Venice – Under Siege
Colvin: Music has been an integral part of the history of a spectacular city in which all the arts seem inextricably woven together.
Vivaldi, Venice's master of music for forty years, epitomised the elegance of the city known as La Serenissima - The Most Serene One.
Yet the city which once led one of the world's great empires is now more inclined to bemoan it's precarious future than celebrate its glorious past.
Flooding, pollution and depopulation - these are the three great dangers facing the Venice of the 21st Century. Every winter flooding like this causes more damage to the city - it's the Venetian's greatest fear. 01.50
Yet despite decades of talk, tidal barriers designed to protect the city remain at the prototype stage with no sign of progress.
And environmental opinion has switched away from such big engineering projects towards a micro approach - dredging out the canals - many of which contain as much as 45 percent mud.
Mossetto: When the tide grows up and comes into the lagoon what happens is that with the southern wind blowing on the Adriatic sea the tide is prevented from getting out of the lagoon when the tide goes down. If the volume available for the expansion in the lagoon grows like it can be by using these tools excavating in the canals we will be able to have a lower tide even in the period of high tide. 02.30
Colvin: Yet it was canal dredging like this that made it so hard to fight the blaze at La Fenice.
To fight everyday fires like this, they need full canals so the dredging that is a solution for the city becomes a problem for the fire department.
Everything in Venice is like that, a matter of juggling complex and often opposing interests.
Venice like the Great Barrier Reef is one of the UN's world heritage sites. But whereas the Reef would still thrive without a single human being, if Venice is to survive as a living city, it's got to preserve its human population.
Yet the Farinati family - Guido and Giuliana and their sons Carlo and Giacomo - are among a dwindling hard core of Venetian-born citizens who remain on the island. 03.53
It's hard at first to understand why people would want to leave. The Farinatis are so steeped in the city's culture that even the kids join in discussions about Renaissance art.
Guido Farinati: The Renaissance begins with the architect Brunelleschi, and then we have all the painters that followed
Child: Michelangelo?
Guido Farinati: Michelangelo, of course.
Social life in a city like Venice is quite different from a city like Milan or other cities. In some ways the car closes offthe communication between men - betweeen people.
Woman, Guiliana, pulling shopping cart up stairs and along bridge, shopping at the market Colvin: Yet when you see Giuliana doing the daily shopping, you begin to understand why the population's down to seventy thousand - half what it was just a generation ago. 04.53
Giuliana: The days go by with a different rhythm. Maybe there's less stress, but in a way, it's also more physically tiring. You always have to walk, come rain, wind or high tide. The high tide might look pretty on the TV news or the postcards - but it's a difficult city to live in.
Not in Venice, however, where families like Giuliana's just don't have the choice. There are no cars, no supermarket trolleys, no option but to do it all on foot.
And a shopping trip in Venice has pitfalls of its own - especially when it comes to buying fish. Pollution in the lagoon means that every purchase hangs by a thread of faith in the Government.
Giuliana: The health authorities would stop the sale of any fish that were pollute or dangerous, like what's happening now with mussels, right now they've banned it from the market.
Colvin: Shallow as it is, the Venetian lagoon is full of fish. An it supports a thriving mussel industry - but two days before our arrival, oil had leaked from an underwater pipeline, right into the area where the mussel growers farm. 06.35
This one was less than a hundred metres from the path of the slick. Much of this man's harvest will be confiscated by the pollution authorities.
The coastguard turned us away from the site of the spill itself - but it emerged later that a drilling rig had accidentally pierced an underwater pipeline. Enough to disperse a thin film of grease across most of the lagoon's surface.
Colvin: An oil spill like this encapsulates the problems of modern Venice. On the one hand the city obviously has to have a clean lagoon. Clean water is essential to the life of Venice. But on the other hand the oil industry also represents thousands of jobs. An those, too, are essential to the city's life.
Ferrari: It's difficult to separate the city from the lagoon. So Venice exists because the lagoon exists. 07.40
Colvin: Dr. Giorgio Ferrari heads the Magistrato alle Acque - Venice's water pollution watchdog.
Ferrari: If the lagoon will be completely damaged or disappear, nor Venice will continue to exist.
Colvin: What's in the lagoon is a filthy mixture derive from decades of unchecked industrial waste. First time visitors to Venice find it almost unbelievable, but this is what shares the lagoon with the legendary city of the Doges.
Porto Marghera - an industrial and petrochemical complex, which was founded in the twenties and grew unchecked through the fifties and sixties. Though it's shrinking now, many of its petrol refineries, factories and port facilities remain active.
