Until a few centuries ago, Venice had only a few bridges, and its people moved around in rowing boats, as many of them still do today. Manoeuvering a boat in the narrow canals of the city or on the shallow waters of the surrounding Venetian lagoon is definitely not easy, and you really have to look at where the boat is going if you don’t want to bump into a wall or god forbid, into an expensive gondola.
A più di un anno dall’inizio dall’inizio di una delle crisi più complesse dai tempi della seconda guerra mondiale, la nostra risposta alla pandemia è sempre la stessa. In un periodo di tempo molto breve nei primi mesi del 2020, un certo tipo di risposta alla diffusione globale di un nuovo patogeno si è rapidamente imposto come quella che alcuni chiamano la “nuova normalità”.
School students, parents and teachers gather in front of Venezia’s central train station to call for the immediate re-opening of schools, which have recently been once again closed across most of Italy in a misguided response to an alarming rise in newly detected cases of Coronavirus.
In the only city in the world without cars, boats are the main mean of transportation. Since the early hours of the morning, the waters of Venice’s lagoon are crisscrossed by thousands of boats of all kinds: there are the famous gondole, the noisy tope used for transport, the elegant vaporetti, the oar-powered sandoli, and the sailing boats known as vela al terzo, a navigation system that is typical of the northern Adriatic sea.
Newspapers declare total alert over the rising number of SARS-CoV-2 cases, and also mention that newly impoverished hospitality workers are “knocking on the municipality’s door”. As we enter the third wave of the Coronavirus pandemic, authorities are closing schools and debating a total lockdown. In the meantime my flatmate, who left his village in Sicily one week after turning 18 to embark on a successful career as a chef here in Venice, is once again unemployed, and is still waiting for his unemployment money for May and June. While the country remain hypnotized by the evolution of the pandemic, every …