To me it seems like reading this makes one believe that the blood and blue parts of the "super blue blood moon" had some minor relevancy in all of this and made the water levels slightly lower than usual.
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.
An eclipse means the moon lines up with the sun, which adds their tides together. It’s basically the same as what happens every two weeks when they nearly line up, so it’s not particularly special, but it is relevant.
"You can't tell how deep a puddle is until you step into it."
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.
It would be crazy hard to build a whole city on 10m deep sea. Some channels have been dig deeper to allow for traffic, but most are fairly shallow. Even the biggest Grand canal is just around 5m deep.
Most of the motorboats in the canals (but not all!) are inboard motors with very shallow draft (or are small outboards). You don’t generally see inboard/outboard boats which generally have a deeper draft than the other two.
Makes you wonder why they bother rowing the gondolas — punting with a pole would work just as well. I suppose they need to row in the deeper main canal.
To an uneducated eye (like mine), Venice looks inadaptable and bound to struggle, and eventually fail. Buildings require constant repair due to erosion. Too much water brings flooding, too little exposes mud and filth, and hinders transportation... I'm very curious to know what counter-measures are put in place to protect the city from these (and many more) dangers.
Same thing happened when I was there as well. But, surprisingly, it wasn't as big of a hassle as one would have thought. You could just walk around it.
And a few hours later rain stopped, the flooding relented and it was back to normal.
And you’ll see stepping-stone type things scattered around the sidewalks to help people walk over flooded areas as well as doors to homes and businesses sealed at the bottom to allow for about 1 meter of flooding without causing any interior damage. Then there are sandbags scattered about to help with flood protection when necessary.
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.
> By far the biggest danger to Venice is the hoards of tourists that make getting around for a local almost impossible.
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.
> By far the biggest danger to Venice is the absence of those hoards of tourists.
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.
"It's such a popular tourist spot, no one goes there anymore." (Apologies to Yogi Berra.)
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.
Just giving that a cursory thinking through, I can see several ways in which that might fail.
"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.
Niagara Falls is doing just fine though? Can you think of examples of tourism destinations that failed because too many people went there? It seems tautologically impossible to me. Yes, the character of them may change, and they may go more upmarket, but I can't see them completely collapsing from getting too successful.
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.
I asked because examples didn't immediately occur to me, though this isn't a topic with which I'm particularly conversant.
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.
Niagara Falls has seen steady growth in terms of tourism revenue and annual visitors for at least close to 30 years (that's as far back as I could find)... And current revenue numbers are (obviously) all time records... So... I'm not really sure what you're talking about.
Measures of social significance of Niagara Falls as a destination of significance.
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.
I mean... If the original developer can't consistently meet debt obligations, then the development goes into foreclosure, and then a new developer lowers the price...
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.
None of those are examples of the real estate economy failing though... Let alone failing because it became too profitable. And even if they were, you're pushing the definition of a profitable real estate economy in the first place.
The rents-extraction can lead to failures by crowding out entrepreneurial activity. Take a look at what's brewing in the San Francisco Bay Area presently.
(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.
The San Francisco Bay Are real estate market hasn't failed... You can't use its hypothetical future failure as an example... The formation of new technical hubs is not a good indicator that the real estate market is failing or will fail.
Got gloriously lost in Venice, can confirm. The less visited areas are charming.
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
I got stuck there for a week once because of a train strike. I was bored within a day or two with the tourist areas, thankfully went on walks outside tourist areas and found them much more interesting and turned the diversion into a pleasurable one.
The adaptability of Venetians, and their ability to live a full, happy life while accepting their lack of control over the environment, changed me a deep and meaningful way.
and those dark back streets, too narrow for GPS signal at times, distant foot steps, no addresses.. wonderful!
The point is you probably could have said that on any date in the last thousand years! They have been fighting tides and subsidence the entire time... the time integrated wealth there is astounding. They have been "building" giant dynamic sea walls for decades although beimg Italy you never know when they'll finish.
These problems existed for centuries but apparently something kept Venice from failing. I suspect it's not about engineering or construction, but it's about money. As long as Venice has a sufficient influx of money it will do well. A significant drop in tourist revenue is way more dangerous to the city than erosion or flooding.
Maybe: fewer tourists, more people move back to the city and other industries begin to re-emerge. But right now, much of Venice is dying off — except for the tourist shops, because of the tourists. It’s turning into an EPCOT Center version of Venice.
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 read that they were now limiting the amount of cruise ships they get a year because of the issue of them crowding the city a lot without spending much.