This is the sewage outfall for the whole complex. The pollution police have to be allowed in - by law. 08.35
The samples are taken back for analysis in the Magistrato alle Acque's laboratories. The legacy of decades of unpoliced industry is a lagoon full of lethal sediments.
And the problem is that pollutants don't come with labels attached saying where they came from.
Ferrari: It's very difficult to prove that one industry have polluted the sediment so probably, I think that the government will have to pay for this.
Young boy walking out door, along, into shop with other boys, walking up stairs, into school, men working with glass panel
Colvin: So 10 year old Giacomo Farinati doesn't know it yet, but when he grows up his taxes will probably still be paying for the environmental mistakes of the last few decades. And there may be far fewer Venetians like him left to foot the tax bill.
Giacomo walks ten minutes to school each morning - when he gets to high school, it'll be far further because dwindling population has caused the closure of so many schools.
And when he leaves school and starts work, perhaps in the family glass restoring business, he'll find out what his dad already knows - that Venice is a hard place to work.
Farinati: We always have to take it from the shop, put it on the bank, from the bank to the boat, from the boat to the bank again, from the bank to the shop, but always with a handcart, it's all complicated because that's how it is in Venice, no cars, it's not possible to drive straight up to the house. 10.11
Colvin: But work like this, connected with Venice's heritage or with tourism - is increasingly all that's left to those who want to remain. This is one of the windows from the Basilica of San Marco itself. Guido Farinati has the contract to restore them.
His overheads are 25 percent higher than they would be on the mainland. He's one of the lucky few who can stay and make it pay.
Farinati: This is a really hard problem. Hard because anyone who lives in Venice and has a job hangs on like grim death. Because it's easier to leave - it's easier on the mainland. There are lots more people there, the network grows, so there are more opportunities. 11.05
People waiting, on boats, ship comes into shot of building and the sunset Colvin: On any day of the year, the number of tourists in Venice is now greater than the number of residents. Outnumbered, priced out of their own housing by Euro-millionaires, under constant threat of flood and pollution, Venetians are an endangered species.
Their survival depends on the skill with which they balance sensitive problems against complex solutions. It may be the greatest challenge in Venice's long history.
Colvin: Music has been an integral part of the history of a spectacular city in which all the arts seem inextricably woven together.
Vivaldi, Venice's master of music for forty years, epitomised the elegance of the city known as La Serenissima - The Most Serene One.
Yet the city which once led one of the world's great empires is now more inclined to bemoan it's precarious future than celebrate its glorious past.
Flooding, pollution and depopulation - these are the three great dangers facing the Venice of the 21st Century. Every winter flooding like this causes more damage to the city - it's the Venetian's greatest fear. 01.50
Yet despite decades of talk, tidal barriers designed to protect the city remain at the prototype stage with no sign of progress.
And environmental opinion has switched away from such big engineering projects towards a micro approach - dredging out the canals - many of which contain as much as 45 percent mud.
Mossetto: When the tide grows up and comes into the lagoon what happens is that with the southern wind blowing on the Adriatic sea the tide is prevented from getting out of the lagoon when the tide goes down. If the volume available for the expansion in the lagoon grows like it can be by using these tools excavating in the canals we will be able to have a lower tide even in the period of high tide. 02.30
Colvin: Yet it was canal dredging like this that made it so hard to fight the blaze at La Fenice.
To fight everyday fires like this, they need full canals so the dredging that is a solution for the city becomes a problem for the fire department.
Everything in Venice is like that, a matter of juggling complex and often opposing interests.
Venice like the Great Barrier Reef is one of the UN's world heritage sites. But whereas the Reef would still thrive without a single human being, if Venice is to survive as a living city, it's got to preserve its human population.
Yet the Farinati family - Guido and Giuliana and their sons Carlo and Giacomo - are among a dwindling hard core of Venetian-born citizens who remain on the island. 03.53
It's hard at first to understand why people would want to leave. The Farinatis are so steeped in the city's culture that even the kids join in discussions about Renaissance art.
Guido Farinati: The Renaissance begins with the architect Brunelleschi, and then we have all the painters that followed
Child: Michelangelo?
Guido Farinati: Michelangelo, of course.
Social life in a city like Venice is quite different from a city like Milan or other cities. In some ways the car closes offthe communication between men - betweeen people.
