The Venice Boardwalk is full of all kinds of people in all sorts of outfits and the atmosphere is very festive with many live street performances taking place, especially on weekends. This sculpture is an accommodation or resolution of opposites in one. Not only does this image bring the male and female together into one figure, but also, two opposite types of performers are represented: the formal classical ballet dancer and the traditional street performer. Of course, this public sculpture might push the envelope in ‘taste’, but if you have ever walked the Venice Boardwalk on a Sunday afternoon, you might understand why this figure is right at home.
One of the main reasons behind the charm of Venice, is the fact that is seems to be floating upon the waters of the lagoon. However the dark truth is that the city is actually sinking and has been for centuries. Venice has always lived on borrowed time, it is a city that should not exist - a whimsical maze of heavy marble palazzi and churches built upon ancient wooden piling sunk into a salt marsh. It is a wonder that Venice survived to the present day to face a threat that may finally end the life of this faded beauty: rising sea levels due to global climate change.
Facts about Venice: figures
In Venice there are about 7000 chimneys, of over 10 different types and shapes.
170 bell towers stand over the former queen of the Mediterranean. In the past, besides serving as a call for church services, they were also used as lighthouses or as observatories to control fires, mostly the San Marco bell tower, the tallest in the town.
The San Marco bell tower - or campanile - is the Italy's fifth tallest bell tower, measuring 98,6mt/275ft.
Built in the 12th century, it collapsed un-expectantly in 1902. The only victim was the poor cat of the caretaker. The tower was afterwards rebuilt exactly the same.
Venice is made up of 118 islands, 416 bridges, 177 canals, 127 campi (squares).
The biggest and longest canal is the S-shaped Grand Canal, splitting the town in two.
There are 3 ancient bridges over the Grand Canal: Rialto bridge, Accademia, Scalzi (Ferrovia).
There is a fourth one, the recent Calatrava bridge, close to the Scalzi bridge, near Piazzale Roma. It is only 4 years old, but I was recently told that it already begins to show signs of decay, unlike the centuries old ones...
6 sestieri, (Venetian quarters) make up Venice: San Marco, San Polo, Santa Croce, Dorsoduro, Cannaregio, Castello.
There are about 350 gondolas and 400 gondolieri.
The Veneto town is visited by 18 millions tourists a year, on average 50,000 a day.
Facts about Venice: its problems
Depopulation is a serious issue for the lagoon town: Venetians living in the historic center were 121,000 in 1966, decreased to about 60,000 today.
At this rate, some experts expect that in 2030 Venice may be a ghost town, populated only with tourists, coming in at morning until evening, like in a big theme park. Very sad.
The main causes of the Venice depopulation are:
the first great escape was during the 1966 flood (the same rainy year when Florence was hardly hit as well). On that occasion 16.000 Venetian ground-floor apartements were abandoned.
The progressive sinking of the town, with more frequent acqua alta (high water) phenomenons.
The increasing maintenance costs of its houses, old, often in bad conditions and constantly under attack by damp.
The increasing costs of houses and rentals: the real estate market is now dominated more and more by very wealthy people or corporations, Italians and foreigners, making the prices prohibitive for ordinary mortals.
This is both a cause and a consequence of depopulation: many small business, mom and pop stores, like handicraft stores, bakeries, small businesses, etc., are little by little closing down, swept away by big unpersonal chains established just for the huge tourism stream, or by stores filled with junk souvenirs or fake Venetian masks...
It is a catch 22, because due to high prices, most tourists prefer to sleep in Mestre, and even bring with them their box lunch when visiting Venice during daytime. It is understandable, but that way Venice often ends up to get more drawbacks than benefits from tourism.
Top ten animals in Venice Italy:
1. Pigeons
Piazza San Marco wouldn’t be the same without them, but their droppings play havoc with the stonework.
2. Lions
Symbol of Venice and St Mark, abundant statuary and paintings of lions in varying forms fill the city.
3. Cats
The city’s feline population is pampered and fed by affectionate Venetians.
4. Rats
Rare, thanks to imported Syrian cats in the past, replaced by an effective council eradication campaign.
5. Horses
Once ridden around town by the Venetian nobility, even up the Campanile via a ramp.
