Venice
After our visit to Venice, I meant to write a post very much like this one. Venice is at once beautiful and depressing.
But there’s a wistful side to da Mosto too, whether its lamenting the loss of half of his family tree to syphilis during the era of Casanova, or the over-running of Venice by tourists. With the indigenous population dwindling to less than 50,000, and the oldest average age in Europe, da Mosto worries for the future of the city, as he brings his children up in what has become essentially a theme park for the hordes of visitors that cross the bridge link into the city, or pull up in the huge cruise ships that stop-over in Venice.
The danger for a city as a theatre or theme-park is that it becomes a stage set, a backdrop. This inevitably treats citizens as actors, there for others amusement. This leads to a simulated city as Baudrillard would have it, a city of the hyperreal as Umberto Eco might tell us. What happens when the audience is not there? Visit Venice on a windswept January and you’d probably find a virtual ghost-town - in fact many people have commented that Venice at night is eerily quiet, as almost no-one lives there, and relatively few tourists stay on the main island.
(via Kottke.)
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