Every city is constantly flooding, burning, and falling apart. But people keep coming and building them up again.
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.
The non-adaptation thing is recent. Dig down and you will find every building today stands atop the rubble of many previous that were nocked down once they got too expensive to maintain. The city constantly sinks and readily adapted to this. Some might say that need to constantly adapt made venice great. But at some point in the 1950s/60s the "greatest generation" decided to protect the old at all costs. Nothing is ever knocked down and so within only a couple generations everything is in crisis at once.
Sources? What I know doesn‘t fit your story. The most of the traditional houses aren‘t on the rubbles at all but on the water tanks, which are at least a few hundred years old.
Many buildings in Venice are hundreds of years old. If the cycle involves replacing, say, 1% of buildings every 5 years then that isn't necessarily in conflict. Most of the buildings would be hundreds of years old, but after 50 years of an effective moratorium, 10% would need to be replaced despite the fact that most buildings are hundreds of years old and don't need to be replaced.
That's a little different from saying the entire city needs to be rebuilt, but it will eventually.
The "greatest generation" name applies to Americans not Italians. They earned that title by winning World War II, rebuilding Japan and Germany, and creating the richest society in the history of the world.
That same generation of Italians embraced fascism, followed Mussolini, allied with Hitler and got their ass kicked in World War II.
I'm not sure if shitting on Italians adds anything to this discussion.
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.
No. It is just a label. No different than gen-x or millenials. It is a description of people born during a paticular period. What those people did in other context, for good or ill, is beside the point: they did do something to venice that broke from previous practices.
I feel like this is a good thing....it's not going to last, and it gives them an opportunity in the meantime to more easily clean and repair places that are normally less accessible.
I have my doubts. There's probably no standby army of cleaners, builders and engineers waiting to jump at this glorious opportunity.
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.
I got the impression from the article that the water is almost never too low to use the waterways for transport. If it happens regularly then it's of course a wholly different matter.
The view of the (very shallow) canals of Venice brings to mind the Erie Canal, which I've been reading up on.
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."
If you watch the video at the end, the sites author is inferring there's some conspiracy or "unknown" space object or the moons 'eclipse' causing this:
Junk article on junk site. Low tides are a normal part of life in Venice. I was Kayaking there a few months ago and Tide tables determine what parts of the city are navigable by boat. Some canals are indeed very shallow. Been that way forever. They are dredged periodically to keep them navigable at normal tides. The larger and deeper canals are always navigable.
The comment about declining population looks really off. I think most of protected old town areas lost population compared to 100 years ago. People no longer cram in tiny rooms, undesirable ground level flats are converted to shops. Why would this ever be a problem? They have Mestre just over a bridge.
What I know for sure is that Venice proper (that is, what is in the middle of the lagoon) has been hemorrhaging residents for a long time now. Residents strated moving to Mestre and Marghera for various reasons (for example because they worked there) but also because Venice is becoming a touristic attraction, not a place people want to live in. Prices for houses are completely insane, and the fact that people are going away feeds back to a lot of shops (I mean shops for residents, not for tourists) closing down.
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.
Venice isn't a practical place to live for many in the modern world though. Transportation is horrendously inefficient, land is expensive and no more is available, and people expect nicer/roomier accommodations than in centuries past.
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.
When I lived in Europe I visited Venice a few times, and what I learned from various readings is that Venice itself, from a buildings perspective, is less than 50% occupied, and the population is overwhelmingly skewed older. So, there's an economic vitality issue to that...
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.
I know many places that are more like a tourist attraction. Tallinn or Bruges' historic centres for example. I fail yo see what's wrong with it? The lagoon is full of islands that can offer other lifestyles if anybody wants that.
There is so much talk these days of "rising sea levels" so its kind of ironic to see the opposite. But I guess changes in weather causes both extremes.
No, this is not expected. Sea level rise occurs because there is physically more water in the sea (both by weight and thermal expansion). Storms and wind can alter local sea level as well, as eg el Nino does in the Pacific, but not in Mediterranean dimensions.
Just about 50k people live in the islands... The density is quite low, and much more people lived there in the past, now for locals it's more profitable to just rent their flat to tourists, while living in the mainland.
The Venice having 155.000 people isn't the islands. Those have roughly 55.000 people. The rest is spread on the mainland.
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.
I was struck by the fact that the bottoms of the canals is just mud--no trash (at least in the photos in the article). The article mentioned the "filth buried at the bottom of the canals", but they seem remarkably clean.
Dredging is a common maintenance activity on canals, and is easier to do with the water present (since you can use ships) than when it is absent.
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.
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.