If Venice dies, we will be left with nothing but the dozens of cities and suburbs with Venice in their name and Disney-like replicas in Las Vegas, Dubai, and Chongqing, along with yet another being proposed right next to Venice itself. If Venice dies, the world would lose “an unbearable challenge to the world of modernity,” as Manfredo Tafuri put it in 1993.
In this insightful, at times lyrical, book, Salvatore Settis argues that this is even more the case today, and that Italy is doing poorly in treating the patient. He offers medicine for the disease that has a global reach—and as we shall see, if we extrapolate his antidotes and apply them to the American patient, they may prove to be effective.
Settis treats Venice as Everycity and presents the role of modernity in inducing its morbidity. Seduced by modernity and overwhelmed by tourists, it has neglected its soul: The city’s population has declined from its peak in 1951 of 175,000 to less than 60,000 now, and the fabric and detailed dealings of the city’s life have been turned over to tourism. To serve it, the Venetians have given their homes over to hotels, becoming commuters from the mainland.
Venice is unique and modernity does not “prize the uniqueness of each city, but rather the homogenization of all cities.” In succumbing to modernity, Venice has accepted modernity’s “economically motivated real estate speculation and the social problems left in their wake, shifting the emphasis to aesthetic, technological, or ecological values.” The rest of the world is rapidly embracing these values, which are most visibly embodied in the skyscraper. Skyscrapers have proliferated, rising ever higher with ever more bizarre forms to satisfy aesthetic and capital competition and to accommodate the world’s population that is moving from barren rural pastures to elusive economic prosperity in megaregions that approach 40 million in population.
This new symbol of modernity visits Venice daily as “skyscraper ships . . . veritable spaceships of modernity, temples of consumerism which have annihilated Venice’s skyline.” In 2013, 13 arrived in a single day, but Italian law now limits them to 2 per day—2 more than are allowed within 2.3 miles of Italy’s shore elsewhere. They bring health hazards and dangers to Venice’s delicate fabric and disgorge a million-and-a-half day-trippers every year with a net financial loss to the city. Other death threats are in the natural and man-made environments that Rome has spent lavish sums to remedy, only to go into the trough of venality and corruption that have been enriching insiders on the peninsula even before there was a Venice.
To protect Venice from death, the Italian government and private interests have concluded that it “will eventually have to adapt one way or the other and comply” with modernity. To that end, vast commercial developments are already underway on the contiguous mainland, and forests of towers are proposed to house refugees from the lagoon with a sub-lagoon subway to carry them back and forth to Piazza San Marco.
Salvatore Settis proposes a very different medicine, one with little chance of success. He would have a code of ethics direct architects to resist complicity in modernity’s ravages and reinstitute the traditional way of building. And he would reinvest aesthetic values in traditional practices and make them servants to civil, ethical values. This flies in the face of the ideology of architecture that serves that modernity that puts the “exchange-value” of property above its social function.
Settis’s opposition to modernity depends on the “ethical self-restraint” of civismo, or citizenship. It requires rejecting any role for skyscrapers and restoring the 1,500 years of experience gained through the careful, incremental additions and modifications to Venice’s physical fabric by Venetians acting as stewards. If successful, Venice could remain a midget while the rest of the world watches the tall guys play. But short of banning non-Venetians’ entry, would this not simply exacerbate the problem?
Settis frames his proposals within recent continental, especially French, theories that belong to the legal tradition of legislated, rather than natural, rights: The necessary laws are already in the statutes and provisions in the Italian constitution—although, as he acknowledges, they are seldom observed. Honoring them would renew sociability and allow citizens and their associations to reclaim the rights of the city for citizens and foster, in Venice’s soul, the “harmony between the concepts of city and citizenship.” Neighbors would, once again, enjoy their neighbors as they exchange pleasantries, converse about families, complaints, and changes, and participate in civic institutions. This is, indeed, the civismo traditional to Venice.
