Decision was made by the Ministers of Ecological Transition, Roberto Cingolani, Culture, Dario Franceschini, Tourism, Massimo Garavaglia, and of Infrastructure and Sustainable Transportation, Enrico Giovannini
25 March 2021
VENEZIA. With the goal of protecting a historical-cultural heritage that is not only Italian but global, the Ministers of Ecological Transition, Roberto Cingolani, Culture, Dario Franceschini, Tourism, Massimo Garavaglia, and of Infrastructure and Sustainable Transportation, Enrico Giovannini, agreed to temporarily redirect cruise ship traffic from Venice towards Marghera. We read this in a note that explains how, during a meeting held today in videoconference, the four Ministers have additionally decided to launch “a competition for ideas to get the docks out of the lagoon and definitely, structurally resolve the problem of the transit of cruise ships at Venice”.
Venetian senator of the Moviemento 5 Stelle party, Orietta Vanin, responded in a statement released on Beppe Grillo’s Blog: “The new government was born under the banner of ecological transition and of conscious and sustainable development. In Venice the guidelines for the future of the City are going in exactly the opposite direction: this will be made clear with an example and with the resulting operational proposals. The Minister of Infrastructure and Transportation has decided on the long term removal of the cruise ships from the Lagoon of Venice. However, in order to prevent the transit of the trans-atlantics in front of San Marco, alternative access routes that can be run immediately have been identified, making the ships pass along the Malamocco-Marghera Canal, and equipping ports for the short to medium term at Marghera. There could not be a worse solution for two reasons: 1) the Lagoon of Venice is being treated like a branch of the sea, when it has an average depth of 150cm and most of its surface has a depth of 50 centimeters. Having these 90-100-150 thousand ton behemoths of the sea transit here, in very narrow water corridors (the canals), means forever endangering the ecosystem of the most important humid zone in Europe (which only for a lack of political courage has not yet been declared a National Park); and these are not the sterile preoccupations of a few environmentalists: during the Acqua Granda of November 2019 there were micro-tsunamis within the Lagoon, the waves from which filled entire islands with sand (Lazzaretto Vecchio) and eroded the shores of the northern quarters of the city (Giudecca), and with the rise in sea level due to climate change the situation is bound to worsen. 2) Doing this incentivizes the tourism monoculture, which before the pandemic emptied the city of its inhabitants (with the transformation of homes into tourist residences), and now in the Covid era is creating a profound crisis because there are no alternative sources of income”. However, the Senator offered various solutions, among which are that of creating, with funding from the Recovery Fund, “a project – ‘Venezia – Laboratory of the 3rd Millenium’ – which also represents an international case study on climate change”.
-Source: La Nuova Venezia
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