Word: marghera
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...envision a vast, ultramodern "workshop of ideas" spread out over the entire 7,090-sq.-mi. Veneto region. The "ideas network" would be centered in the 80-acre Arsenale, the old shipbuilding yards of the Venetian navy. Along the edge of the lagoon, from the polluted petrochemical shores of Marghera to Marco Polo airport, a "Riviera of culture and technology" would be tied together by an aboveground metro. Planners promise that the construction would create 5,000 jobs, as well as a sophisticated electronics- and-communicati ons system to serve the city in the next century...
...three different cities. There is the historic town built on 118 alluvial islands in a lagoon, plus two other communities on the mainland: the bleak, modern residential suburb of Mestre, which the daily Corriere della Sera calls a "delirium of concrete," and the huge, fume-filled industrial port of Marghera. Any action to help Venice often turns out to harm her ugly sisters. For example, Venice is sinking in part because the pumping of fresh water from artesian wells in Mestre and Marghera depletes the underground "cushion" of water on which Venice floats. If the pumping is stopped to save...
Trouble is, Marghera is partly built on the mud flats, and the city earmarked another 10,000 acres of adjacent marshlands for new factories. By banning any further municipal intrusion into the marshes-including proposed landfill projects in Mestre-the new law will severely limit the growth of both cities. Indeed, Marghera's importance is bound to wane-probably with adverse economic effect on Venice. "If you take away the industrial sector," warns Critic Vladimiro Dorigo, "it means killing the whole place...
There is a possible compromise. Manmade locks might be built to control the dangerous high tides. Stretching across the three natural openings between Venice's lagoon and the Adriatic, the locks would open to let ships reach Marghera and would close to prevent Venice from being swamped in tidal water. That would allow further building on the mud flats-if the state decides to spend some $80 million on the locks...
...digging and filling for Marghera's deep-water tanker canals and protective dikes have not only helped erode the island's underpinnings, but also seem to have unsettled the natural ebb and flow of the tidal waters. In the past, flooding was a rarity in Venice. But now it has become almost a regular occurrence, as winds and new tidal currents trap an overflow of water behind the lagoon's three egresses. Along the canals, water has seeped through foundations to crack and moisten plaster walls -some of them holding priceless paintings. The frescoes by Paolo Veronese...