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00:00Venice, the most beautiful city in the world, had grown from bleak marshland to become a
00:22great trading power, with an empire that stretched across half the known world. It had created
00:31some of the most beautiful art ever seen. It had become a place of adventure, sex, and
00:39pleasure unlike any other city. But one man had brought the party to an end. His name
00:48was Napoleon Bonaparte, and his armies had left Venice a looted, crumbling, forgotten
00:57backwater. The great city had fallen into poverty and decay, and it seemed there was
01:06no way back.
01:36This is the point where many stories of Venice end. The great empire was dead, and Venice
01:53was rotting away. But I'm going to tell you a story about what happened next, about how
02:00the great artist of the 19th century created the romantic image of Venice that is recognized
02:08and reproduced all over the world.
02:16The world now comes to Venice, and Venice comes to the world.
02:30This is Venice in Las Vegas. It's a hotel and casino, an architecturally faithful version
02:40of Venice in the middle of America. Cars drive under the Rialto Bridge. Moving walkways take
02:59people over it. But it's too clean, and it's much too antiseptic. It's surreal. These people
03:06are visiting Las Vegas, but they have come because they love the idea of Venice.
03:13Venice has become more than just a creation of bricks and mortar. It has become a city
03:21that lives in everyone's imagination.
03:28Yet the real Venice is still a place where people live, a city caught between its past
03:35and its future, between the people who live here and the people who live here.
03:42Venice is a city that is not just a place of art, but a place of life.
03:50The real Venice is still a place where people live, a city caught between its past and its future,
03:57between the people who live here and the tourists who visit.
04:05This is the age that has defined my life, an old city caught up in modern times.
04:24And it all started with you, British, and your romantic sensibilities.
04:35In the 19th century, your poets, your painters, and your writers would come here to forgotten,
04:43poverty-stricken Venice, and be intoxicated by the atmosphere.
04:50Venice attracted the romantics because they were in love with decay, something of ancient
04:56beauty, forged through time and left to wither.
05:03They believed Venice would be at its most beautiful the moment it was about to die.
05:13The marriage of Venetian architecture and nature had always been a fragile one.
05:20In those days, we'd repaired and strengthened our great buildings.
05:29Now, poverty meant building work was left undone.
05:37The city was poised between beauty and decay, between power and foe.
05:46And one British poet was to discover Venice as a haven from change,
05:53a refuge in the romance of history.
06:01A refuge in the romance of history.
06:11The poet was Lord Byron.
06:20And he would immerse himself in the city.
06:26My beautiful, my own, my only Venice.
06:31Thy breeze, thy Adrian sea breeze, how it fans my face.
06:38The very winds feel native to my veins.
06:46Venice, for Byron, was everything he needed.
06:51It was inspiration, romance.
06:54He fell in love with its scrambling ancient palaces,
06:59with their resonance of the past.
07:08This is Palazzo Mocenigo, Byron's home on the Grand Canal.
07:16Here, he would revive the glory days of Casanova and indulge his love of Venice.
07:23But there was a difference. For Casanova, it had been a party.
07:28For Byron, Venice was a state of mind.
07:32He called it the island of my imagination.
07:41In Venice, silent rose the songless gondolier.
07:47Her palaces are crumbling to the shore.
07:51But beauty is still here.
07:55States fall, arts fade.
07:59But nature does not die.
08:02She, to me, was as a fairy city of the heart,
08:07even dearer in her day of woe
08:10than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show.
08:17Byron's libido and his affairs
08:20became notorious throughout Venice and Europe.
08:24They became the hot gossip in English society.
08:28He had women literally all over Venice.
08:32He had a fling with Marianna, his landlord's wife.
08:37Then there was a fiery affair with Margherita, the wife of his baker,
08:42Giulietta, Miss Taruscelli, Miss Spinola, Miss Aloisi,
08:49Miss Kleptenheim, and her sister.
08:57Byron only caught a disease once, and that, I'm ashamed to say,
09:03was from one of my ancestors, Elena D'Amosto.
09:08Buongiorno.
09:10Buongiorno.
09:16Almost nothing is known about Elena D'Amosto.
09:20All we know is from Byron himself in a letter.
