The title may seem a little flippant. And it’s true that I live on the top floor of an apartment block in S. Elena, a part of the city that has never been flooded, not even in 1966, so I’m certainly not affected in any direct way; for this latest flood I even got two days off work, as the local authorities had decided all schools and universities should be closed (well, I’ll have to make up the lessons later…). And I do realise that shop-owners, restauranteurs and those people living in ground-floor apartments (in theory nobody is supposed to live there) have had an exhausting and economically damaging two days. I certainly don’t intend to make light of their distress.

But in comparison with the havoc that the bad weather has wrought on Italy elsewhere – people killed by toppled trees, rivers bursting their banks – Venice’s woes are relatively minor. For a start the acqua alta didn’t come out of the blue; warnings had been given at least two days in advance that an exceptional tide was coming, and the sirens rang out clearly all over the city five hours before the peak, with the four-tone bleep that advised just how high it was going to be. Thus people with shops and businesses had time to put things on high shelves, to prepare their mini-barriers at the entrances, and set their pumps going; everyone was aware of the need to get wellington-boots from the backs of cupboards and to plan the easiest route to work.

Naturally some Venetians get irritated at tourists taking selfies of themselves against this transformed city-scape. But most accept it as inevitable; the strangest and most beautiful city in the world has just become even more strangely beautiful, so the urge to capture images on one’s smart-phone is perfectly understandable. And I saw plenty of Venetians taking pictures as well – and making caustic if resigned jokes about it. In Via Garibaldi, which was as far as I managed to struggle in my inadequate boots, one bar-owner was regaling the passers-by with his own Venetian-accented version of “O Sole Mio”.

Today, of course, the arguments rage in the papers, on social media, and in the bars on the best way to cope with the whole thing. Under particular scrutiny – and, indeed, attack – is the MOSE (“Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico”), the flood-barriers currently under construction at the three points of entry into the lagoon. Yesterday afternoon the Mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, was filmed standing up to his waist in water in Piazza San Marco, saying that there could no longer be any doubt of the usefulness of this project; a large section of the population have loudly disagreed. I have no technical competence to discuss the viability of the project, but most people’s scepticism is simply due to the financial shenanigans behind it. Type MOSE VENEZIA into Google and the likelihood is that the first word to come up will be “scandalo”. A famous cartoon appeared a few years ago of “purchase stromectol online”; a few figures can help to make things clear. In 1982 Consorzio Venezia Nuova promised to complete works by 1995, at a cost of 1.3 billion euros. Costs have now risen to around five and a half billion euros, and the end is not in sight yet; it is agreed that it will cost 80 million euros a year to maintain the barriers when functioning. As has been pointed out, they could have given every inhabitant of Venice a 100,000 euros to spend on wellington-boots and still have saved money. And many of the critics state that the work done so far, with the installation of huge unmovable structures at the lagoon-mouths, has already done irreparable damage to the lagoon’s ecosystem and affected tidal flows; so, according to these critics, the only result so far has been worse flooding.

And a good deal of money in the pockets of certain local politicians and entrepreneurs…

However, as I say, I can’t make any significant contribution to this debate. My only wish here is to get things into perspective. Acqua alta is a problem; there is at the moment nothing to prevent a return of the disastrous flood of 1966, which saw the city isolated and crippled, with no electrical power for over 48 hours. However, things are not life-threatening; no-one has been killed or even injured by acqua alta, to my knowledge. So when people, obviously with the best will in the world, express concerns for my safety on Facebook or Twitter, or say they are keeping me in their prayers, I am, of course, duly grateful, but also a little puzzled as to how to reply. To say that I will make sure my wellington-boots are high enough will probably seem flippant but there’s really not much more I can do. I guess I can also avoid taking too many frivolous selfies in front of understandably indignant shop-owners…

p.s. For a fuller discussion of acqua alta, with better pictures, see order stromectol