Impending doom of Venice

Venice has always felt like a dream. A fever dream soaked in salt water and laced with crumbling elegance. A city defying logic, with no roads and no cars, just a tight weave of alleyways clinging to the edge of oblivion. But dreams fade.

The city suffers from an infamous impending doom. This city is sinking. Literally. The water creeps higher each year, licking the foot of every frescoed church and marble step like it’s tasting what it will soon swallow whole. It has been predicted that by year 2028 the city will completely go underwater, which is only ten years from now.

Art installation in the Grand Canal, symbolizing the threat of flooding.

Rising sea levels, reckless tourism, corrupt politics, take your pick. It’s a slow-motion tragedy with a Baroque soundtrack. “Aah, Venice”, as old Indiana Jones used to say.

The Venetians? They’re leaving, drowned by Airbnbs and luxury boutiques. What’s left is a beautifully preserved corpse, embalmed for tourists.

Derelicts.

It reminds me of the “hüzün” of Istanbul and the “saudade” of Porto. A sense of melancholy stuck in the very walls, forever in silent anguish.

Mark Twain noticed the melancholic decline more than a century ago, on his visit in 1867:

“We have been in a half-waking sort of dream all the time. I do not know how else to describe the feeling. A part of our being has remained still in the nineteenth century, while another part of it has seemed in some unaccountable way walking among the phantoms of the tenth.”
— Mark Twain (1867)

Lonely bridge at night.

The darkness falls and the tourist crowds disperse. There is something eerie about the silent derelict bridges. I ponder the fate of Venice as I walk down a narrow alley, listening carefully.