6. Dogs
By law dogs in Venice must be muzzled, kept on a leash and cleaned up after at all times.
7. Seagulls
Self-appointed garbage collectors, they do an admirable job around the markets.
8. Cormorants
Hundreds of elegant jet-black waterfowl inhabit the lagoon, to the chagrin of the fishermen.
9. Rhinoceroses
One of the many exotic circus animals portrayed on canvas by 18th-century artist Pietro Longhi.
10. Elephants
Incredibly, a runaway elephant from an 1819 circus took refuge in a church, and cannon fire was needed to dispatch it.
news in venice italy:
Italy, rich in art, cuisine and ancient history, went from being the “sick man of Europe’' to its third largest economy, only to see its future imperiled by stagnant growth, political paralysis and investor fears over the mountain of debt it has piled up over the years.
In a sense its economic troubles date back to the late 1990s, when the country’s manufacturing was overtaken by competitors in Asia. Its patronage-based politics and rule-bound labor practices changed little, but a flood of cheap money that followed the introduction of the euro helped keep the system going.
Then came the global financial crisis in 2007, which shrank Italy’s economy by more than 6 percent. Growth resumed in 2010, but was snuffed out in 2011 by the rising debt crisis, and the International Monetary Fund predicts “another decade of stagnation.”
At roughly 120 percent of G.D.P., its growth-hobbling government debt is second only to Greece’s among euro zone members. Although it has run a budget surplus, minus debt costs, for several years, the Italian government now spends 16 percent of that budget on interest payments — a bill that began to rise in the summer of 2011 as investors and creditors began to fear that Italy cannot escape Europe’s debt crisis.
As a result, the country has increasingly taken center stage on the debt crisis, as the amount of Italy’s debt held by foreigners — nearly 800 billon euros — is more than that of Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined. The debt problem is being compounded by the country’s economic slowdown — in December, the government’s minister for economic development proclaimed that Italy had already entered a recession.
The crisis did what Italy’s liberal parties could not — end the reign of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose government had moved too slowly to implement fiscal reforms to assuage either the markets or France and Germany, the heavyweights of the euro zone rescue efforts.
Mr. Berlusconi stepped down on Nov. 12 after a $75 billion package of deficit reduction measures were adopted, ending an era in the country’s history. His successor was a former European Commissioner, Mario Monti, who was asked to lead a cabinet of technocrats until the economic situation is stabilized and new elections are held.
In December, Mr. Monti unveiled a radical and ambitious package of spending cuts and tax increases, including deeply unpopular moves like raising the country’s retirement age. The measures are meant to slash the cost of government, combat tax evasion and step up economic growth, so the country can eliminate its budget deficit by 2013.
He won a vote of confidence on the package in the Assembly on Dec. 16, but only after it had been weakened in response to complaints from the right and the left. It was passed by the Senate the next week, but Mr. Monti felt the need to make it a vote of confidence, to fend off scores of modifications proposed by the Northern League, once a pillar of Mr. Berlusconi’s center-right coalition and now the loudest opposition party.
After days of political wrangling in Parliament, the Monti government bowed to pressure from the right — most notably from the party Mr. Berlusconi — and dropped some elements of the $40 billion package of spending cuts and revenue increases, including a wealth tax and the speedy liberalization of closed professions like taxi drivers and pharmacists, a plan that drew protests from their powerful guilds. It also scaled back a newly reinstated property tax on primary residences.
After protests from the left and labor unions, some counting more pensioners than workers among their members, Mr. Monti reinstated inflation increases on low-level pensions that he said would make the measures more equitable.
Mr. Monti has said he wants to make Italy more equitable — especially for young people and women, whom he has called a “wasted resource” — and to help the economy grow. But even as he pledged to address labor reform and other structural changes in the coming weeks, he has run up against a wall of vested interests.
For the most part, the new austerity package is based on tax increases. It would reinstate a property tax on first homes, which Mr. Berlusconi had eliminated as an election promise in 2008. It would also impose a 1.5 percent tax on revenues brought into Italy under an earlier tax amnesty, and add taxes on cigarettes and gas, which is close to 1.70 euros per liter, or more than $8 a gallon.
