Campaign For A Living Venice

VENEZIA: “I think with terror of the first time that we raise the blocks of MoSE and Piazza San Marco will be under water anyway, and these images will travel around the world. There is need to move quickly in all institutions for San Marco.”

So said the engineer Fabio Riva, Director of the Public Works (the former Magistracy of the Waters of Venice) as he attended the presentation of a project prepared by the ‘procurtoria’ of San Marco for keeping the entrance to the Basilica of San Marco dry. This precious marble entrance today is under water 200 days a year, for over 900 hours.

Riva then added, “when in June 2018 we raise MoSE in Venice is will seem as though nothing happened.”

“As a citizen I find it unacceptable that activating MoSE at 100 cm there will already be 40 cm of water in San Marco, 50 cm if it activates at 110 cm,” said Mario Piana, co-author of the project to keep San Marco dry at least 70% of the time. “It is unacceptable, and the world will laugh at us.”

The project’s authors say that it has been tested and will require a year of work and 1 to 2 million Euros – financing which at the moment does not exist. Without such a project, the Basilica, which begins to flood at 65 cm, the the Piazza, which floods at just over 80 cm, will continue to flood indefinitely, regardless of MoSE’s efficacy at higher water levels.

Source: La Nuova di Venezia, 10-28-2016