Tourism is the worst form of immigration. As the principle of mass-tourism is exemplified in the city which called herself “the most serene / Serenissima“ all other cities look at Venice for answers and pitfalls to avoid. A 5 euro tax will not make the floating city unattractive to the masses, neither render its unique charm and captivating history less alluring. There are a lot of evocative epithets being used for Venice, but “La Dominante,” has the least appealing ring to me. I like to call her secretly “buttercup” (or in Italian “ranuncolo”). It evokes a flower and butter, as butter has a lower density than water enabling it to float like other lower-density substances such as ice or oil. Some type of candy called butter cups are indeed be made of a lot of butter, but could also consist of heavy peanut butter or a spongy dough, like Peanut Butter Cup cookies. As we do not know for sure if all butter cups can swim imagine, if those get wet they will get soggy and likely sink like a proud little boat.
The word buttercup may refer also to a type of bright yellow flower, often growing near water, genus Ranunculus with about 1750 subspecies. The common name buttercup may derive from a false belief that the plants give butter its characteristic yellow hue and the fact it is deemed poisonous to cows and other livestock connects with the absence of these animals – and cars–, in the city of bridges. Other dwellings near the water line like Miami, Shanghai, New York or Singapore, face the same looming peril to be submerged by the ongoing climate crisis. So far Venice keeps its head out of the water, also with the help of the costly mobile floodgate system called “MOSE”. Endangered by rising sea levels and overtourism, the changing, reflected light in the lagoon is the envy of many bigger cities with a less colourful past.
Living now for 5 years in Venice, it is for me about saturated beauty, contemporary art, historic sweetness in the architectural interplay with the water and light as well as stubborn resilience, floating on the surface like a block of churned butter or a flower petal. Cigar ends as well as cigarette stubs also float on the water, may it be the Venetian lagoon’s or any other waters on and off the Mediterranean sea. The young British travel writer Robert T. Byron visited Venice again in his famous account “The Road to Oxiana” in 1933 and described “water like hot saliva” on Lido di Venezia, floating cigar ends and “shoals of jelly fish”.
The products of tobacco addiction which pestered our environment have long since gone, but the waters of Lido and their changing qualities as well as the occasional jelly fish infestation remains. It is still a paradise of calm and quite relaxed summer tourism in comparison to the crammed and loud beaches along the coast like Jesolo, Bibione or Caorle. The Venetians love it and the world only looks more closely when the summer heat is interrupted by droves of Hollywood stars, and the flock of paparazzi following them during the Venice Film Festival, oldest in the circus of festivals.
Venice, like a neorealist movie is generally kept afloat with nonprofessional actors, although in a number of cases, well-known rich players are cast in leading roles, playing strongly against their normal character types in front of a background populated by local people. The current mayor is such a personality, catering to a few but still developing a lot in Mestre, where most of the former Venetians fled, after they sold their properties. Venice is almost exclusively focused on its own location, capitalising on the beauty of a rundown city, showcasing the flashy mask of the lowest and most easily flooded area of former Byzantine loot, Sant Mark’s square.
Neorealist films, like Venice, typically explore the conditions of the poor and the lower working class, which come as immigrant workers and mass tourist invasions pouring from Cruise ships like cigarette stubs form the mouths of actors in the 50s. Venetians often exist within a simple social order holding up former Aristocrat pecking order where historic birthright is the primary objective.
Tourists and local influencers alike on the other hand pay homage, using their smart phones for selfies against the picturesque backdrop for both sympathetic and cynical depictions, constantly portraying their own pain, misfortune, social struggles, and working-class struggles in social life, but with usually no aim of criticising the injustice of the real social system and resisting reality. The “most instagrammable city” buttercup is helping display a gay “look, here I am in the most beautiful romantic setting, all happy” forgetting the struggles for the term of the stay.
One can say, classical neorealist films in the Golden Age of Italian Cinema, like Roberto Rossellini’s “Rome, Open City” did as well aestheticise as much as document the struggle of people trying to keep their lives afloat. I like to see Venice through that prism, that its remaining inhabitants and numerous visitors with a tolerance for filming equipment like the selfie stick, create and repeat on top of antique foundations “a new world in which the main elements have not so many narrative functions as they have their own aesthetic value, related with the eye that is watching them and not with the action they are coming from” (Augusto Sainati, 1998).
cit. Sainati, Augusto (1998). Supporto, soggetto, oggetto: forme di costruzione del sapere dal cinema ai nuovi media, in Costruzione e appropriazione del sapere nei nuovi scenari tecnologici (in Italian). Napoli: CUEN. p. 154.)
THIS TEXT got published in his Italian translated version in ArtsLife Magazine on the 01.03.2025 with the title Il Neorealismo Contemporaneo di Venezia https://artslife.com/2025/03/01/immagini-di-citta-2-il-neorealismo-contemporaneo-di-venezia