09:25He says he didn't pay her, so she wasn't a prostitute,
09:29but era di modi facili, as we say in Italian.
09:35My whorehold has been much extended
09:38since the masquerading began and closed,
09:41but I was a little taken aback by a gonorrhea gratis.
09:45A girl, a gentle donna named Elena D'Amosto, was clapped.
09:52And she has clapped me.
09:56Byron's epic poem, Childe Harold, was a best-seller all over Europe,
10:03but his success and swagger around the city made him enemies.
10:14A local roused him to a challenge.
10:19Luckily for Byron, it wasn't a duel.
10:23The race would be from here on the Lido all the way to Venice,
10:28but not just to St. Mark's Square over there.
10:31They would swim to the other end of the Grand Canal,
10:35and that is 4.5 miles.
10:39I won by a good three-quarters of a mile,
10:42knocking the Italian all to bubbles.
10:47It was as if the Englishman and the Venetian
10:50were competing for the soul of Venice.
10:53And we had lost.
10:58Byron was the only one left.
11:01He was the only one left.
11:05And we had lost.
11:08Byron was just the first.
11:11So many of your 19th-century writers and painters would come here.
11:18For the British, Venice was a city of fantasy,
11:22a city of the mind.
11:25This place inspired painters to paint what they felt
11:30as much as what they saw.
11:34St. Paul's Cathedral on the Grand Canal.
11:37Very strange.
11:39What is it about you British?
11:43It was as if painter William Marlowe saw Venice
11:47as just another outpost of your growing empire.
11:52Did we see it as a compliment?
11:54I'm not so sure.
11:58More and more, British artists would shape the identity of my city,
12:04and you were about to give us
12:06the most spectacular images of Venice we had ever seen.
12:26Joseph Marlowe William Turner was the greatest British painter.
12:31And in Venice, he had found his greatest subject.
12:35No one ever saw Venice in quite the same way after Turner.
12:50Turner would push the Venetian marriage of architecture and nature
12:55further than anyone,
12:57into a mystical fusion of light and weather with bricks and mortar.
13:03It was as if nature was engulfing the city.
13:10He visited three times late on in his career.
13:14These trips resulted in hundreds of images of Venice,
13:19visions of the city unlike anything that had been painted before,
13:25as blurred and imprecise as Canaletto had been meticulous.
13:35Turner would give us the truest picture of the city,
13:39of the feel of the city, of any artist.
13:43Yet he would also dramatically change Venice to suit his own ends.
13:49And there has always been something of a mystery about his vantage point.
13:58This was once the Hotel Europa.
14:04Turner stayed here during his trips to Venice.
14:09Now the building is offices, most traces of its past ripped out,
14:14but we do know he stayed on the top floor.
14:30In this painting of his room, the only surviving clue
14:34is the view from the window.
14:37And this is the closest match I can find.
14:49Who would have thought?
14:51One of the most important places in the history of art
14:55would end up a bagno.
15:07And searching for Turner's vantage point
15:10turns out to be something of a problem, over and over again.
15:17We need to see the door of the church.
15:24Just a little further on and maybe we have the right perspective.
15:33Seems that we are in the right position.
15:36Here we have the door of the Church of the Salute.
15:40Here the Campanile of Saint Mark.
15:43The Campanile is much taller than in the reality.
15:47Here there is a building that doesn't exist.
15:59Strange.
16:01Strange. OK, we'll have a look.
16:04Oi!
16:10I think here we are in the right place for the Dogana.
16:15Here is the Dogana, the buildings.
16:18But the rest, the Ducal Palace, Saint Mark Square,
16:22doesn't exist in the reality.
16:25In the painting, yes.
16:31Nothing seems to fit.
16:33Turner has moved the great monuments of Venice around
16:38to suit himself.
16:43Now we are in the island of the Church of San Giorgio.
16:47Here we have the first point of view from the Dogana,
16:51where we were there.
16:53Now we are in front of Saint Mark
16:55and we can see the Doge's Palace,
16:58the Campanile of Saint Mark
17:00and the Palace of the Zecca.
17:02Two points of view for one painting.
17:07Turner was not painting the Venice I know.
