Eventually I will have to stop collecting comics about Venice - there are simply too many. It's no wonder comic artists are attracted to Venice. As Kia Vahland has recently written in a German newspaper article: "The principle of resilience through beauty has a long...
Nürnberg flooded, 1909
The Bavarian city of Nürnberg (Nuremberg) has been flooded quite often over it's history. The flood of 1909 is particularly memorable and the most severe flood that has been documented in photography. The visual similarity to Venice, apparent in pictures like these,...
“Let Venice sink.”
In a 1971 special edition of Architectural Review devoted to the lagoon city author Jan Morris proposes to simply let the city sink. It's a polemical claim, but one that takes the ambivalences and dilemmata of historic heritage seriously. A different, longer version...
Lo Sposalizio del Mare – the Marriage to the Sea
Every year at Ascension Day (Ascensione di Cristo, or "Festa della Sensa" as the Venetians say, it is celebrated in May) the Republic of Venice celebrates itself but also it's intimate relationship to the sea. In the age of Renaissance the head of state, called the...
Values for survival: Vanishing homelands Bangladesh and Venice
I first became aware of the presence of climate refugees from Bangladesh in Venice, Italy, through a remark, Amitav Ghosh made in his book "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable" from 2016. There the Indian-US-American novelist notes that Bengali...
The case for culture
In a very nice, comprehensive and extensive article, Dutch author Thijs Weststeijn, describes the role of culture in forming a climate conscience. The article not only describes the threats to cultural heritage the world over, particularly flooding, and the efforts to...
Venice flooding from a duck’s perspective
In the Donald Duck story "Zio Paperone e la deriva dei monumenti" by Italian comic artists Giorgio Pezzin and Giorgio Cavazzano, Uncle Scrooge together with Donald and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie save the historic buildings of Venice from rising floods....