attractive place for entrepreneurs (not hard, in certain respects; for about $8000 a month, which might get you a two-bedroom flat or a tiny office space in Manhattan, “you can have a palace on a canal here”, he notes). It will definitely involve increased regulation of tourism operators; there’s no need for a “ticket” to enter the city when government due diligence around the offering will naturally result in a greater spend (“No one should be able to experience the breadth of Venice in a day for €1.50.”)
Brandolini d’Adda’s family history has been intertwined with that of Venice for more than a thousand years. But the future, not the past, is where his gaze is fixed, and where he’s setting his intentions.
“I think we need to come out from under the weight of our heritage a bit and actually forget about tradition for a little while, and open up to the world and look outward,” he says. It’s the ethos, he notes, that put Venice on the world map in the first place. “I’m really confident that finally, this might be that moment.”
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