17:11His paintings were idealised,
17:14romanticised versions of the city.
17:18British artists had brought Venice back
17:22to the attention of the world.
17:24Yet every image of Venice was romanticised and real.
17:33The true poverty and suffering of the people who lived here
17:38was a reality.
17:41The true poverty and suffering of the people who lived here
17:45was never part of the picture.
18:00And your greatest writer was no better.
18:04Surely his love of the city
18:07surely his love of the city
18:10should have revealed the real misfortune of the Venetians.
18:17His name was Charles Dickens.
18:23Dickens was far from being a Byron or a Turner.
18:30His novels were gritty chronicles
18:33of downtrodden industrial Britain.
18:37But Venice turned this tough chronicler of social reality
18:42into something else.
18:44It turned Dickens into a romantic.
18:48It was as if Venice was a drug.
18:52He wrote about the city
18:54as if he were experiencing a strange hallucinogenic dream.
19:07I could not think but how strange it was
19:09to be floating by a dreamy kind of track
19:12marked out upon the sea by posts and piles.
19:16I came upon a great piazza
19:18anchored like all the rest in the deep ocean.
19:21On its broad bosom was a palace.
19:24Cloisters and galleries,
19:26so light they might have been the work of fairy hands,
19:29so strong that centuries had battered them in vain.
19:32Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast palaces,
19:36I wandered on from room to room.
19:39The old days of the city lived again about me.
19:43But welling up into the secret places of the town
19:47crept the water always,
19:49coiled round and rounded in its many folds
19:53like an old serpent.
19:55Waiting for the time, I thought,
19:57when people should look down into its depths
20:00for any stone of the old city that claimed to be its mistress.
20:07THE CITY OF VENICE
20:25British artists had created a Venice in the popular imagination
20:30that was a place of infinite wonder.
20:33More than that, a place that would change your soul
20:37if only you could get there.
20:41Not surprisingly, the number of travellers to Venice
20:45began to rise dramatically.
20:49Dickens had made the trip from Italy by gondola,
20:53but with more and more people seized by the romantic dream of Venice...
21:00...things were about to change forever.
21:13The rail link between Italy and Venice was completed in 1846.
21:19More than three and a half kilometres long,
21:23supported by 222 arches.
21:30VENICE
21:36Now Venice was easy to get to,
21:39physically connected to Italy.
21:44This was the greatest disaster.
21:47Although Venice seems to be an independent state
21:52half a century earlier,
21:55it's this bridge that truly put an end to Venice's independence.
22:06This is the greatest symbol of Venice's lost supremacies.
22:17Now the city was nothing more than an extension of the mainland,
22:23a fact many Venetians could not accept.
22:27We even insisted the bridge include its own means of destruction
22:32in case it was used by an invading force.
22:43Inside the bridge there are 48 spaces,
22:46especially built to house dynamite.
22:50If the bridge ever needed to be destroyed, it could be,
22:54and Venice once more would retain her independence.
23:03But there was an invasion.
23:06An ever-increasing army of tourists streamed across the new bridge,
23:12and they brought with them a new attitude.
23:16They were in love with the romance of the city,
23:19like the artists who had come to Venice before them.
23:23But they did not want the city to die.
23:27They wanted to keep Venice standing.
23:31So change was inevitable.
23:35The big question now was what sort of change would it be?
23:40Renovate or modernize?
23:43Repair or demolish?
23:46Once again, you, British, would define the argument.
23:51John Ruskin had visited Venice as a young man,
23:56and when he returned in 1849,
23:59he was horrified to see the deterioration of the city.
24:04Ruskin believed Venice was the greatest architectural creation on earth,
24:10and yet, he said, the city was disappearing
24:14as fast as a lump of sugar in hot tea.
24:19In his great work, The Stones of Venice,
24:23he would attack the romantics' vision of the city
24:27and their love of decay.
24:30Instead, he argued that Venice was in peril and must be saved.
24:36But like many conservationists,
24:39he didn't know when to stop.
24:41Ruskin got so worked up about Venice,
24:45it was as though he wanted to preserve us in Aspic.
24:50He even objected to street lighting in Venice.
24:54He said cast-iron gas lamps reminded him of Birmingham.
