“Battisti Elementary has a view right onto Via Dante, the pedestrian and cycle road that leads to the underpass to Marghera, which is often a meeting place for drug dealers and users. An emblematic message has appeared on the walls of the underpass in recent days: ‘Mestre is a condemnation. If you’re going there, save yourself while you still can. By the time you realize it, it will be too late’.”
December 7, 2023
By Paul Rosenberg
Throughout 2023 one of the most consistently read stories on this site was “Welcome to ‘Heroin Street’ Mestre – the Drug Dealing Capital of the Northeast”, originally published on October 29, 2022. Now as we enter 2024 it’s clear that not much has changed.
The news from Mestre on January 5 reported the spectacle of two people sitting across the street from the Battisti Elementary School on via Dante and injecting heroin, with a friend watching over them.
Fortunately, the school was still closed for the winter break. Police were called, but the group moved off on its own. As the news story dryly remarks, “The need to intervene on the drug problem in Mestre remains evident”. Indeed, 2023 saw a variety of popular initiatives along these lines organized by a broad coalition of citizens’ groups and associations, aimed at “Taking Back the City”. But beyond promises of more policing, little has been done by the Municipality. People are still calling for more social services, more health services, and more ways of helping the drug users, who often end up living on the street for days or longer, other than just policing. The public selling and use of drugs like heroin is now the norm.
The outburst of the one citizen interviewed in the story pretty much sums up the situation for those who live in Mestre: “We’re fed up, it’s time to stop living with these scenes before our eyes”.
That same day a letter was published in a different newspaper that offers a stark look at another big element playing a role in Mestre’s decline – poverty. The text reports that for 2021 and 2022, Venice is the municipality with the lowest average per capita income in Veneto, and also last in family disposable income. This stands in contrast to the fact that “Venice is the third municipality in terms of tourism added value (3,076,678,870 euros according to Istat 2022)”. Tourism, the letter points out, was supposed to be the mainland’s new ‘vocation’ once the Petrochemical plants closed. The real economic results for workers, however, are dramatic:
“average Venetian taxpayers, mostly from Mestre, are tourism workers, in large number seasonal, in large number foreigners from single-income families, many managed by cooperatives in the related industries, to which should be added similar workers in the construction industry. According to Istat (XXI Annual Report, July 2022), looking at annual salaries, “64.5% of employees in hotels and restaurants are in poverty…” even if we only consider full-time workers. It should be added that the ownership of the majority of high-level accommodation facilities is foreign (except for a few courageous Venetian hoteliers who are fighting an unequal struggle) and that what remains of the “added” value in Venice are the bricole and the mountains of “added” trash whose management costs are a heavy burden on residents throughout the municipality. “Only a handful of cooks, waiters, tourist guides, landlords, hotel doormen, rose sellers, taxi drivers, restorers, and gondoliers will remain” says Tiziano Scarpa in his The Passenger.
… The decline of Mestre and the mainland that began with the petrochemical crisis and its related industries cannot be stopped by the industrial tourism monoculture which is not suitable for producing economic and social growth in the territory.” (Maria Laura Faccini, President of the Common Project Committee, published in Il Gazzetino)
The common thread between these two tragic New Year’s stories is the Brugnaro Administration and its policies. Instead of delivering the revitalization, decorum and security he promised when campaigning in 2015, instead of having the “Courage to Do” anything other than promote his dream sports stadium that he promised when campaigning in 2020, Brugnaro and his government have brought poverty and ruin to the citizens on both sides of the bridge, selling them out and selling the city off to foreign investors and luxury chains, and enriching Brugnaro’s own businesses fabulously along the way, notwithstanding the “blind trust”.
But back to the story about the heroin users. I’m not sure why this story gets read so often, but it is true and it is the reality in Mestre now, and just as much of a part of Venice as anything else is – especially as the drugs and violence inexorably find their way into the historic city, as has already begun happening.
The news story ends with the following unsettling detail: “Battisti Elementary has a view right onto Via Dante, the pedestrian and cycle road that leads to the underpass to Marghera, which is often a meeting place for drug dealers and users. An emblematic message has appeared on the walls of the underpass in recent days: ‘Mestre is a condemnation. If you’re going there, save yourself while you still can. By the time you realize it, it will be too late’.”
2025 still seems a long way off, but I can only keep hoping that it isn’t too late.
-News story source: La Nuova di Venezia e Mestre
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