Alarmist headline in the Daily Express
Highly misleading captions in Fortune.com
As I said in my earlier blog post, “acqua alta is a big nuisance”. It could become something much worse if the circumstances of November 1966 were to be repeated. However, so far that hasn’t happened. Monday’s acqua alta was bad, caused a certain amount of damage and a great deal of inconvenience. But, despite the havoc wrought elsewhere in Italy, nobody in Venice was killed, and no-one, to the best of my knowledge, even injured. Certainly no landmarks were “destroyed”. And so headlines like the ones featured here are highly misleading, not to say alarmist.Â
In yesterday’s Gazzettino, hoteliers reported cancellations by as many as a third of their foreign clients, who had seen the newspaper-reports and the photographs. Speaking selfishly, as one who doesn’t rely on the tourist industry for my income, I’m certainly not likely to complain if the number of visitors goes down, but I can see how frustrating it must be for people in the business to lose customers for no good reason at all. One manager reported the case of a couple who, despite the fact that their room was on the upper floor (as is invariably the case), insisted on moving out and spending the night in the car-park at Piazzale Roma, where they would feel safer.Â
So just to repeat the title of this post, acqua alta is not a tsunami. No-one is going to get swept into a canal by a sudden tidal wave while reading their guidebook or gazing at a Tintoretto. Don’t cancel your holidays because of a few careless and ill-judged newspaper headlines.Â
You mean we can’t trust everything the Daily Express tells us??
Sorry to have to break this news to you…
I would like to say that I encountered a big chunk of wood floating just below the surface of the water on Monday evening. I have a bruise on my shin. So I would like to bravely say I was wounded in the Acqua Alta of 2018 !! However, I have awarded myself a medal of bravery in the form of a t shirt with a handy graph on it showing the wellington boot in relation to water depth.
I’ll make sure to bear this in mind when drawing up the list of the victims of 29th October.
The T-shirt sounds very useful – but it must be difficult to measure the boot against it if you’re wearing both items.
Only just noticed this post & the replies.
How strange, when I was back in Venice from early November, I didn’t see huge evidence of devastation. Must clean my glasses.
Venice coped wonderfully. The area of England I live in is increasingly often flooded, and they simply can’t cope. Electrics, etc need to be planned from the start, and the flood door gates are wonderful. Fortunately I live too high up to be personally affected by our floods!
Thanks for your comments, Ella B. It was a bad acqua alta, as they go, and people say some severe damage was done to the fabric of St Mark’s. However, for most people it was a matter of severe inconvenience rather than of devastation, and for the most part the damage done was dealt with or cleared up by the very next day. Venetians are used to these things, after all, and all the signs are that they’re going to be increasingly frequent…