La laguna e il MOSE

Whoever has walked through Venice on a morning of high water knows that the city lives in a balance fragile with the sea. For centuries the Venetians had learned to coexist with the tides raising the walkways and slipping on the boots of rubber at dawn. In the last years something has changed in depth and the name of this change is MOSE.

The MOSE is a system of gates mobile submerged on the bottom of the three inlets of port of the lagoon. When the tide forecast exceeds a certain threshold, are filled with air and themselves lift from the seabed like a dam temporary that isolates the lagoon from the Adriatic. The work was designed at the end of the years eighty and the works lasted decades amid controversies and scandals of corruption. Only in the autumn of 2020 the gates entered truly in operation.

From that day the raisings themselves have multiplied. If before piazza Saint Mark would end up underwater dozens of times a year, today the shopkeepers recount about having forgotten the sound of the sirens. A bookseller of calle lunga has confessed that would have closed his shop if the gates had not been come. Even the tourists seem returned to book with confidence the months of winter.

Yet not everyone celebrates. The ecologists warn that the lagoon is not is a simple basin of water: it is an ecosystem living that breathes thanks to the exchange constant with the sea. Every time that the gates themselves close for hours or for entire days entire, the sediments do not are renewed and the water stagnates. The biologists fear that species delicate like the crabs native and the meadows of seagrass could suffer in silence.

The question is become more urgent with the rise of the level of the sea. If the climate were to continue to warm as predict the scientists, the gates would have to rise more and more often, perhaps every day during the months of autumn. Some experts maintain that the work is born old, because the calculations original did not had considered a warming so rapid. Others reply that without the MOSE Venice would already be lost.

In the bars of campo Santa Margherita itself is debated heatedly. A fisherman of Chioggia recounts that his grandfather would have laughed at the idea of stopping the sea with some doors of steel. A woman elderly recalls the water big of 1966, when the water to her had ruined the trousseau of wedding: to her any cost would be justified as long as to not see again those scenes. A young architect objects that the problem real is a other: the city itself is emptying of residents, and no gate will be able to hold them.

Also the costs of management weigh on the debate. Each raising costs hundreds of thousands of euros and the maintenance of the hinges submerged, corroded by the salt and colonised by mussels, will require sums enormous for the coming decades. The state has created an agency dedicated to coordinate the operations, but the unions protest because would want more technicians stable and fewer contracts temporary.

When one asks to a Venetian whether himself trusts the MOSE, the answer most honest is often a silence. One knows that it works, one knows that it costs, one knows that perhaps will not be enough. Yet no one proposes to dismantle it. Because under the discussions technical remains a feeling more ancient: the fear that if one were to lower the guard, a day the water would return to take for itself everything.

Perhaps the true problem is not is whether the MOSE works or not, but what kind of lagoon we want to leave to those who will come after of us. A lagoon protected by barriers of steel remains in any case a lagoon different from the one that the doges contemplated from the their palaces. It would be perhaps wise that the citizens discussed about this before that the habit to the gates raised makes unthinkable any alternative.