The governor of the Bank of Italy, Ignazio Visco, said last week that the measures would increase Italy’s tax burden to 45 percent, a level that businesses say is unsustainable.
On the day of the vote of confidence, the minister for economic development, Corrado Passera, said the Italian economy was already in recession, and Confindustria, the industrialists’ organization, said it expected the Italian economy to contract 1.6 percent in 2012, rather than grow .2 percent as it had previously expected.
Mr. Monti has told Italians in no uncertain terms that such changes are essential for Italy to bolster its anemic growth, stave off recession and pay down its staggering public debt, which is $1.9 trillion, or 120 percent of gross domestic product, in order to stabilize the Italian economy and protect the euro.
The following week, Italy’s short-term borrowing costs were halved at an auction of government bills, reflecting a huge infusion of low-cost, long-term liquidity into euro zone banks by the European Central Bank. But its long-term borrowing costs remained just under 7 percent, a level regarded by most economists as unsustainable.
Behind Low Growth
Before the global economic crisis of 2008, Italy had been paying down its sizable government debt for close to a decade, and was running a budget surplus if those interest costs were excluded. But the debt crisis that arrived in 2011 focused new attention on impediments to growth.
Italy’s entrenched political and patronage system, overly generous pensions and job protections, along with an excessive web of competition-killing red tape, are often cited as the primary culprits in a dismal economic record that is seem as the root cause of Italy’s troubles.
According to forecasts from the European Commission, Italy’s gross domestic product will grow only 0.1% in 2012, down from an earlier projection of 1.3%, and will expand only 0.7% in 2013. Economists have long argued that Italy needs to carry out serious structural reforms to stay competitive.
The measures that Parliament is expected to approve include a mixture of spending cuts and tax hikes, the sell-off of some state real estate, including farmland, and the privatization of municipal public utilities. They would also loosen the grip of Italy’s powerful professional guilds and make it easier to transfer public servants, leading to their possible dismissal if they refuse a transfer away from home.
They also spell out tax breaks for employers who hire young people and women, and a move towards streamlining Italy’s cumbersome judicial process, in certain cases. But they fall short of addressing serious pension or labor reform.
The Berlusconi Factor
Since 1994, Italy’s political life has been dominated by Silvio Berlusconi, the idiosyncratic billionaire and three-time prime minister. But Mr. Berlusconi’s power has been steadily leaking away as the nation seems to have finally tired of his well-publicized dalliances. Politically, he appears to have lost his touch.
In December 2010, he avoided the collapse of his government when he barely survived a vote of confidence. Although his mandate is set to end in 2013, the razor-thin majority shown in the vote meant that Mr. Berlusconi no longer has the margin to govern.
Mr. Berlusconi, who has emerged largely unscathed from a dizzying number of trials, is facing further legal troubles. In February 2011, Milan prosecutors filed a request to try him on criminal charges related to prostitution and abuse of office; he is accused of paying for sex with an under-age woman, nicknamed Ruby Heart-Stealer, and then abusing his office to help release her after she was arrested on a theft charge.
By July 2011, tensions had emerged between Berlusconi, and the finance minister, Giulio Tremonti, who has been praised for maintaining control of the budget deficit, and investors reacted by driving up rates on government borrowing. Soon after, Parliament rushed to pass an austerity bill that aims to reduce the country’s budget deficit to 2.3 percent by 2014 from the current 4.6 percent through a combination of income and corporate tax hikes, cuts to local and regional governments, an increase in fees for public health care, cuts to some high-level pensions and an increase in the retirement age.
Background
Encyclopedia Britannica describes Italy as “less a single nation than a collection of culturally related points in an uncommonly pleasing setting.” However concise, this description provides a good starting point for the difficult job of defining Italy, a complex nation wrapped in as much myth and romance as its own long-documented history. The uncommonly pleasant setting is clear: the territory on a boot-shaped peninsula in the Mediterranean, both mountainous and blessed with 4,600 miles of coast. The culturally related points include many of the fountains of Western culture: the Roman Empire, the Catholic church, the Renaissance (not to mention pasta and pizza).
