As the water taxi budged its way through the labyrinth of canals one grey Wednesday recently, I knew what was coming. Up ahead, at my hotel, was a porter, on the dock, holding out a pair of knee-high black rubber boots.
I slipped them on, squeaked my way clear of the boat's mahogany frame, and sloshed my way through the lobby's ankle-high inundation until I washed ashore at the reception desk. Someone handed me a glass of prosecco, as if to congratulate me for my nautical accomplishment.
For people who actually live in Venice, a dozen centimetres of water on the floor offers no such sense of adventure. The romance of living in a 1,300-year-old city built on wooden stakes driven into the mud floor of a lagoon is dimmed by the floods, which take place at least 100 days of the year, usually starting in November. Battered by tidal surges from the east and river influxes from the West, Venice is the world's first city – but certainly not the last – to know what it's like when the sea is reaching your knees.
Here is a city whose private life takes place upstairs, its ground floors largely abandoned to the waves – especially after the terrible flood of November, 1966, when 194 centimetres of water destroyed much of Venice's ground-level grandeur and launched a project that, today, every maritime city in the world is watching. Venice's flood season, after all, could soon be Mumbai's, Miami's, Halifax's flood season. Many scientists believe global warming and melting ice caps will cause ocean levels to rise 10 to 30 cm. So when we visit Venice today, we are visiting our homes tomorrow.
I had come here to watch this city save itself, once again, in the most stupendous nature-challenging effort that has taken place here since the Italians first fled the Barbarian-colonized dry land to raise palaces here in the 700s.
But I'd also argue that the rain-and-flood season, when Venice is most empty and most itself, is the best time to visit this city, to discover that beneath its centuries of tourist clichés is a living, real city with good food and real neighbourhoods. And that by poking around carefully, in the backstreets and abandoned ramparts that are hidden from gondola-riding canoodlers, you will find much to learn about life in a world of rising waters – and you'll have a chance to see a stunning salvation in the works.
The elegant woman at the desk of the hotel, built recently in a glass-merchant's 15th-century palace that had lain empty for decades (in other words, a typical hotel here), sighs and tells me she's counting the days. “This is unbearable – you can't live, you can't welcome guests when there's water everywhere,” she says. “They just have to hurry up and finish the Mose.”
She's referring to the portentously named MOdulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico, a project whose acronym – Moses, in Italian – is as overcooked as its budget of $7-billion, its timeline of 30 years or its ambition of defying nature and stopping the tides. For most Venetians, who have long since accepted their city's becoming a theme park-cum-museum as its only path to salvation, its 2011 completion date cannot come soon enough.
For other Venetians, deeply wary of anything that touches their ancient ways and equally distrustful of anything coming from the government of Italy (which many here still see as a foreign country), nothing good can come of it. Strolling the back pathways and bridges of Venice, you'll see the graffito “No MOSE” painted on walls. In the view of Mayor Massimo Cacciari, a rumpled philosopher given to fistfights with his less co-operative constituents, the whole thing is a conspiracy to destroy the purity of his city and turn the lagoon into a stinking toilet. Or, rather, into more of a toilet.
For visitors, this is your chance to witness an experiment that may define the next century. Moses is a grand effort to regulate the tides entering the lagoon, by building enormous air-driven floating valves that can stop the water while allowing the largest container ships, up to 70 metres wide, to pass through a huge system of locks.
