Just before midnight on Nov. 12, Venice’s “acqua alta” reached 184 centimeters (6 feet) above sea level. It was generated by a combination of rising tides and powerful winds of more than 75 miles per hour. City officials estimated the damage at about 1 billion euros. Like many others, Mayor Luigi Brugnaro blamed climate change.
“I love my town, we’ve raised four children here, but the city has changed for the worse in the last five years,” said Giovanni Giol, president of the Benedetto Marcello music conservatory.
Housed in a palace built in the early 1600s, manuscripts and books in the library were soaked in this month’s historic flood. The worst affected items were sent to a restoration facility in Bologna, while others were carried to higher levels of the building and are drying out on floors of the museum alongside 17th century musical instruments.
“The storm brought home the reality of the situation,” said Jane Da Mosto, executive director of a non-profit organization trying to reverse the community’s decline by controlling tourism, including a ban on cruise ships. “Venice is close to falling off the precipice. There’s no control room.”
About 1,000 residents leave every year, and about 50,000 people now call the lagoon home. The former city-state has been governed together with its larger mainland neighbor Mestre since they were linked in 1926 by Fascist leader Benito Mussolini.
Activists like Da Mosto say the city’s issues are so unique that it needs to be separate. On Sunday, Venetians will vote on a referendum to give the community its own administrative structure, but it’s non-binding and opposed by the mayor, who has called the effort “folly” because it risks creating bureaucratic bottlenecks and discouraging investment.
That puts more focus on the fraught MOSE anti-flooding project. Embroiled in several corruption probes, the system of water gates is way over budget at 5.5 billion euros and counting, and won’t be ready until 2022—more than two decades after construction began.
And it will likely be useless in stopping rising tides, according to Nelli-Elena Vanzan Marchini, an Italian historian who has written several books on Venice.
Global warming has raised sea levels about 8 inches since 1880, according to Climate Central, an independent organization of scientists and journalists. The rate is accelerating and a recent report by the group predicted that high-tide lines could permanently rise above land occupied by around 150 million people by 2050, including 30 million Chinese.
That’s a bleak outlook for residents like Boldrin. Along with creating masks, the artist paints images that evoke the “Death of Venice” theme—dark, solitary figures crushed by the weight of the city’s decline.