Biography & True Stories
Venice is lagoon
by Roberto Ferrucci
After the two tragedies avoided in summer 2019, the theme of the cruises ships in the lagoon has returned to international prominence. For too many years Venice has been waiting in vain for the solution to what is only one of the serious problems that afflict the city (tens of millions of tourists who besiege it every year, thousands of apartments Airbnb and the consequent hemorrhage of residents, the scandal of the Mose, the most useless and expensive public work in Europe) and the solution can only be one: out the ships from the lagoon. This long story, that in France has been defined a récit, tries to give voice to those who live in Venice and is forced to suffer the sieges of mass tourism. In an alternation between the lagoon and Saint Nazaire, where most of the cruise ships are built, the narrator and his companion do the accounts with the consequences of these epochal anomalies. They are looking, like other Venetians, for a possible key to resistance in a city where obstacles are increasing day by day, in the face of the indifference of institutions often hindering themselves. Venice, which has become the crossroads and the emblem of an era finally forced to come to terms with a nature that is showing us the bill, that tells us to hurry, that time is up. A book that tries with the word to find an alternative route, a possible and necessary reversal of course to save the most beautiful and fragile city in the world, and with it the entire planet. The series: Taccuini d'Autore collects books on the road. Texts that travel around the world, crossing the frontiers of writing, crossing this abstruse era looking for traces of meaning, meeting stories, landscapes, characters. Books that accompany us in our daily lives and in ours elsewhere.
