Venice: letters from the future of a city that refuses to die

The iconic photograph of the Acqua Granda shows a man standing motionless with his head bowed on the Ponte della Paglia. Hours upon hours. He cannot take a single step to reach safety, and no one can take a step towards him to save him. If you think of Venice – the Venice of that 4 November 1966, betrayed by the sea with which, for centuries, it had celebrated its splendour day after day – what the Acqua Granda meant for Venice is all captured in that photograph. Helpless. A few other words, a few other images: it was not a wake. It was not a matter of remembering, ruminating or even assigning blame – that quintessentially Italian ritual surrounding tragedies that refuse to fade. Instead, there were small signs, sounds and evocative names of imaginary districts scattered throughout the vast twilight of a mighty theatrical space. Salt. Salt, for example.

Salt that seasons and preserves, but also salt that rises, seeping up from the water and penetrating the walls until they rot, ‘blossoming’. When the water had receded, it remained, eating away at the walls and drying out the vegetable gardens of Sant’Erasmo and Pellestrina. Memories of small gestures: furniture carried upstairs, objects placed on tables, children perched on the tables of those living on the upper floors. Not much else is needed; that is not what the vigil is about. “Water demands space; water must be given space,” says Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, as if, rather than being the president of the Biennale, he were the leader of a mobile, collective tragedy that is just beginning: “Water must be given space, and the word becomes public space, the Agora. It is through theatre that the Agora becomes the Polis, and thanks to theatre, the word becomes politics.”

Not a celebration, nor a commemoration of events from sixty years ago, but a ‘vigil’ – a contemporary gesture evoking future events. This was the night of 4 November 2026, the Acqua Granda Vigil in the vast new space of the Biennale’s Historical Archive at the Arsenale – an extraordinary restoration and transformation of yet another part of what was once Europe’s largest factory, 8,000 square metres running alongside the Corderie. The Vigil is a Special Project of the Historical Archive – International Centre for Research on Contemporary Arts, because here at the Arsenale there will not only be the preservation of a vast heritage of documents, but it will also be a place of creation, of imagination, and of event organisation.

The venue was inaugurated by an event that sends messages and writes letters to the future: ‘La Veglia dell’Acqua Granda’, conceived and directed – almost like a secular sacred drama – by Marco Paolini and Michela Signori, with consultancy from the director and playwright Davide Iodice. A long night, from 6.30 pm to 1 am, six hours of medieval, itinerant theatre, with its soloists and messengers, and the chorus of Venetian women with their heart-rending, liturgical singing (the Coro delle Cicale, conducted by Giuseppina Casarin, an ensemble of rare intensity that evokes the sounds of an archaic Veneto, with music by Guido Sodo). Those in the audience who experienced the charm of those six hours of great civic theatre were indeed fortunate. It was, however, a participatory audience.

Water demands space; it demands remembrance. The great night at the Arsenale was a collective experience in which theatre, personal accounts, music, scientific reflection and even just the right amount of politics (in the loftiest sense, like water itself) were interwoven. Amidst it all, a moment of true agora – indeed, of polis – ‘Fondamenta’ (for a new politics), almost an ideal constituent assembly for the Venice of the future (was it not, after all, an old man and a young man – Concetto Marchesi and Aldo Moro, as was recalled – who enshrined the protection of the landscape in the Constitution?). What will become of Venice, that universal city, in forty years’ time? A hundred years after the (first) Acqua Granda?

There are different ways to remember tragic events, but they are distinct. That 4 November, when Italy’s two greatest cities of art were cut off from the world, in darkness and under water, evokes different memories. For Florence, it was the epic tale of the ‘Angels of the Mud’. In Venice, however, ‘the Venetians, by candlelight, scoured the sites of devastation: yet it really did seem as though they were performing a collective, poignant funeral rite for their dying city’, wrote Giulio Obici. ‘In Florence, the tragedy had neither a timetable nor rules to be broken: it was a brutal, unjust, utterly abnormal event,’ wrote the *Paese Sera* journalist in 1967 in ‘Venice: How Long Will It Last?’. Something unheard-of is happening in Venice. Three times in a row, over three tides, the sea failed to keep to its schedule and broke the pact ‘mentally contained within the framework of a hypothesis verified over centuries’. The tides were no longer tides. “Even the people living on the ground floors, who by now had pointlessly piled piece of furniture upon piece of furniture, were fighting not only against the waters but also against time: if Venice was Venice, that devastation had to come to an end.”

