Culture, Climate & Calamity: Italians Wink While Saint Marks Sinks.

In the Land of Bella Figura, really solving a problem is not as important as looking like you’re solving the problem.

I was supposed to have been gently awakened by the ringing of church-bells outside my hotel window on the Grand Canal last week. Instead, I was jolted out of bed by a series of rising siren tones, each one higher than the last, indicating the level of ‘acqua alta’, or high water, that was about to rush through the city streets. I counted four tones, which my hotel concierge told me the night before, meant the highest possible level of water, and that it would be unsafe — not just inconvenient, but possibly life-threatening- to leave the hotel under those circumstances, as there would be no way for me to return to the hotel until the waters had receded later that afternoon. Worse, he reminded me, a second tide was due in the evening, expected to be even higher than the morning’s tide, this time in the dark, making it especially dangerous to leave or return to the hotel. He suggested I wait out the morning tide at breakfast and handed me a pair of bright blue plastic thigh-high waders, which the hotel was passing out to all the guests.

“In case you do go out”, he said, as he handed them to me. “But be sure to be back before dark, as tonight’s tide will be higher, maybe waist deep, and these…