Woman, Guiliana, pulling shopping cart up stairs and along bridge, shopping at the market Colvin: Yet when you see Giuliana doing the daily shopping, you begin to understand why the population's down to seventy thousand - half what it was just a generation ago. 04.53
Giuliana: The days go by with a different rhythm. Maybe there's less stress, but in a way, it's also more physically tiring. You always have to walk, come rain, wind or high tide. The high tide might look pretty on the TV news or the postcards - but it's a difficult city to live in.
Not in Venice, however, where families like Giuliana's just don't have the choice. There are no cars, no supermarket trolleys, no option but to do it all on foot.
And a shopping trip in Venice has pitfalls of its own - especially when it comes to buying fish. Pollution in the lagoon means that every purchase hangs by a thread of faith in the Government.
Giuliana: The health authorities would stop the sale of any fish that were pollute or dangerous, like what's happening now with mussels, right now they've banned it from the market.
Colvin: Shallow as it is, the Venetian lagoon is full of fish. An it supports a thriving mussel industry - but two days before our arrival, oil had leaked from an underwater pipeline, right into the area where the mussel growers farm. 06.35
This one was less than a hundred metres from the path of the slick. Much of this man's harvest will be confiscated by the pollution authorities.
The coastguard turned us away from the site of the spill itself - but it emerged later that a drilling rig had accidentally pierced an underwater pipeline. Enough to disperse a thin film of grease across most of the lagoon's surface.
Colvin: An oil spill like this encapsulates the problems of modern Venice. On the one hand the city obviously has to have a clean lagoon. Clean water is essential to the life of Venice. But on the other hand the oil industry also represents thousands of jobs. An those, too, are essential to the city's life.
Ferrari: It's difficult to separate the city from the lagoon. So Venice exists because the lagoon exists. 07.40
Colvin: Dr. Giorgio Ferrari heads the Magistrato alle Acque - Venice's water pollution watchdog.
Ferrari: If the lagoon will be completely damaged or disappear, nor Venice will continue to exist.
Colvin: What's in the lagoon is a filthy mixture derive from decades of unchecked industrial waste. First time visitors to Venice find it almost unbelievable, but this is what shares the lagoon with the legendary city of the Doges.
Porto Marghera - an industrial and petrochemical complex, which was founded in the twenties and grew unchecked through the fifties and sixties. Though it's shrinking now, many of its petrol refineries, factories and port facilities remain active.
This is the sewage outfall for the whole complex. The pollution police have to be allowed in - by law. 08.35
The samples are taken back for analysis in the Magistrato alle Acque's laboratories. The legacy of decades of unpoliced industry is a lagoon full of lethal sediments.
And the problem is that pollutants don't come with labels attached saying where they came from.
Ferrari: It's very difficult to prove that one industry have polluted the sediment so probably, I think that the government will have to pay for this.
Young boy walking out door, along, into shop with other boys, walking up stairs, into school, men working with glass panel
Colvin: So 10 year old Giacomo Farinati doesn't know it yet, but when he grows up his taxes will probably still be paying for the environmental mistakes of the last few decades. And there may be far fewer Venetians like him left to foot the tax bill.
Giacomo walks ten minutes to school each morning - when he gets to high school, it'll be far further because dwindling population has caused the closure of so many schools.
And when he leaves school and starts work, perhaps in the family glass restoring business, he'll find out what his dad already knows - that Venice is a hard place to work.
Farinati: We always have to take it from the shop, put it on the bank, from the bank to the boat, from the boat to the bank again, from the bank to the shop, but always with a handcart, it's all complicated because that's how it is in Venice, no cars, it's not possible to drive straight up to the house. 10.11
Colvin: But work like this, connected with Venice's heritage or with tourism - is increasingly all that's left to those who want to remain. This is one of the windows from the Basilica of San Marco itself. Guido Farinati has the contract to restore them.
His overheads are 25 percent higher than they would be on the mainland. He's one of the lucky few who can stay and make it pay.
Farinati: This is a really hard problem. Hard because anyone who lives in Venice and has a job hangs on like grim death. Because it's easier to leave - it's easier on the mainland. There are lots more people there, the network grows, so there are more opportunities. 11.05
People waiting, on boats, ship comes into shot of building and the sunset Colvin: On any day of the year, the number of tourists in Venice is now greater than the number of residents. Outnumbered, priced out of their own housing by Euro-millionaires, under constant threat of flood and pollution, Venetians are an endangered species.
Their survival depends on the skill with which they balance sensitive problems against complex solutions. It may be the greatest challenge in Venice's long history.