Venice without water
strangesounds.org
strangesounds.org
To clarify, the eclipse part has nothing to do with tides. The "red" part couldn't even be seen from Italy from what I could find. The "blue" part is totally arbitrary as well (two full moons in one calendar month).
So, a super moon affected this, the blue and blood parts are more of a coincidence... I think. Took 15 min to search for all of this to confirm my initial suspicion, but my search results were filled with the event from a couple of days ago, so I could be wrong.
Miller's Law (Martin's Extension)
As I've just commented: a surprisingly small depth of water can make possible a tremendous amount of transport. And the depth of a body (or channel) is very hard to tell from its surface.
Venice also naturally floods all the time, when I was over there the large square next to the cathedral / church flooded.
When it floods, it usually floods several inches on average
There's a good article on it here
https://www.visit-venice-italy.com/acqua-alta-venice-italy.h...
And a few hours later rain stopped, the flooding relented and it was back to normal.
Venice has been fine for hundreds of years; it isn’t all the sudden going to fail.. it just adapts and moves on. By far the biggest danger to Venice is the hoards of tourists that make getting around for a local almost impossible. When I was there in November (to take a Venician Plastet/Marmolino class) — even in the cold rain it was essentially a mob of people seemingly everywhere except the most back streets of back streets. That “hidden Venice” is quite amazing — I am definitely over the crowds and kitsch that pollute the maIn drags. Pro-tip if you want to have a nice visit: explore the streets and canals at night.
You've got it precisely backwards. By far the biggest danger to Venice is the absence of those hoards of tourists. Venice is dependent upon tourism income for its economy to an extent much greater than most other cities. Rome, Florence, Milan, and others have big businesses and use tourism as supplementary income, but it's the main source for Venice.
No. The danger is any point away from the equilibrium - too few/no tourists and there's no income, but too many tourists and the tourists won't spread the word for other potential travelers anymore when they e.g. cannot go to any popular place or getting ripped off hundreds of dollars for pizza.
Tourism-based economies can't fail from becoming too profitable. If prices are high, it's only because people are still willing to pay them. It's market forces in action.
"Real-estate-based economies can't fail from becoming too profitable. If prices and rents are high, it's only because people are still willing to pay them. It's market forces in action."
Or, perhaps, it's rents-extraction, money-laundering, signs of even worse collapse elsewhere, and killing the underlying fundamentals of the local economy.
I suspect there's similar lines of analysis which could be applied to tourist spots. And am wondering what examples of now-failed tourist temples there might be. Say, Niagara Falls, as an example.
The much more worn path is tourism spots failing from lack of visitors. You see that at the older Las Vegas casinos that can't compete with the latest and greatest mega-resorts, for example.
Acapulco, Mexico, is a former tourist mecca that's been transformed, though, as with a few other examples I can think of, largely through violence (here: drugs wars).
Niagra Falls remains a tourist destination, but not of a scope that it once was. There are several other destinations I could think of, also largely East Coast U.S., which once commanded a high volume of traffic but which are no longer premier destinations.
Or: who is vacationing to N.F.? Is it Wall Street bankers, or working-class types from Cleveland?
I'd also strongly suggest not getting too fixated on that one instance. I'm suggesting it as I suspect it might fit, but not because I'm positive of that. Question is if there are any instances along the lines I'd sketched out above.
I'm looking through what tourist destinations (or ventures) have failed. One additional dynamic: if the money's high, then net of financing a fall in the market can be catastrophic due to the loan-service nut that must be covered. It's not viable to drop the price, as that would fail to meet debt obligations. The search here turns up several examples of this.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=failed+tourist+destination&ia=news
Regardless... I still don't see a good example of a tourist destination failing while also seemingly being profitable... Niagara Falls isn't even an example of a failed tourist destination.
(Or Seattle, NYC, Vancouver, London, etc.)
It's not hit a precipitating point, yet ... but if you look at the formation of the tech industry in Los Angeles (aerospace and RAND especially post WWII) and Sunnyvale (1950s, 1960s), a large appeal was space and cost, as compared with East Coast centres, especially NYC and Boston.
edit: totally agree with your reply. I ended up at some point in a small, quiet plaza with cobblestone, old church, pigeons, and a bench under a tree, and I felt like I was in a movie
and those dark back streets, too narrow for GPS signal at times, distant foot steps, no addresses.. wonderful!
As I said in another comments, no, the wall (MOSE, several walls, actually) has not been completed yet and is non-operational.
That's a little different from saying the entire city needs to be rebuilt, but it will eventually.
