Venice has the battle against extreme weather down to a fine art - The Guardian (blog)

Tourists lugging suitcases through waist-high water, or sitting at tables on Piazza San Marco in their swimwear. Pictures of Venice in flood are alarming and surreal; the inundation of 70% of the city following heavy rain – one of the most dramatic floods of modern times in Venice – is surely a catastrophe, an apocalypse.

Well, not necessarily.

We are used to thinking of Venice as a city in peril, a glorious relic of human creativity that is about to go under any day now – and suddenly the end looks closer. But there is another point of view. Venice is no longer alone in its peril. In the past few weeks we have even seen New York in peril. As climate change makes extreme weather more frequent, Venice looks less like a victim of the sea and more like an old survivor that can teach the rest of the world how to live with water.

You barely notice, on a dry summer day when the waters are confined to their canals, how systematically the art treasures of Venice are kept on the upper floors of palaces and museums. One museum runs across the highest storey of the arcaded buildings that frame Piazza San Marco, while paintings in the Accadamia Galleries are similarly ensconced above ground. It is far more worrying to think about all the art in churches. But the fact is that no other city has such an acute awareness of borrowing its existence from water – or so much skill in that regard.

In their art, the people of Venice are as happy on water as on land. Vittore Carpaccio's painting Hunting on the Lagoon, which dates from around 1490-95, shows young Venetians who seem totally amphibious in their lifestyle. They stand easily balanced in low-sided boats to shoot arrows at waterbirds, but Carpaccio makes it seem that these brightly dressed youths are the true waterbirds – graceful lords of the sea. That same confidence is on show in his picture The Miracle of the True Cross at the Rialto, in which Venetian men and women dot the dark waters of the grand canal in their elegant gondolas.

In Gentile Bellini's 1500 painting The Miracle of the True Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo, meanwhile, priests swim in the canal searching for a lost relic. This may not seem so remarkable, but the ability to swim was rare 500 years ago. These Venetian clerics are so confident in the water that some are swimming in their religious robes . They are like dolphins, utterly at ease.

Titian portrays a woman bathing in open water in his painting Venus Anadyomene – purportedly a mythic depiction of the goddess of love. Hunting and fishing, swimming and bathing – Venice has always known how to enjoy its waters.

The city also knew how to draw wealth from those waters, as Venetian merchant ships spanned the seas. The palaces built by this commerce are monuments not just to luxury but prudence. Each has its living spaces and grand salons on upper floors, often with a covered courtyard on the ground floor that gives instant water access and is comparatively impervious to flooding. The city's finest house, the Ca' d'Oro, is a case in point. Its canal-level courtyard has a stunning marble pavement that is both beautiful and waterproof.

This may seem terribly complacent. The perils of Venice are real; this treasury of civilisation does need protecting. But it is not all bad news. Or rather, as the news gets worse for the entire planet, Venice has some lessons to teach about how to live with the sea, in what the Most Serene Republic always boasted was a happy marriage.