In Venice, the Acqua Granda broke up a marriage, and it’s not as though we can stand there sixty years later, brooding over it or turning it into theatre. Convening the Agora and transforming it into a Polis has, after all, on the best of occasions, been the theatre of Marco Paolini, who had already portrayed Venice at the Arsenale through "Il Milione" in 1988. Now he has divided the agora, district by district, within the vast space that was once the Magazzino del Ferro, to hear oceanographers speak in hushed tones of climate change and waters that will rise ever higher; a young biologist explaining why the blue crab that is devouring the clams right into the lagoon is a global problem and not just one affecting the Adriatic; or the poetic account of what it means to be a street sweeper, a ‘scoassèr’, in Venice – the cleanest city in the world, tourists included – yet one that has no sewer system (it has the lagoon and the tides). Discussions also address what needs to be done, while the female captain of a vaporetto recounts how the currents have shifted since the Mose project. The evening blends scientific insight with the flavour of personal narratives. La Veglia could become a Rai Cultura programme for Rai5; it forms part of an already extensive theatre project, L’Atlante delle rive, which Paolini will take on tour across Italy.

When the Acqua Granda rose to one metre and 94 centimetres, it marked a watershed moment that was to shape the future. The famous phrase by art historian André Chastel was invoked: ‘Venice is the central episode in the crisis of the modern world, which will have to rethink its way of life’. On that day, it became clear that it could no longer be simply a matter of draining the warehouses or repairing the sea walls that had been blown apart by the fury of the sea. What course of action was taken? When the world discovered, almost before Italy itself, what had happened, the outcry was enormous. UNESCO launched a major campaign; by 1969, its Report on Venice – setting out instructions on how to save the city – was already complete. ‘Save Venice’ was founded in 1971, and in 1973 (in record time for Italy) the Special Law for Venice (Law 171, 16 April 1973) was passed, establishing a legal and scientific principle: ‘The Republic shall protect the hydraulic, physical and morphological balance of the lagoon, ensuring its natural and environmental preservation’. The salvation of Venice had begun, but so too had its medicalisation. From that point on, Venice and the Venetians began to think differently about themselves. Quarrelsome as ever, and with the added Italian vice of squandering resources and indecisiveness: the MOSE project, already envisaged in the law, took fifty years to materialise. But at that point, Venice began to cease being a living organism, just like its lagoon. From UNESCO to the legislation, the great ‘hospitalisation’ of Venice began, long before Settis’s funereal prophecy, “If Venice Dies”. After all, isn’t the most beautiful literary work ever written about Venice entitled “Fondamenta degli incurabili”?

Following the Acqua Granda – which was perhaps already a sign of climate change, though nobody realised it at the time – Venice had to be protected from itself, from industrial development, from pollution and from overpopulation. It was to become, at best, a Disneyland. The depopulation of the city began. During a discussion in the ‘Fondamenta’ forum, one participant remarked that the Law for Venice is ‘a load of rubbish’, starting right from Article 1 and that so-called ‘hydraulic, physical and morphological balance of the lagoon’ – a concept that never actually existed. Yet the lagoon has never been a delicate balance to be left untouched; it exists precisely and solely for the opposite reason, because for centuries it has been manipulated, transformed and diverted. Andrea Rinaldo, who ironically describes himself as a plumber but is a lecturer in Hydraulic Engineering and has won the Stockholm Water Prize – the ‘Nobel Prize for Water’ – emphasises this point strongly: Venice exists because people have always intervened in it. And it has ‘an urgent need to be manipulated’, because climate change will not wait another twenty-five years.

Will it one day be the city of fish? This is the premise of Tiziano Scarpa’s entertaining one-act play, Cefala Cefania, which recounts the fish’s first exploratory foray, made possible by the high water in the city that will one day belong to them. The play is staged with great humour – enjoyed by the actors as well – on the small stage in the middle of the large space.

