The sinking city
Marco Claudio Campi | Venice, Italy
Organization: University of Brescia
Photographer: Marco Claudio Campi
Organization: University of Brescia
Exhibit Title: The sinking city
Location: Venice, Italy
Venice sits atop sediments deposited at the mouth of the Po River. After surviving this precarious condition for more than fourteen centuries, early industrial projects laid bare its vulnerability, making the city prone to sinking effects. More recently, climate changes have worsened the situation dramatically. Rising sea levels and increasingly strong winds from the open sea into the lagoon have now come to jeopardize the city's very integrity.
It is in this scenario that a series of adverse meteorological conditions culminated in the great flood of November 2019. With a height of 187 cm, this was the second-largest tide ever recorded. Then, in 2020 the MOSE (Experimental Electromechanical Module) started operation, bringing a promise of radically solving the problem. However, unknown to most, MOSE is completely inadequate to address the challenges posed by the rising sea level, which threatens to submerge the city in the coming years.
This gallery tells the story of a city that is slowly slipping toward its doom.
Marco Campi is a photojournalist based in Milan, Italy. His photographic work intertwines with his activity at the University of Brescia, where he teaches “Inductive reasoning”, the science of identifying patterns from observations. Broadly, his interests lie in the vast domain of uncovering the “big picture” from single snapshots. In this respect, photography serves as a means to capture fragments of truth which, properly pieced together, reveal deeper insights into the human experience. Campi’s photographic work has taken him multiple times to India, where he documented youth movements and developed a long-term project titled “On the traces of prana”. In South Africa, he studied the life conditions in townships. During the pandemic, from October 2020 to July 2021, he exclusively photographed at Milan’s Monumentale Cemetery. The poignant encounters he experienced during those heart-wrenching months were collected in the photobook “Diary of a pandemic” published in late 2023 by Polistampa. His current work focuses on the pressing issue of climate change, with an ongoing project on the condition of the city of Venice.
via Bolzano 27
20127 Milano
Italy
e_mail: marco.campi@unibs.it
ph: +39 3207806380
Venice sits atop sediments deposited at the mouth of the Po River. After surviving this precarious condition for more than fourteen centuries, early industrial projects laid bare its vulnerability, making the city prone to sinking effects. More recently, climate changes have further worsened the situation dramatically. Rising sea levels and increasingly strong winds from the open sea into the lagoon have now come to jeopardize the city's very integrity. With Venice slipping toward its doom, the scientific community debates how it could possibly be saved.
It is in this scenario that a series of adverse meteorological conditions culminated in the great flood of November 2019. With a height of 187 cm, this was the second-largest tide ever recorded, surpassed only by the memorable "acqua granda" of 194 cm which occurred in 1966. To experience it first-hand, I traveled to Venice twice that year, documenting the conditions suffered by the population. The photographs captured during those two trips were grouped into a collection titled "The Last Tide". This name was chosen as a good omen: I was aware that the MOSE (Experimental Electromechanical Module), a massive flood protection system that had been under construction for over sixteen years, was soon expected to become operational, promising to provide a final solution to the problem of high tides. In hindsight, the MOSE only partially fulfilled its promise, as I documented on three more occasions in the following years. That second group of photographs led to the collection called "The New Normal".
But, why hasn’t MOSE resolved the problem? MOSE was first activated on October 3, 2020, when Venice was hit by a high tide of 135 centimeters. Without MOSE, this tide would have put more than half the city underwater, but on that day the city remained almost dry. A Venetian, who had suffered from too many floodings, told CNN, "This is historic... like the first step of Armstrong on the moon". However, not all that glitters is gold, and the initial excitement has now waned.
One problem is that deciding to raise the barriers is a complicated process. Two establishments, the "Centro Maree di Venezia" and the "Sala Operativa Consorzio Venezia Nuova", make weather predictions using their models and compare forecasts. MOSE's barriers are raised only if there is consensus that the water will reach or exceed 110 cm. This level, however, does not prevent low-lying areas, like piazza San Marco, from flooding. On my trip in 2021, the manager of one of piazza San Marco’s historic cafés told me while standing in waders, "Nothing much has really changed, this leaves a sour taste".
So, why not operate MOSE at lower tides as well? This is due to several reasons: frequent gate closures would "doom the lagoon and destroy its ecosystem", Fabio Carrera, a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and founder of the "Venice Project Center" said. Moreover, operating the barriers requires coordination and causes disruption. Elisabetta Spitz, the "extraordinary commissioner" for MOSE, explained that warnings start 48 hours before the tide, informing everyone operating in the lagoon, from trash-collecting boats to ships needing to change course. Last but not least, each gate closure incurs significant costs: estimates made by the "Consorzio Venezia Nuova" suggest a cost of €323,000 each time.
In these years, with MOSE far from providing a final solution, the authorities have been seeking additional measures. During one of my last visits to Venice in late 2023, I saw an innovative glass barrier erected to prevent water from covering the precious marbles and mosaics of the Basilica of San Marco. Scientists also proposed various other measures, such as raising the pavement of piazza San Marco and modifying its drainage system to stop water backflow, currently the primary pathway for water entering the square during high tides. To counter wave overtopping from the San Marco quay, temporary floating breakwaters have also been suggested.
But, what can we expect for the future? Undoubtedly, this is the most important question.
Scientists have hypothesized various scenarios for sea level rise. The most likely predicts a rise of 1 meter by 2100 and 0.5 meters by 2060, while the worst-case scenario foresees a rise of 0.5 meters by 2040 and 2.5 meters by 2100 (source: NOAA Climate.gov). This forecasts acquire an ominous and alarming significance in relation to a fundamental aspect of MOSE’s operation: its gates do not create a watertight barrier. This implies that a rise in the average sea level results in a rise in the lagoon level even when the gates are closed, which will ultimately doom Venice to get submerged in the not-so-distant future.
Since the fact that MOSE lacks to be watertight may come as a surprise to our readers, it is relevant to take a moment to comprehend how MOSE functions. MOSE exploits a simple principle from system theory: every system behaves as a low-pass filter. This means that the system filters out frequencies above a certain range, causing input oscillations beyond the cut-off frequency to vanish in the output. For example, if we rapidly move one end of an elastic band up and down, a mass attached to the opposite end barely moves. MOSE works on this same low-pass principle: tides sway above the cut-off frequency of the lagoon system, formed by the lagoon and the MOSE barriers that slow the flow of water. As a result, Venice remains shielded from the effects of high tides. However, as dramatic as it may seem, since MOSE is not watertight, it is entirely unsuitable to confront the sea level rise that we will experience in the near future. This rise will put the city permanently underwater whether or not the barriers will be closed. Jane da Mosto, co-founder and executive director of "We Are Here Venice," a nonprofit association focused on Venice's challenges, expressed her view on MOSE with these words: "A highly impacting, heavily engineered, and overly complicated solution was adopted. It can, at best, only prevent extensive flooding from extreme events. But other things need to be done to protect the urban fabric from the chronic impacts of higher and higher average water levels". It's difficult to disagree with these words.
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