Years ago, a friend, a member of a family among the new arrivals from Vicenza 500 years ago (and therefore limited to being bankers), introduced me to a “thousand-year-old Venetian”—that is, a member of a family that has participated in one or another municipal commission for a millennium. My friend noted, even then, that Venice was losing a quality that Rome had already lost after it engaged modernity with the automobile’s arrival. Wealthy and privileged Romans now rode around isolated in their large automobiles while Venetians still walked, which allowed civismo to retain a democratic quality through the mixing and encounters among diverse citizens in the public realm.
When civismo builds a beautiful, mature city, it reveals a centuries-long commitment to having the new serve the common good that has embraced that city’s unique visual qualities and caused any new building to be a fitting neighbor to its predecessors. This is the constantly renewed tradition that in Venice, as in any city whose soul is alive in the present, has breathed the invigorating air found in accepting the past as a gift to the present and an obligation to the future. The Venice we love is the result of “an act of perpetual renewal,” the ongoing evidence of the new emerging within the old. If, Settis warns, “this necessary, constant motion would ever stop, it would exact an incredibly high price: death.”
That essential role for ever-renewing tradition is the very antithesis of the ideology of the architecture that serves modernity. Modernity’s global hegemony casts Venice in the role of a canary in the mineshaft whose song is growing weaker in America as modernity extends its reach into those places whose value resides exclusively in their potential for financial gain with disregard for what Settis calls the cultural and civil capital of the city’s soul.
America’s cities and landscapes have stronger protections against the ravages of modernity than in Italy (and elsewhere) because the American natural-right legal structure puts more authority in citizens than in the workings of government officials. The primacy of property’s “exchange value”—which allowed the barbaric destruction of New York’s Penn Station in 1963—was countered by a preservation ordinance that brings citizens’ voices to decisions about the city’s forma urbis. New York’s measure was a latecomer compared to the first such ordinance, the one that Charleston, South Carolina, instituted in 1931 to assure continued success, such as the prevention in 1920 of the destruction of a valued mansion to construct a gasoline station in its colonial center.
Charleston’s subsequent success with preserving the old while building the new has led to its attracting nearly four million tourists a year. Elsewhere, modernity and its skyscrapers have been at work while Charleston’s 128,000 residents have resisted, protecting the city’s fragile grace and beauty. (They benefited, too, from the long-term guidance of Joseph Riley, mayor from 1975 until last year: Once, when a developer offered to build a 20-story tower to stimulate economic vitality in Charleston, Riley replied that he would be happy to help him build what the city could use as a stimulant: four 5-story buildings.)
If Venice Dies can alert citizens everywhere to the canary’s song and strengthen their resolve to protect and constantly renew the unique treasures they call home. But the “unbearable challenge of modernity,” which endangers their continued success in protecting our valued physical heritage, is “presentism,” Settis’s shorthand for the belief that neither the past nor the future is as valuable as the present. “The voracious presentism that has ravaged cities and landscapes in the name of profit,” he writes, “is . . . to be understood as a social pathology, which should be corrected by an education that values the ethic of responsibility and enforcement of the laws.”
It might be too late for that, since “presentism” is at the heart of the ideology of the architecture and urbanism that serves modernity. Still, there is an alternative to presentism that has proven successful. It rejects the denatured modernity that is building skyscrapers rising from desolate landscapes and suburbs, shopping malls, and office parks, separating central cities from rural districts. It is the method citizens used in Venice for 1,500 years, and for centuries in building Charleston: the continued commitment of citizens to a tradition of building places where they can pursue and enjoy the fruits of citizenship. Italian cities can hive off regional variants of Venice and Florence, and variations of Charleston and other American meccas can proliferate here as well. Cities from Manhattan to Everytown can let their past guide their future as they accommodate people by building up-to-date regional versions of the best old towns and districts of cities.
Salvatore Settis does not take this route, but his basic point offers reasons for doing so. A city’s death occurs when it loses its soul, and a city’s soul resides in the “harmony between the concepts of city and citizenship.” In America, more so than elsewhere, this principle has the potential for resisting modernity and preserving the ongoing task of a civil people intent on building cities that allow every individual to pursue happiness.
Carroll William Westfall, the Frank Montana professor of architecture emeritus at Notre Dame, is the author, most recently, of Architecture, Liberty and Civic Order: Architectural Theories from Vitruvius to Jefferson and Beyond.
