Venice: The Meeting of East and West - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 93

with sturdy planks. On flood days, tourists are well advised to see Venice by wearing tall
rubber boots. Autumn is an especially vulnerable time for travelers.
After years of debate and procrastination, the government of Italy is hard at work on
building seventy-eight steel floodgates that will rise in advance of rising tides to keep wa-
ter out of the lagoon. Environmentalists worry that the project will threaten the wetlands
ecology of the lagoon. The floodgates call for dredging sixteen million cubic feet of earth
from the lagoon and replacing it with eight million tons of rock and nearly one million tons
of concrete. If successful, the floodgates will work much the same way as the floodgates
of the River Thames in London, keeping the lagoon from spilling into the streets, campi ,
and piazze and preventing sea water from flooding the canals. If unsuccessful, the future of
Venice will continue to be problematic.
TODAY'S SHOPPER IN VENICE
Visiting the Venice of today is like taking many steps backward in time. It is an exercise,
as the artist Arbit Blatas suggested, like peeling back layer upon layer of a painting, to re-
veal earlier and earlier iterations of this famous city. But Venice, like every historical urban
center of note, also accommodates the modern traveler. The shops of Gucci, Ferragamo,
Louis Vuitton, and countless other modern designers adorn the side streets of Venice (along
with cheap kiosks whose level of tackiness grows with each passing year). But the hunting
grounds for designer purchases of the rich and famous share their valued space with long-
time sellers of two traditional products: Murano glass and Carnival masks.