Off the Beaten Path in Venice

The City of Venice has long been a source of inspiration and wonder for the world. Despite its reputation for tourism, Venice is a year-round home to many people: students, families, farmers and fisherman, leaders in the tourism industry, and both Italian and international homeowners. During our Northern Italy field trip last week, City and Regional Planning students set out to look past the gondola rides and tourist havens and find this hidden, “real” city of Venice.

In the busy Piazza Santa Margarita, home to university students and local public schools, 17 planners met with a local Venetian who held the title “Magistrate of the Waters.” This position, which dates back to the 1500s, manages the relationship between the built environment of Venice and the delicate, ever-changing natural environment of the Lagoon. In beautiful, poetic language, the Magistrate described the interconnectedness of the two realms, and expressed hope that we consider Venice the ultimate example of modernity despite its near 1200-year-old existence. While modern is often the last adjective one would think of when describing Venice, the city has survived multiple natural disasters and military occupations because of its adaptive citizenry and receptivity to technological assistance.

To learn more about the year-round Venetian lifestyle, we traveled an hour North by boat to explore the small fishing island of Burano. Our professors led a tour of the 80-unit public housing complex intended to ease the rent burden on Burano famers and fisherman. Although located on a single plot of farmland, it was designed to echo the canals, alleys, and campos (small piazzas) of the famous Venice of St. Mark’s Square, but articulated and painted in the unique style of Burano.

Riding the ferry through the Lagoon back to central Venice, I realized that although we had set out to find something real behind the façade of tourism, in reality there is no separation between the two. The icons of the city – St. Mark’s Basilica, the Doge’s Palace, Rialto Bridge, Palazzo d’Oro, the Grand Canal – are integrated in the daily life of residents just as much as they are impressed on the fantasy of tourists. The city’s canals, winding streets, monumental bridges and secret passageways, which seem incredible, beautiful, even Disney-fied, are in reality solutions to an infrastructural problem in a unique environment. The culmination in Venice of that which is old and new, surreal and functional, monumental and personal, results in exactly what the Magistrate of the Waters described: a testament to the modern city.