25:02But it was in cast-iron that Ruskin's view of the city
25:08would be challenged by another of you, British.
25:12Bridge builder Alfred Neville was a modernizer,
25:16and he would fill Venice with modern bridges,
25:20replacing bridges built of stone.
25:23Today, they look charming, but to the 19th century eye,
25:29there were shocking signs of change.
25:32Neville would go on to confront the very heart of antique Venice
25:38with the most uncompromising structure the city had ever seen.
25:45The Accademia Bridge was built in 1854.
25:49It was only the second bridge to be built across the Grand Canal
25:54in Venice's long history.
25:57Its straight girders spanned the 48 metres of water
26:02in one great heroic length.
26:06But ultimately, the forces of conservation would triumph,
26:11and Neville's modern Accademia Bridge was taken apart
26:16and cut it off for scrap.
26:20It would be replaced by a temporary wooden structure.
26:27And the temporary bridge has stood there ever since.
26:31We Venetians just cannot face the challenge
26:35of choosing between an old or a modern design.
26:40This would be the first of many such battles
26:44between the old and the new.
26:48Ruskin and Neville were on opposite sides of the argument.
26:53They had fired the first shots in the battle for the soul of my city,
26:59a city which was inescapably connected to the modern world,
27:06but which could never belong to it.
27:12Now a terrible event would spark off the most ferocious argument
27:18between the conservationists and the modernisers
27:22that Venice had ever seen.
27:28At eight minutes to ten on the morning of the 14th July 1902,
27:35our crumbling city really started to fall down.
27:42Venice's great Campanile collapsed.
27:49Rescuers were still climbing the tower just days before,
27:54even as the cracks were appearing.
27:58Luckily, the only casualty was the caretaker's cat.
28:05Venice had lost its most potent symbol of the city seen from the lagoon.
28:12It was said a Venetian captain sailing home went mad
28:17and failed to find the Campanile on the horizon.
28:22So what would fill the gaping hole in the Venetian skyline?
28:30Many architects were keen to see a new and modern structure
28:35rise in place of the old Campanile.
28:38It would be a great symbol of Venice embracing the new century.
28:47But these designs met strong opposition
28:51from those who wanted to preserve Venice as it was.
28:56The slogan they developed in the face of the modernists
29:00was Dovera Comera.
29:05The flag for the modernisers was this man, Otto Wagner.
29:10He was an architect from Vienna,
29:13where his work had won him fame and fortune.
29:20He claimed it would be a falsification of history
29:24to rebuild the Campanile in the old style.
29:27The mixture of building styles in this square
29:31from many different ages
29:34gave the place its charm.
29:37And a new building could only add to that charm.
29:41Yes, said the authorities, but Dovera Comera.
29:52The Campanile was rebuilt almost exactly as it was before.
29:57But just as the city's conservatism was growing stronger and stronger,
30:03the alternative voices for change were getting louder too.
30:08The argument was going to get nasty.
30:17The Industrial Revolution had changed the face of Europe.
30:24But we had been immune.
30:27The city's narrow canals and tightly packed buildings
30:31gave no space for modern factories.
30:34It seemed as if we had no place in the great plan for the future.
30:39And on the whole, we were pleased.
30:42But something was happening in art,
30:45and we Venetians could never ignore art.
30:49In Italy, a new movement was growing,
30:52and its followers were staging a revolt against the past.
30:58The futurists believed that Italian art had become stagnant
31:04and called for a new art glorifying modern technology and energy.
31:10On 27 April 1910, a man ran across St Mark's Square.
31:18In his hands, he had a pile of pamphlets.
31:23It looked an innocent scene
31:25as he climbed to a high balcony overlooking the square,
31:29but the pamphlets he carried were entitled
31:32The Manifesto Against Reactionary Venice.
31:36The man's name was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
31:40He was a poet, leader of the futurists,
31:43and he was about to perform
31:46the most outrageous attack on Venice in the 20th century.
31:51To these art revolutionaries, Venice was an insult,
31:56everything they stood against.
31:58We feared they might even smash the city to pieces.
32:22We want to prepare for the birth of an industrial and military Venice.
