What lies behind a city's wrinkles?

Le Regard Libre N° 50 - Giovanni F. Ryffel

LONG FORMAT ARTICLE | Beauty is promised by tourist agencies as a balm to soothe the neuroses of a life of frenetic offices, fast food and stress. Vacations, then, are the only bright spot in contemporary life: they're almost the exiguous drop in the bucket that the rich man in hell demands. But does the entertainment promised when we visit Porto, Split or Venice allow us to truly taste the beauty we're hoping for? And if we quench our thirst with this water, what will we leave to those who grew up near this source?

«Artificial beauty, deceptive beauty», complains one Venetian of the state his city has been reduced to for the sake of tourist profits. Nowadays, people are even talking about «Venice Park» or «Venice Land», just as they did about Luna Park and Disney Land. Venice is the emblematic case of a city that has been forced to sell itself because of the economic decline triggered by the fall of the Serenissima, the «Serenest» Republic of Venice. Turn your eyes to this ex-city-state can help us pinpoint some of the problems associated with the deceptive beauty of tourism in «art cities».

The Venetian case

The Venetian case is controversial. Contrary to what is repeated in history textbooks, when it was abolished by a plebiscite organized after Napoleon's passage, the Republic was doing relatively well economically. At least, well enough to survive. The ensuing dependence on the Austrians marked a period of poverty and decadence, favoring the ideological rise of the Risorgimento, the movement to unify Italy. Many Venetians saw it as a way to regain their height. Others just saw the risk of ending up under the sway of another iniquitous lord.

It was a good mix of both. If, on the one hand, Northern Italy could really benefit from the industrial development of the newly-born Kingdom of Italy, on the other hand, it marked the official end of Venice. The development had favored the famous cultural centers of the Venetian possessions on land: Padua and its prestigious medieval university was enlarged, Verona became famous for its operas: these are two splendid examples! By 1887, already twenty years after Unity, all the cities were linked by an efficient railroad system. Venice, which was not just a maritime city, nor a city built on an island in front of the coast, but in the middle of the lagoon waters, several kilometers from the shore, on more than three hundred natural and artificial islands, found itself almost cut off from this development.

Without the authority that had enabled it to centralize power, economic resources and the arts, Venice had no choice but to survive. The birth of bourgeois tourism in the belle époque, as witnessed by Death in Venice, Thomas Mann's famous book, dictated the path to take to avoid total bankruptcy. The myth of Venice was created for tourists, as Brodskij well recounts in his poetic but lucid Watermark, or Foundations for the incurable. Yes, because Venice, from the moment it abandoned itself to tourism, has become the setting for an incurable mystery.

The show, this beautiful deceiver

Multicolored flyers, flyers and brightly colored commercials. Not a wrinkle, not a flaw. Everyone's smiling, a family's running to their gaiety on the beach of the Lido; a couple sip moments of happiness in the city's most chic bar, the Florian, Venice, where nothing is left to chance, from the precious glass of Murano to the superb lace of Burano. This is the image of a Venice waiting to be discovered. But we could also talk about the center of Rome, Paris or Barcelona. In advertising, everything is more real than real, more real than real. Toulouse has never looked so rosy as on its welcome signs, beautifully displayed in its airport concourse.

But the most touristic cities tell us something else. This is the mystery of every city that has suffered this fate. Its dignity is hidden in its ostentation. Wherever the past has been most noble, wherever it has left the most obvious traces of its glory, that's where the spectacle machine is set up, whether in the slender lines of French Gothic or the exuberant splendor of Portuguese Manueline. Monuments, museums, works of art, squares and churches - everything remains in its place, but everything slyly changes function. The invisible diaphragm of spectacularization has already slipped between these buildings, which they are actually and our eye.