One can sing songs that are the ancient sound of the earth and the sea. But one can also challenge resigned doom-mongering (Paolini says it’s about playing on the other side of the pitch). Andrea Rinaldi says that Venice is alive, even though the Morelli Pharmacy has its famous official counter in the window showing the number of residents in the depopulated historic centre: “Today, thanks to tracking systems, we know that every weekday at 11 am there are 200,000 people in Venice – far from being dead! What has changed is the relationship between the civitas and the rus; this is what we must address, as well as the water.”

We must also reconstruct ‘Marcian patriotism’, because water demands a place and the word demands a polis, a political community. Even if the blue crabs are now fully integrated citizens of the lagoon – and even tourists have a right to Venice; who can dispute the universal right? – who could ever dream of Venice without the Ponte della Libertà, severed as it once was from the mainland by the great Po Valley, which carries all its rivers and their sediment here, into the lagoons? But Venice is Venice, says physicist Giulio Boccaletti, though with the mind of a historian, because it was here that an idea of the Republic was born – that of Paolo Sarpi. Venice will not die because it has given Europe an idea of politics and administration that will shape its future.

Many black-and-white images of Florence and the Acqua Granda have been shown over the last few days. But not at the Arsenale. There, projected silently onto two bricks of the Arsenale, were the images created by the elderly residents of the San Giobbe Service Centre, who crafted objects and shared memories. But if ‘Venice is truly the central episode of the crisis of the modern world’, it is so because it represents a possible future. A vigil-awakening: a rare example, in an Italy of eternal lamentation, of coming together as a community, a Polis. A future that concerns the climate, certainly. The oceanographer Sandro Carniel speaks of a frontier we have forgotten, and of the fact that it also takes imagination – a virtue of humanists and poets – to believe that science will be able to find currents that bode well for everyone’s future.

We need to think big – something that is done in Venice, but not always in Italy. The Arsenale, with its new space for remembrance and creation, is a sign of this. The Biennale, too, has experienced its own ‘high water’ in recent months, but what matters more is that the former iron warehouses will become the Archive and the research centre. What matters more is that the Biennale represents, for Venice, a sign of a transformation that is both possible and not institutionalised. The Arsenale regeneration project began in 1980 with Paolo Portoghesi; the Venetians had not yet rejected the idea of holding an Expo in the lagoon, and Pink Floyd had not yet wreaked havoc in St Mark’s Square; it was then Paolo Baratta’s strategic vision that shaped the grand plan for the regeneration of the Arsenale’s spaces, including the idea that the Historical Archive should not remain isolated in Marghera, but should become the heart of Venice’s new great ‘factory’: a factory of culture, ideas and international influence, just as the Arsenale had once been the great ‘factory’ of the maritime world. In this way, he helped to transform the character of a city once deemed beyond hope, and Venice discovered it had a future as a city of knowledge, both above and below mean sea level. But now it must face an uncertain future. Not so much how high the water will rise, but how long it will take.

How high has the mid-sea line—written in the green of the seaweed—risen on the nose of the poor cherub in front of the Salute? In this respect, Venice truly is the world’s crisis point. Science may perhaps help save it from the salt, with a bit of common sense, says Sandro Carniel. There was also another ‘Acqua Granda’ in 2019, “but nothing happened – do you know why?”, says Paolini, wearing his sailor’s jacket: “Because the Mose was going to be built anyway”. Today, even those who didn’t want it can’t help but give it their blessing – even Marco Paolini, because time also means changing one’s mind. Yet everyone acknowledges that the Mose is not a permanent solution; “it’s just a reprieve that science has granted us”. A handful of years to find a new solution, if one exists. Because in the future, the Mose won’t be able to rise 250 times a year, every day except at weekends, quips Paolini the sailor. There’s a little red postbox in the entrance hall of the Archives, into which everyone, as part of a collective ritual, has posted a letter setting out their views on the future of Venice – that is, of all cities, as Chastel puts it. The letters will be opened and read only in 2066, forty years from now, on the centenary of the Acqua Granda. This initiative also challenges the doomsayers who predict that Venice will already be the domain of the Cefala Cefania fish. Because the ‘Fondamenta’ of the Vigil are not those of the Incurabili. And this alone sets the exercise apart from the usual Italian and universal lament.