32:33Let's hurry to fill the small, smelly canals
32:37with the rubble of the old, crumbling palaces and brothels.
32:45Let's burn the gondolas,
32:48let's burn the gondolas,
32:51let's burn the gondolas,
32:54and let's raise up to heaven the imposing geometry of the metal bridges.
33:02Italy was about to be thrown into a futurist nightmare.
33:08Benito Mussolini had plans to make Italy
33:11into a futuristic fighting machine,
33:14and Venice was a part of them.
33:17Here he is, with Adolf Hitler in St. Mark's Square.
33:28Mussolini built a big new bridge from Italy to Venice,
33:32alongside the train bridge.
33:34The new bridge was for motor cars.
33:37But where on earth are all these cars going?
33:42Ever since the late 19th century,
33:46there have been people who wanted to fill in Venice's canals
33:51and make them into roads.
33:54Occasionally, it even happened.
33:58This canal was paved over, look.
34:02This stone was the original border between the canal and the pavement.
34:08Throughout the 20th century,
34:11modernisers dreamt of the motor car
34:15penetrating to the very heart of Venice.
34:19Imagine what might have been.
34:22Fortunately, it never happens.
34:37Luckily, the cars never made it further
34:40than one square at the back of Venice.
34:44But Venice couldn't keep all motorised transport out of the city.
34:50The last century saw the city's canals fill up with heavy goods vehicles,
34:57ambulances and fire engines.
35:03Buses and taxis all travel by water,
35:07but the city pays a high price.
35:11In the 1930s, strict speed limits were introduced.
35:42We have detected a lot of lasers.
35:45There is a sanction and a seven-day suspension.
35:50Are there any other suspensions?
35:53Last year, there was one.
35:56One?
35:57Yes.
35:58Now there is a suspension for 14 days.
36:02Let's see if it works.
36:12VENICE
36:24If we want to use motorboats,
36:26then no one, except the emergency services,
36:29can travel more than about twice the speed of a gondola.
36:36It's a simple but incontrovertible fact
36:39that now the fabric of Venice cannot stand the pace of modern life.
36:44The wake created by motorboats
36:47destroys the delicate structure of the canals
36:51and the buildings that line them.
36:58But one day, more than any other,
37:01made us Venetians realise just how perilous everything had become.
37:08A catastrophe was to change everything.
37:11It was the moment the debate stopped being about a crumbling city
37:17and became instead the nightmare of our home disappearing beneath the waves.
37:31Throughout 1,600 years of existence,
37:34Venice had conquered cities.
37:38It had defended invasions.
37:40It had defied great tyrants and empires.
37:44Throughout the 20th century,
37:46it held back the tide of the modern world.
37:50But nothing was to prepare Venice
37:53for what happened on 4 November 1966.
38:07Torrential rain and a Scirocco wind blowing at 100 kilometres an hour
38:13stopped the morning tide leaving the Venetian lagoon.
38:17Then the afternoon tide rushed in,
38:21flooding the city to a depth of two metres.
38:25The most terrible floods in the city's history.
38:30In St Mark's Square, the water got up to here.
38:38The ground floor of every building in Venice was full of water.
38:43Here in my house, the water came quite high.
38:48I think it was something to the fourth or the fifth step.
38:55And it's quite incredible.
38:59I was young, I was five years old,
39:01and I think my mother took me here with a pyjama.
39:05And looking from here, all flooded.
39:08It could be a place for a boat.
39:11Not a room to live.
39:13Strange.
39:15When all this happened, I was five years old,
39:18small enough to be able to walk on my own.
39:22I had to walk on my own.
39:25When all this happened, I was five years old,
39:28small enough to be engulfed by the waves
39:31and carried out to sea.
39:34My memories of the event are a bit hazy,
39:38but my father remembers our experience of the day
39:42like it was yesterday.
39:55Of course, Venice has always flooded a little with the tides.
40:16It's something all my ancestors were used to,
40:19and we are used to.
40:23But in 1966, it was different.
40:26A tragedy. A catastrophe.
40:28Il disastro.
40:30More than the city could cope with.
40:35The electricity failed,
40:37and the flood water burst the underground oil tanks,
40:41carrying a thick black sludge through the city.