Visit show is now necessary to sustain a city that no longer has - or believes it no longer has - living resources in the present. In fact, it helps to kill off what might have been future resources for the city, such as craft guilds, a cultural life not limited to guided tours and, to return to Venice, an industry that might still have flourished. The light from the lanterns illuminating the facade of the Doge's Palace in St. Mark's Square in Venice reveals architectural marvels to our compulsive hunger, typical of the great stressors of city life. At best, it satisfies the voracious phantasm of the historian. But this same light hides from us the real palace that was inhabited by the Doge: the one Venetians were accustomed to rubbing shoulders with on their way to mass on Sundays, the one that had the stench of salt water and the scent of spices and incense from the trading cities that belonged to the Serene all over the Mediterranean.

This reality is hidden from us by the very way tourism presents it. The same tourism that has done away with the framework that gave us access to the reality of this city. In fact, when you go to St. Mark's, you'll only find Venetians there on Sundays. Its mosaic vaults, sumptuously adorned with symbols and gold, no longer echo with the whispers of prayer. Now it's the chaotic din of foolish commentary: from the one who complains that «the ice of the Florian was expensive» to those who, admittedly, are astonished by the amount of gold and wonder «where can I buy a postcard? The same applies to the Venetian markets, which are gradually dying out. What sense does it make to sell fish or fennel to tourists? Significantly, there are only 50,000 Venetians today, compared with twice as many in the post-war period and four times as many in the city's heyday.

A mystery: diamonds in misery

But that's not all, there's also a lot of misery. A tragic wound. And this misery is shown in what we hide, or would like to hide, from the city: dilapidated buildings, crumbling walls, the tragedy of families losing their homes after generations, a wealth of work that is dying, social fabrics that are crumbling, and with them the lives of these people, their stories, their know-how that still had something to teach us and share with us. What made these people's existence so dense and meaningful is gradually evaporating from reality, to appeal only to the tastes and daydreams of tourists.

And finally, there's the eternal poverty, the kind you'd have seen anyway and which is not the result of tourism, but of the Venetians themselves. Here, you won't find the grand boulevards that bear the imperial stamp as in Paris or Vienna. Adverts may alter the colors of photos with Photoshop, but Venice was once a center of wealth, art and power, but basically it was never anything more than a center of merchants and pole fishermen who lived in narrow, sometimes tiny houses. Visit Very Serene was stained, with the help of the Franks, with the blood of the inhabitants of Constantinople, during the siege of 1204, even if more recent research also shows the injustices perpetrated on the other side. It was also the scene of fierce and cruel political struggles within its borders. It has left some sestiers of the city die in misery.

This city has many unhealable wounds. The wounds left by its real history, by the real poverty of its people, which we hardly ever see today. And the wound of not being able to fully bring to life the Venice of the Venetians, who still know how to be as warm and welcoming as the good merchants they were. A city that suffers from an unreal myth that tragically feeds off its real splendor. This is the mystery of an almost unknown city that has survived the «mystery» created by Hollywood fantasies; that is, the Venice that smells of baccalà e polenta to the strong character of the Adriatic Sea, the Venice that speaks the dialect of the place, a hard-working dialect, which has nothing of the Neapolitan accent, so Tyrrhenian and plaintive.

So? Should we renounce all tourism in cities like Venice? Perhaps we should renounce the concept of tourism, yes, but go on a real vacation, one that respects the places we visit. This form of travel involves us in the life of the place, learning from its inhabitants how to pick the fruit that needs to be picked. Who, moreover, would dare to behave like a boss in a place where he or she is only the last to arrive? Every city, even the most beautiful, hides a mystery, not the easy mystery of tourist attractions, but the mystery of the glories and miseries of its inhabitants and buildings. So let's visit the Doge's Palace, but also the bumpy alleyways, which hold other treasures in store for us, sometimes even accepting a humbler reality than we'd imagined. So maybe, instead of returning from vacation with, at best, a feeling of having unburdened our nerves, we'll come back more mature in our relationship to the world. Let's go there, if we can, knowing someone local who can teach us to have the right relationship with the city, the one that doesn't lie, either about its wrinkles or its beauty.

Write to the author: giovanni.ryffel@leregardlibre.com