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Stenio Solinas

If it were not for the vegetation seeming on the point of eating the isle, surrounding the remaining buildings, chasing and crossing all over, blocking approaches and barring the canals, Poveglia would seem the same it was a century ago, when the great Ferdinando Ongania, photographer and etcher introduced it in his “Street and Canals in Venice and in the Islands of the Lagoon”, a sort of visual map of a disappearing out historical-geographic heritage. “If all goes on well and without delaying red tape, next summer we will start the works of clean-up and earth moving “, Tomaso Cognolato tells me, responsible for the associated projects of the Cts, the young and student tourist centre. The operation is ambitious since the title. “Poveglia, the world in a island. The island for the young of the world “. Under the auspicious of the Unesco, supported by the Veneto Region and the Venice Municipality, the project foresees the recovering and the transformation of these eight hectares overlooking the Lido, at twenty minutes of motorboat from San Marco. Seventy billions foreseen to allow the rise of hotel, amusement, museum and congress structures widely employing leading technologies. “That of Poveglia is the history of long decadence after a period of splendour “, explains to me architect Maurizio Varratta, conceiver of the project for the Cts. Rich of vineyards and saltworks, inhabited since the IV century after Christ, it's at the end of 1300 that Poveglia, “the isle of poplars “, reaches its apogees. As an autonomous republic, a Ducal Gastaldo governs it with 27 councillors, enjoying privileges and having some thousands inhabitants. The Serenissima tolerates badly this autonomy, too much paraded. The war of Chioggia in 1379 is the mere pretext, so waited for. Militarily, Poveglia is an important outpost: Venice builds there a drill ground, the Octagon, demolishes the former defence, transfers inhabitants for higher interest reasons. Once the conflict ended, the isle will never be the same, eaten by water due to the works done, damaged by storms and for it was field of military encounters. It does keep some privileges (tax exemption among others), but who gets back knows that nothing will be alike before. Passed in the XVI century under the magistrate at the Old Court, vainly it is attempted to attract the order of the Camaldolese to build a convent. Later entrusted to the Magistrate of Health, it is employed as port basin (garaging and equipment) and later as place for quarantine for ships. The remaining is contemporary history. On the terraces rising above the ancient laundries and from where it's possible to enjoy a staggering landscape, with Pellestrina and Chioggia in the background, Verratta expounds me the whole project. Few hours before, at Ca' Farsetti, the Councillor responsible for Environment Alessio Vianello explained me why the municipality is interested to the project and the reason Poveglia results adequate for this kind of effort. Simplifying it at the most, not to confuse the readers more than we were before solving it, of the 34 minor isles of Venice, eight, among which just Poveglia, have historical-artistic interest remains that can be recovered and conserved. The above mentioned nearness to the Lido and San Marco, the fact of being in the town-planning scheme for eventual “services for the managed spare time “ and falling within the European structural funds areas have made it was chosen for a privileged and aimed re-launch instead of being privatized and submitted to a bidding. But why would a boy prefer Poveglia to Venice as it is or a Caribbean isle? Tomaso Coghol, who is young, stares at me as he has not understood or I haven't understood anything. Passing years, one of the risks one runs is that he opposites the rhetoric of the cynicism of who has experienced too much, and knows that the light of utopias often is a mirror, for larks or not, for the rhetoric of the enthusiasm, that turns any initiative into something epochal, any idea turns universal and thinking positive solves all problems. So that Poveglia becomes “a place of the world and not simply an isle in the Lagoon, echo of the main events and at the same time relay satellite in the world of what happens at Venice, and that thanks to the technology and also and mainly with the contribution of the Cts's international net “, is something that, personally, leaves me indifferent. And nevertheless, the recover of a piece of history, the use of a strip of land otherwise destined to putrefy and its transformation into another Venice neighbourhood, into a district neither outskirts nor dormitory, the possibility of employment, the rising infrastructures is an event not occurring every day and worthy of interest and encouragement. By this point of view, the project, as architect Varratta explains is complete. In the north of the isle there will be the gardens, naturalistic routes, the stopover areas and the flora and fauna sighting ones, the aviaries to recover the lagoon birds, the greenhouses, a natural aquarium. The middle area will have and auditorium, a theatre, a conference hall, a restaurant, a hostel, a lodge, squares and markets, an Imax floating cinema with a 360o screen, the berthing for ships. Finally in the octagon where formerly was the redoubt, there will be a permanent archaeological and historical museum. Massimo Cacciari says that “the isles in the lagoon are not only the aesthetic crowning of the old town centre but also its value -added in terms of environment and historical, architectonic and naturalistic heritage and it would be a crime let it decay till irrecoverableness “. When in the afternoon the motorboat gets back Poveglia sinks behind it in a silver strip. Really resurrections occur when all hopes are lost.

 

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