40:47There was no light in the streets.
40:49It was as dark as it was during the war.
40:57The shock was so great
40:59that you couldn't understand the situation
41:03and you couldn't react.
41:08The fact that I left home at nine
41:14to see these poor people being thrown out of their shops
41:19or from their homes,
41:21all the stuff that had been ruined.
41:24And to see that someone was crying,
41:28because they had lost everything.
41:31Undoubtedly, it had an effect.
41:34It wasn't very normal.
41:45I had never seen anything like it in Venice.
41:54The flood had devastated Venice.
41:57People thought there was even a real possibility
42:01that some of our great buildings would collapse.
42:05It seemed the sea had turned against the city
42:10with a fury nobody had foreseen.
42:15Worse than that, it looked as if
42:19the balance of architecture and nature
42:22on which Venice had thrived for more than a thousand years
42:26had collapsed.
42:31Over the centuries,
42:33buildings had shifted in the marshy ground.
42:37It was the sort of thing the early builders expected.
42:43Now the flood of 1966 had tipped the balance
42:48in favor of volatile nature.
42:51But it wasn't true.
42:53It was not nature's fault.
42:56It was man's fault.
42:58So, what exactly was going on?
43:03Decades before,
43:05industry had begun to overwhelm
43:08the Italian coast of the Venetian lagoon.
43:13A vast industrial complex around the town of Marghera.
43:19Pollution was poisoning the fish in the lagoon,
43:22upsetting the delicate ecological balance.
43:34The dredging of deep channels for oil tankers
43:38brought stronger currents.
43:41These currents accelerated the Adriatic's high tides
43:46towards Venice,
43:49worsening floods and eroding the lagoon's salt marshes.
43:55The creation of artificial islands
43:58and huge fish farms
44:00made the lagoon system ever more vulnerable.
44:06So Venice was certainly sinking,
44:08seriously sinking.
44:12At the same time, the sea was rising.
44:17The effects of global warming
44:20making a bad situation worse.
44:25The Adriatic has risen 10 centimeters in the last century.
44:31But worst of all,
44:33the lagoon bed was sinking.
44:36Not just the city,
44:38but the entire Venetian lagoon bed.
44:41In just 50 years, it had dropped by 12 centimeters.
44:47And the culprit was Italian industry,
44:50the factories of Marghera,
44:52pumping fresh water out from under the lagoon bed.
44:58Venice, Italy
45:04Have a look now, there,
45:06to have an idea what is happening.
45:15Look at these bricks.
45:17As the water rose up,
45:21the water went over the level of the stone
45:25and touching the bricks,
45:27the salt of the water got into the bricks
45:30and caused them to explode.
45:33Something had to be done.
45:39As the gravity of the situation was realized,
45:42the fresh water drainage by industry was stopped.
45:49And since the 1970s,
45:51money has poured in from all around the world.
45:55The spirit of Ruskin is abroad again.
46:00The world must save Venice from environmental catastrophe.
46:05But there is still controversy about how to do it.
46:10A set of enormous flood barriers
46:12at the entrances to the lagoon is planned.
46:16And the barriers look likely
46:18to put an end to serious flooding of the city.
46:21But no one can be sure
46:23if this will help or worsen
46:26the unbalanced state of the lagoon ecosystem.
46:31And many argue
46:32that the closing down of the heavy industry in Marghera
46:36is much more important.
46:39The eyes of the world are on Venice now
46:43and it stands as an extraordinary scientific,
46:47engineering and ecological challenge to all of us.
46:52With money and the new technology,
46:55the problem will be stabilized.
46:58But the truth is that sinking
47:00is no longer the biggest threat to Venice.
47:07Now the biggest threat is tourism.
47:10Visitors are overrunning the city.
47:14The pilgrimage to Venice
47:16that began as a trickle of British artists
47:20at the start of the 19th century
47:22is now a tidal wave of tourists from all over the world.
47:30Life goes on, but for us Venetians
47:33it is increasingly difficult to live here.
47:37But it's all I have ever known.
47:43As a child growing up,
47:45I enjoyed the mood of pleasure-seeking.
47:48I felt almost part of it.
