⊕ Venice and the Anthropocene book cover

Edited by Cristina Baldacci, Shaul Bassi, Lucio De Capitani and Pietro Daniel Omodeo Foreword by Serenella Iovino, published May 15, 2023

Serving as an exploration tool complete with a map, the guidebook presents Venice as a distinctive ecosystem under threat while offering insights into what it means for our human-made systems.

Venice and the Anthropocene is a collection of short essays that frame Venice as a palimpsest of ecological eras. It’s an uneven read; the relevance of any given site in Venice is not always clearly communicated. And somehow the book’s diverse topics don’t seem to span much at the city’s history. But there are several gems and I’d like to focus on those here.

Venice is a city held up by rot-resistant trunks driven deep into mud. “So numerous is this implantation that we might imagine Venice as an upside-down forest,” we’re told by Jonathan Skinner and Andrea Vianello. “Wood may be Venice’s most voluminous and least visible material but it is also its most enduring.”(p. 63)

The book lays bare Venice’s extractive history throughout its pages by making the hidden more explicit. In the case of lumber, we’re forced to acknowledge the Dolomite forests as the literal foundation of the opulent Venetian trading empire.

The book prizes visible but overlooked markings of the anthropocene throughout Venice. There is the plaque to Giovanni Caboto (aka John Cabot) for “discovering Newfoundland” in 1497. As detailed in “Baccalà in Venice, Cod in the World” by L. Sasha Gora, we learn how “one could catch [the cod] by simply lowering a basket into the water.” Thus Cabot promised fish “enough to feed this kingdom… until the end of time.” Time, however, ended in 1992, when the spawning biomass in Newfoundland collapsed to just 1% of its historical average.

Of course Venice’s hunger for baccalà did not solely cause the collapse of fisheries. But as an international trading hub, the city presaged the excesses that drive today’s climate crisis. Not only as a medieval historical artifact, but as a 20th century petrochemical hub at the city’s Porto Marghera. By 1955, “330 firms employing nearly 40,000 workers” were established in Venice’s new industrial zone, producing petrochemicals and other pollutants that devastated the surrounding environment and the health of the workers.(p. 135)

The eventual formation of leftist groups like Potere Operaio and the Autonomia Operata linked labor struggles with environmental degradation. The demands for improved working conditions, reduced exposure to toxic chemicals, and more sustainable modes of production presaged modern calls for environmental justice.(p. 137)

The long term effects of this exposure are just being felt today.The working poor have been on the front lines for generations It is felt today from air quality in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood to the water quality in Flint, Michigan to the aftershocks felt in Venice: “long-term consequences of industrial activity [at Porto Marghera] do not only manifest in the destruction of the ecosystem but also the workers’ deaths from mesothelioma, an incurable type of cancer linked to asbestos exposure, the symptoms of which tend to develop gradually over time. Cases of infected workers exposed to asbestos in the 1970s are expected to peak between the 2010s and 2030s.” Thats today.

Venice is ultimately being consumed by the legacy it helped create. The most famous frontline battle is the rising sea level that threatens to erase the city from the map. This surprisingly gets very little space in the book. But Stefano Liberti’s “The Tide Forecast Center of Venice” focuses on the historic Hydrographic Observation Station, Punta Della Salute:(p. 194)

Development of annual mean sea level (blue line) estimated as the mean value between maximum and minimum in Venice, Punta Salute, in the period 1872-2020, and frequency of tides exceeding 1.10 m (red histogram) via A Multidisciplinary Approach for the Vulnerability Assessment of a Venetian Historic Palace: High Water Phenomena and Climate Change Effects (  authors)

These are exceptional events, but the tide centre’s historical graphs show us that the exception is likely to become the rule. Just look at the chart illustrating the most conspicuous tides, those exceeding 140 cm. From 1923 to the present day, the Punta della Salute station has recorded 25 of them. “But of these, 16 have occurred in the last 20 years”, Papa comments, pointing at the chart. They are more and more frequent because the sea level has risen, the city is subsiding under the weight of subsidence, and the sirocco winds that push the water towards the Lagoon are increasingly imposing.

As Liberti opines, “Global warming has a local declination [in Venice] that can almost be measured with the naked eye.” I would argue that the word “almost” is misleading. Human-made climate change is visible everywhere in the city. One just needs to know where to look. And that’s the value of this book.