A VENETIAN RIDDLE


VENICE, Italy May 29, 2012 To prevent the sea from burying this city of waterways and ancient history Silvio
Berlusconi's government launched a spectacular 1.5 bill Euro (two billion dollar) rescue operation four
years ago. Its target was to tame flooding high tides from the Adriatic Sea with gigantic steel barriers.

 Today the cost of the project has blown out to 5.5 billion Euro amid growing suspicion it was never
intended to save Venice but to ensure the world's largest cruise ships can enter the Venetian lagoon and
sail by St Mark's Square - to the delight of paying passengers and the profit margins of Venetian
merchants and officials.
The drama does not end there: Experts now have doubts the barricades - an ambitious engineering feat
often criticized as impractical, overprized and easily replaced by more modest projects -  will actually work
or was ever intended to work.  Apparently the designers cannot guarantee the mighty steel barriers may
not break up, allowing a wall of retained tidal water to wipe out this one thousand year old urban jewel
with a man-made tsunami.

  Executives and engineers of the project (which is run like a secret society by a consortium of thirty
companies that have been given extraordinary autonomous powers by Berlusconi) are simply fired or
asked to resign if they express criticism and concern.
  An investigation this month by the State-run RAI3 Report program - one of Italy's most viewed - made the
project (known as M.O.S.E. ) appear like a money-laundering scheme to enrich friends and the friends of
friends. Funds, the program found, are easily available while other public projects across Italy are at a
standstill and cities are without federal finance in a nation wrecked by economic woes and loan freezes.
   But money does have a way to end up in anonymous pockets in Venice.
     For the last three years the annual international Venetian Film Festival on the Lido has been staged
next to a huge crater extending for an entire block. Il Buco (the hole) was dug out as foundation for a new
and long heralded Cinema Palace - until the builders abandoned palace and hole claiming they had found
deposits of banned asbestos buried in the subsoil  a presence that should have been known before the
hole was dug.

     Ever since Il Buco was left gaping and a two way beach-side road was reduced to a one-way road no one has
been able to find out what happened to the
sixteen million Euro set aside for the Palace. The city's amazingly
unconcerned mayor, Giorgio Orsoni, told a TV interviewer the case of the hole was 'funny'.He said it cost
3.5 million
alone to dig the hole and it would cost another six million Euro to close it.  Just in case anyone asked why his
city has not filled in Il Buco the mayor protested: 'The municipality of Venice is already in debt to the tune of 400 million
      With the prestigious Venice film festival only three months away residents of the Lido  site of' Il Buco'  still wonder
who gave the order to cut down nearly a hundred old pine trees to make space for the cinema palace which is unlikely
to be ever build.
 Mayor Orsoni (who seems to know little about anything or too much about everything) has been unable to shed light
why the trees were felled during one night and who executed this nocturnal axing when the architects admit their plan
for the cinema palace did not include the felling of a single one of the shady old pines.                      
 But the main mystery in the Venetian riddles concerns the 650 multi-storey cruise ships that pass every
year along the lagoon, floating by St Mark's Square, a spectacle cruise ship companies promise their
three to four thousand passengers on each vessel.

      The passing of these ships through the delicate ecosystem of the lagoon and parts of the Grand Canal and the
Giudecca Canal has become a Europe-wide scandal. It disgusts not only environmentalists, engineers, and waterway
technicians but thousands of non-commercial Venetians in a city whittled away to just 60,000 residents but with four
million tourists each year who jam waterways and narrow alleys.

For years technicians and engineers have provided irrefutable evidence of the damage caused by the
propellers and the water displacement volume of these cruise ships to the delicate architecture,
infrastructure and ecosystem of a city built on calcified tree trunks. Worse, air pollution of each ship
(whose diesel generators are switched on day and night while moored at the port of Venice) expel carbon
dioxide equivalent to that of 15,000 automobiles.

 In the wake of the outrage following the infamous disaster of the Italian cruise ship Concordia (which foundered on a
beachside reef) the Ministry of Environment banned large passenger ships from entering Venice. The ban lasted just
over a week before shop keepers and cruise ship companies convinced the politicians to rescind it - though similar
stay-offshore regulations continue to exists for the rest of Italy.

In Venice, a tourist Mecca, money for those who run the city and the province speaks far louder then preservation
and heritage.

 The RAI3 program Report not only detailed the weird projects and companies active in Venice but traced baffling
administrative links and ownerships between the various Venetian projects. â€˜Report also found rampant nepotism.
Wives, husbands and daughters have senior posts in the consortiums while government officials and those involved
boldly tell interviewers: 'There is no conflict of interest'.

A former senior technician of the MOSE project, Lorenzo Fellin, said on camera he was told to shut up or leave when
he pointed out a prototype of the MOSE barriers had jammed grips during a test. He advocated calling for an
international tender for the construction of the barriers. Denied he resigned in protest.

Fellin told RAI3 the consortium of thirty companies involved in the project decided their barrier version was functional.
He said  all such decisions are facilitated by the fact the consortium controls, plans, executes and tests all aspects of
the MOSE project without outside interference or access.

Maria Giovanna Piva, former head of the Department of Venetian Waterways and once a staunch supporter of the
MOSE project changed her mind recently when she doubted the mysterious barriers would really work or could be
trusted not to break down. She demanded independent testing but was immediately told by the Ministry for the
Environment to resign her post.
'They rang me two or three times a day. They said if you resign we give you a job in Bologna only two hours from your
home (in Venice). But if you don't resign we might have to send you to Palermo,' Piva told RAI3 TV.
 She resigned, perhaps frightened by the kind of warning usually attributed to the Mafia rather then a government
 While most Venetians were initially content a solution had been found to the periodic flooding of their city a growing
segment of citizen began to demonstrate against the MOSE and the cruise ships. Protesters using their boats and
holding up placards were recently  charged with˜polluting the lagoon'.

  For years now the MOSE project has widened and deepened the miles-long access canals (from the Adriatic) into
the lagoon. Deeper canals will considerably increase rather then decrease the volume of water entering at high tide
and flooding the city. But in compensation, of course, dug out canals will allow even the world's largest cruise ship to
sail along St Mark's Square.
  And that's what it is all about.

Uli Schmetzer, a former foreign correspondent and author of four books (available on www.amazon.com with the digital
version on Kindle) lives part of the year in Venice.