47:51The endless stream of visitors.
47:54In the 60s and the 70s, Venice was groovy.
47:58As soon as I walked out of my door,
48:01I could meet people from all over the world.
48:05Then, suddenly, it all seemed just a bit fake.
48:10And I realized all my friends were leaving.
48:1590% of the people are not Venetians.
48:24Gondolas.
48:26Tourist town.
48:28Glass.
48:31This one, I hate them. I hate. I hate them.
48:35They're all going around with those things.
48:38Hats, hats, glass.
48:41Our ancient traditions have become tourist pageants.
48:46This is the historical regatta,
48:49a celebration of our great history.
48:53It looks more like a pantomime on water.
48:57They're selling Venice everywhere.
49:00Gondola.
49:06Look, the plastic gondola on top of your television.
49:10At Square of Tramontine,
49:12the same family has made gondolas for centuries.
49:16Tourism keeps the business going,
49:19but the exodus of Venetians means it won't be long
49:23before there is no one to make them.
49:53Venice.
50:13This is Venice now, a tourist destination,
50:18a place recognized all over the world,
50:22an important survival from another age,
50:25but also my home.
50:28Still home to lots of Venetians, angry Venetians.
50:35We wonder if what you British started will kill our city.
50:42In my local barbers, one of the few places not selling souvenirs,
50:47me and my friend Franco often grumble about what Venice has become.
51:18Let's get rid of tourism, what happens?
51:21Now, to get rid of tourism instantly, we collapse.
51:29It's become tight and I don't recognize it anymore.
51:32And since, in my opinion, the city is now close to a coma,
51:38if not already in a coma,
51:40I don't like to keep the heads of the deceased or the dead.
51:44It's on the verge now.
51:46I think it's about not coming back.
51:49We've already passed the verge.
51:52We can't think that a city can live with a population
51:56of less than 50,000 people.
52:00Since 1945, Venice has lost more than half of its population.
52:06And now, we have the highest average age of any city in Europe.
52:15VENICE
52:22Many say that Venice is closer to death than it has ever been.
52:34We are heading for San Michele, Venice's cemetery island.
52:40It is the last journey we Venetians take.
52:45Here lie our dead.
52:48But the connection of every family to the city is becoming weaker
52:53and Venice is slowly losing touch with its past.
53:02This is my family tomb
53:04and here lie many of my ancestors.
53:09ANDREA D'AMOSTO
53:15Andrea D'Amosto, 1879.
53:20Antonio D'Amosto.
53:23Carlotta Bartakovich.
53:27Andrea D'Amosto, 1960.
53:30He was my grandfather. I never met him.
53:34Eugenia De Vito Piscicelli.
53:36She was my grandmother.
53:39And my uncle, Antonio D'Amosto, in 1998.
53:44And it's difficult to imagine
53:47what will have become of Venice when I'm lying here.
53:57But the city's future doesn't lie in my hands.
54:02And we...
54:06Eat at school?
54:11Pierino, have you eaten the egg?
54:19Have you finished eating?
54:21All of it? Even the milk?
54:25Drink the milk.
54:28All my life, the fight has been to stop Venice from sinking.
54:33To save this unique slice of history.
54:37But what about the people who live here?
54:39What about me?
54:42My family?
54:45Venetians and their trades are dying out.
54:49The fabric of the city is intact.
54:52But it's soul is slowly dying.
54:56My children go to school in Venice.
54:59But many fear they may be part of the very last generation of Venetians.
55:08See you later.
55:11Ciao. Buona giornata. Ciao.
55:23How much can I save?
55:26170.
55:28170, right? Because from 8 to 6...
55:318 minus 7 equals 1.
55:35Right? Can you write it down?
55:39Can you find the place?
55:41Yes, yes, yes.
55:48Throughout its long history,
55:50Venice has, time after time,
55:53emerged triumphant from misfortune and adversity.
56:08In the children, I see hope that this unique city can be saved.
56:21Maybe they will even live in a Venice that is independent again,
56:27free of the confusion of modern Italy,
56:30so we can settle our own future.
56:51Respect!
56:54Most important of all, for the city to survive,
56:58I hope they make it their home.
57:01I pray they will.