That same generation of Italians embraced fascism, followed Mussolini, allied with Hitler and got their ass kicked in World War II.
That same "greatest generation" of Americans wrongly imprisoned American citizens of Japanese descent during the war, and turned a blind eye to Jewish refugees for an embarrassingly long time before grudgingly entering the war. None of us are perfect.
See? Goes both ways.
However, it would be interesting to see what the per-tourist expenditure rates have been over the past five years; my hypothesis is that per-tourist spending is down despite total tourist spending being up. Cruise ship passengers are a bulk of visitors and they don’t spend much (since they sleep on the ship.) So that crowds out potential visitors who might spend more money.
As another commenter said: there is a equilibrium between tourists and locals that needs to exist. My opinion is that shoulder-to-shoulder people is actually harming the city. There are actually proposals to limit the numbers of tourists — those proposals from the government wouldn’t exist unless there was some sort of problem.
I am not a Venice expert and have only been there a few weeks, but seeing masses of people buying cheap Chinese-made knockoff Murano glass from vendors who aren’t even Venetian (nor even live in Venice) — it’s hard for me to accept that is “good” for Venice or Venetians.
I'm sure there were people in the 1100's saying the exact same thing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Republic_of_Ven...
Just look at... well, all of Europe after WWII. Lots of Warsaw had to be rebuilt from scratch. It takes a lot to actually kill a city for good, though obviously it does happen.
I would even guess that the work already in progress has come to a complete standstill. Surely, they are not equipped for wading through deep mud, and they have lost their main means of transport.
The initial channel was 40 feet wide, but only 4 feet (1.2 meter) deep, with canal-boats having a draft of 3.5 feet -- leaving 6 inches of clearance between those and the canal bottom. Given the speed of travel -- about 3-5 mph (4.8 - 8 km/h) behind a horse or donkey tow -- bottoming out would like not have been disastrous, but would still have been at the very least, a nuisance.
Considering canals to alternatives, I also realised that one of these was that the surface was uniform, effectively flat, and immune to the hazards and treacheries of road-based travel, most especially mud, ruts, and wash-outs. A canal is the original self-healing substrate.
Even at 5 mph, the constant and smooth travel, as well as the size of the boat relative to the tow (1-3 horses, boats of up to 78 ft (24 meter) in length), travel time was cut in half and costs by an order of magnitude. From a note on the Wikpedia entry:
"Using Clark's Works of Man figures, a mule can draw 60,000 lbs but carry only 250 lbs, which need men to load and unload daily, have a need to carry grain as well (parasitic weight), and for same tonnages, required far more men as a labor force, drastically increasing running costs. A 95% reduction is probably conservative, 250#/30t is 0.4% the expenses, so reduction to 5% costs still indicates someone is taking a lot of profits."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal
The Erie Canal was eventually enlarged. But in its day, the initial configuration was an absolute revolution in transport for the United States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEoPhPoWws4
Not sure how much credibility this guy has but it sounds a bit quackish.
At the moment the isles are home to more or less 55.000 people, while the majority of the population lives in Mestre and Marghera.
> Why would this ever be a problem?
Because, as I said, there are very few residents in there. Would you still call it a city or is it more Mestre's tourist attraction?
My parents moved from Venice to Mestre in the 80s, so I was born in Venice but always lived in Mestre. I'm not sure I resent them for this, in hindsight.
The buildings are empty because if you renovate your building you have to bring it up to contemporary building codes, which is very expensive. So people abandoned the buildings and no one wants to pay to make them habitable by current standards.
And so you're left with the tourism conundrum -- things are good enough for the tourism economy but everything behind that is failing.
That said, I always enjoyed the beauty, strangeness and pedestrian culture of Venice. It's a lovely place to visit and walk and read.
It sounds like the people living in Mestre are making the best rational choice for themselves. There are plenty of other old cities that did not survive with their way of life intact into the modern age; it is what it is. It made more sense as a city unto itself in centuries past, but things change with technological and cultural progress. There is nothing inherently good with things continuing the way they always have; indeed things remaining stagnant is often bad, and the people who have been enabled to move out onto the mainland thanks to modern transportation methods are likely living better lives now than those who could not do so centuries ago.
Residents don’t ride in gondolas— that’s for the tourists. Far too expensive.
In Italy when you talk about a city it's usually about the city itself and some towns around it. In this case most of the population is in Mestre and Marghera.
So it's actually even smaller than you thought :)
It's certainly easier to pop down with a trash bag and pick up litter when the water is absent, but for dredging the dirt, you need the water to come back. There's no good way to move it around without being able to float it off in a boat on the water.