Sunil Sethi: A Short Walk on the Grand Canal

AL FRESCO

Venice: Last Sunday morning I hopped into a water bus, or vaporetto, the prevalent form of public transport in the city of waterways and lagoons and wafted up and down the Grand Canal to look at some of the local museums. The choice was immense: In the sunlit rooms and gardens of the Palazzo Venier di Leoni, where the American heiress and collector Peggy Guggenheim lived for 30 years to amass one of the great private collections of 20th century abstract and Surrealist art, the Giacomettis, Picassos and Jackson Pollocks were laid out in all their glory together with contemporary exhibits by artists like Anish Kapur. A short walk from the Guggenheim collection, at the Accademia, there for long queues to see 28 masterpieces by the Venetian painter Titian assembled from museums around the world. Across the Grand Canal, at the magnificent Palazzo Grassi, its revival paid for by tycoons like Gianni Agnelli and Francois Pinault and its galleries modernised by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, there is a monumental exhibition "Rome and the Barbarians" with treasures from the Byzantine age. Welcoming visitors to the Grassi at its waterside pier is a gigantic skull-shaped installation composed of everyday stainless steel utensils ""tiffin carriers, buckets, dekchis etc "" by the Indian artist Subodh Gupta.

The heart of Venice is a small place, so small that Napoleon called the Piazza San Marco "the finest drawing room in Europe". Some 12 million tourists troop through it every year "" about three times the number that all of India receives. On water and on foot they traverse a fragile terrain of 400 bridges, 1580 km. of intersecting canals, some lanes so narrow that five people can hardly walk abreast, and innumerable churches and palaces that hold a trove of Renaissance and other treasures. Apart from a interval of a couple of winter months, when mists shroud the city and biting winds blow in from the lagoon, it is open season all year round in Venice.

Yet, in the four days I spent there last week, I saw no litter, no traffic jams of water buses, water taxis or gondolas and only a discreet and non-interfering police presence to monitor the roistering late-night crowds thronging the many picturesque squares, trattorias, bars and cafes. A friend who lives on the Grand Canal, leaning on his balcony the other day, observed a cormorant swoop down and pluck a fish out of the water: if the waters were badly polluted, there would be no aquatic life. But the tides from the lagoon that help wash the canals of Venice are also a curse.

For years, a combination of rising sea and dropping land levels, sudden sea storms and industrial effluents have flooded the city and threatened the extinction of the "Serenissima" "" the Serene One. The last major flooding of the city occurred in 1966. Now, an ambitious eight-year project known as the MOSE system, that will cost millions of Euros, is being put in place to control the water flow into the lagoon by way of barriers and gates, raising banks, removing pollutants and reconstructing marsh lands ecologically. Proud Venetians turned down offers of funding from the European Union, and the city, state and federal government have pooled resources and technological skills to implement the complex scheme to save Venice.

Being among the oldest and most successful businessmen on earth Venetians, however, have fewer reservations in accepting money and help to preserve their city. In his splendid book The City of Falling Angels, American journalist John Berendt (who wrote the bestselling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) chronicles the drama, intrigue, corruption and manipulation behind the fund-raising efforts of several foreign private organisations pledged to restoring individual buildings in Venice. I visited a couple last week, especially the jewel-box of the Renaissance Miracoli church. And it struck me that the wealth of any city "" its economy, history and accumulated centuries' old heritage "" can only be saved by its inhabitants.