Visconti | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Munich.

The airport is a micro city, something you’d design back in the day on The Sims when you’d be sat in your jammies before the PC thinking yourself a Svengali creator. The airport design is pants, though, and the online maps a shambles, too. Why have low-resolution JPEGs all over the web airport guides? Even the official site is lacking in detail and shoddily put together. For someone as obsessed with airport preparation (I like to escape them upon arrival and not waltz/shuffle around like a penguin on Valium) as I am, a detailed exit plan is desired. Anyway, I tell myself it’s just an airport.

Straubing, Regensburg, and the Autobahn.

Upon arrival I think of Richard Wagner and mad King Ludwig in that period when Bavaria, under the Hohenzollern yoke, somehow in a rapidly modernising new Germany managed to bridge a link to a romantic past of myth and folklore. I think of Visconti’s Ludwig (1973) especially, this a half-baked banality of a movie.

I have a vision these days of a latter-day Julie Andrews doing her hills-are-alive thing, but only this time it’s now tainted with the image of a dreadlocked lady in a trackie clutching an alcopop in one hand and a boombox in the other. The Sound of Music (1965) scene was of course shot a fair bit away at Obersalzberg, but one can be forgiven for thinking this encapsulated all of Bavaria before time caught up with it.

I was expecting ‘Old Bavaria’ here – tradition, peace and quiet, a conservative(ish) enclave. It was this to an extent but such things are now fantasy. It’s this globalisation virus again – granted, the same virus which enabled me to stroll off a cheap easyJet flight for the price of two bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Every city feels the same for me, and I even reckon Venice will be anonymous by the end of the decade. Nevertheless, the bantz was top quality and taxi drivers aside (they refused to stop on countless occasions) I thought it a cracking wee adventure.

Booze?

Oh aye, the ethanol intake was high. This I figure is the reason mosquitos were nibbling me to smithereens in my sleep – I was a free drinking session.

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Death *of* Venice.

Venice was pure decadence; it reminded me of the decline of the Amberson family in Welles’s semi-forgotten masterwork, or more aptly the great ball sequence that closes The Leopard (1963). There was a sense about the place that I was walking the streets and traversing the canals of a city on the edge of time, an opulent remnant grasping on to another era. That bygone age becoming more irrelevant and forgotten by the day, it is now eroded by the pernicious intents of globalisation, nowhere more evident than in the installation of garish vending machines in the city’s piazzas.

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Declared world heritage status by UNESCO, Venice now houses only 55,000 permanent inhabitants who must endure up to 30,000 cruise ship passengers a day, with an estimate 22 million visitors a year swarming into the archaic Republic.

Revolting scenes. Photo: World Monument Scenes.

Venetians blame this tourism for the miniscule, still dwindling population. The catechism is that tourists’ need for short-term accommodation increases rent prices, with much available property utilised by landlords for holiday rentals as opposed to residents or long-term tenants. It’s an issue of space, and Venice can’t be built *upwards*. As summed up by UNESCO: “The capacity of the city, the number of its inhabitants and the number of tourists is out of balance and causing significant damage to the city.”

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The ‘hordes’.

The Queen of the Adriatic is no doubt in need of more than a lick of paint, such is the deterioration of its buildings and canals through simply too many people cramming into such a tiny lagoon. But without the hordes of holidaymakers, and I am one of these vermin myself, Venice would surely melt away into Atlantis, a world unto itself, and though there’s something bittersweet and fatally beautiful about such a proposition, it demands an economy that ticks, and its permanent residents, however grating the experience, depend upon the premise of tourists spunking their bum bags of cash up the wall (or into the lagoon).

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There’s an argument that as something becomes more accessible it loses its aura, especially where cities are concerned, as if tourism is still the grand pursuit of the elite. Those days (I hope) are over. What must be done – the repairs, the concerted efforts by city administrators to study, manage, and maintain the integrity of its structures – has been thoroughly articulated by UNESCO. Speed limits on motor boats (to prevent wave erosion) and a buffer zone around the lagoon are just a couple of the common sense solutions that have yet to be implemented. A masterpiece needs periodic renovation, constant conservation, and the consultation of its most vital components – its makers.

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For further reading, please check out the following:

Italian Environment Fund: http://www.fondoambiente.it/

Shocking facts: http://theartnewspaper.com/news/conservation/how-italy-stopped-venice-being-put-on-unesco-s-heritage-in-danger-list/

Residents rather vexed: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/tempers-flare-in-venice-as-angry-protesters-block-cruise-ships/

Wanderings and … wonderings.

Tag Archives: Visconti

Gäubodenvolksfest in Straubing.

Death of Venice.