But Italy, united fully only in 1870, has long struggled not so much with its identity as with the concept of itself as a single unit working toward common goals. It has been central to the formation of the European Union, and after the destruction of World War II, built itself with uncommon energy to regain a place in the global economy. But distrustful of authority after centuries of decentralized and often arbitrary rule, Italians tend to feel loyalty locally: to region or town or, most commonly, to the family itself.
The fragmentation has revealed itself in politics. Since World War II, more than 60 governments have risen and fallen, and politicians have had little success in winning agreement on structural changes to make government work better and keep a once-robust economy growing.
Amid a marked economic slowdown in recent years, many Italians have described their frustration at the lack of change with no clear model in sight as a malaise. Still, Italy’s 58 million people enjoy one of the world’s highest standards of living, and the nation remains a gold standard for fashion, high-end cars and motorcycles, furniture, tourism, design and food.
Italy is also home to the Vatican city-state, the center of the Roman Catholic church for nearly 2,000 years. In 2005, after the death of the popular and long-serving Pope John Paul II, the German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI.
Stagnant Economy
Since the economic crisis began, Italy has regularly turned up on the informal list of Nations That Worry Europe. While its finances are not as precarious as those of Greece, Portugal or Ireland, because it is far larger — the Italian economy is the seventh largest in the world — its troubles are more frightening. As a recent report by UniCredit, a European banking group, put it, Italy is “the swing factor” in the crisis, “the largest of the vulnerable countries, and most vulnerable of the large.”
Public sector debt amounts to roughly 119 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product, nearly identical to Greece. And like Greece, Italy is trying to ease fears in the euro zone and elsewhere with an austerity package, one intended to cut the deficit in half, to 2.7 percent of G.D.P., by 2012.
But there are differences. The Italians, unlike the Greeks, are born savers, and much of the Italian debt is owned by the Italians. That means that unlike Greece, which will be sending a sizable percentage of its G.D.P. to foreign creditors for a generation to come, Italy is basically in hock to its own citizens.
To understand why so much of Italy, is stagnant or worse, requires a bit of geopolitical history and a look at the highly idiosyncratic Italian business culture. It is defined, to a large degree, by deep-seated mistrust — not just of the government, but of anyone who isn’t part of the immediate family — as well as a widespread aversion to risk and to growth that to American eyes looks almost quaint.
It has economists worried not about a looming fiasco so much as a gradual, grinding decline of Italy’s economy.
Economists see a country with a service sector dominated by innumerable guilds, which don’t just overcharge but also raise the barriers to entry for the millions in ill-fated manufacturing jobs who might otherwise find work as, for instance, taxi drivers. They see a timid entrepreneur class. They see a political system in the thrall of the older voters who want to keep what they have, even if it dooms the nation to years of stasis.
They see a society whose best and brightest are leaving and not being replaced by immigrants, because Italy has so little upward mobility to offer.
The Debt Crisis
Italy’s borrowing costs rose in late July 2011 almost a full percentage point from a month before at an auction of 10-year bonds, to the highest rate in more than a decade, in another troubling sign that the latest rescue package for the euro zone had not eased investors’ concerns.
The country appeared to be headed toward a vicious cycle — if the interest rates it paid rose too high, its debt would become unaffordable, a prospect that was leading the market to push up interest rates. In response, on Aug. 7, the European Central Bank said it would “actively implement” its bond-buying program to address “dysfunctional market segments,” a statement interpreted as a sign that it will intervene to prevent borrowing costs for Italy and Spain from growing unsustainable.
Scrambling to fend off a crisis, the Italian government on Aug. 12 approved $65 billion in additional emergency austerity measures over the next two years, including tax increases and cuts to local government in an effort to balance the budget by 2013. But that plan began to unravel at the beginning of September, when it was subject to so much backtracking and political wrangling that European leaders raised the pressure on Italy to deliver as promised.
The Italian Senate delivered on Sept. 7, passing a package that would trim 54 billion euros ($76 billion) to balance the budget by 2013, according to the Finance Ministry. To ensure passage after weeks of bitter political fights, the center-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resorted to a confidence vote in the Senate, meaning that a majority “no” vote would have not only scuttled the bill, but also brought down the government. The measures passed 165 to 141.
On Sept. 14, Italy’s lower house gave final approval to a $74 billion austerity plan, giving a boost to the weak government, which won a confidence vote on the plan earlier in the day.
