On January 8, the minister for economic development Federica Guidi has signed a framework agreement for Porto Marghera by 153 million euro. With her were the president of the Veneto region Luca Zaia, the special commissioner of the city of Venice Vittorio Zappalorto and the president of the Port Authority of Venice, Paolo Costa. For those interested in things Venetian, an ad may seem like a déjà vu, yet another reminder of the “revival of Port Marghera”, a phrase over the years become a refrain from the campaign, a good intention that rarely follows a ‘ concrete action. Things, at least this time could be different and the plan seems destined to have real consequences in the area, for a rather banal reason: the money is there really.
It’s hard to explain Porto Marghera to those who have not ever seen is that enormous set of factories, warehouses, chimneys and smoke that can be seen to your right along the bridge of Liberty in the direction of Venice. And, of course, it is to your left as you leave the city, to serve as a counterpart postindustrial former Serenissima and its antiquities.
But Porto Marghera is different: it is the industrial center born in 1919 – close to the First World War – who converted in a few decades much of the Veneto from the primary sector to the secondary; is the port through which thousands of people met for the first time the place fixed by going to the factory from the countryside by bike or with the trolley; but also the local labor movement, with the flags of the Fiom that still can be seen outside of the factories; and, finally, is the chain of deaths and illnesses caused by asbestos, forced early retirement become standard practice for thousands of people, all former workers unaware of the extent of the material wielding murderer.
Porto Marghera is, in short, a huge spider web of industrial smokestacks and with a prime location in the lagoon of Venice, a World Heritage Site, a little something that became one of the most important centers of Europe and chemicals in 1971 it touched a record high of employees (35,724), before letting go in a slow but steady decline.
As with any tragedy, the project was born from a need and a lack, that of a port. At the end of the nineteenth century, while northern Italy knew a belated industrial boom between Turin and Milan, Venice was linked to the mainland by a railway bridge (“uniting the continent in Venice”, as the islanders say, chronically self-centered): for the first time in history, Venice could be achieved by a means other than water, a novelty that must have seemed blasphemous to some old conservative local. But there was something missing in the city, a lack heavy and awkward for the former queen of the seas: a modern port. Which it was built soon.
There were some problems. Of all the political, it represented the Austro-Hungarian empire, then still the master of the region, which favored the Italian city Trieste due to an old rivalry that ended with a Napoleonic regalia.
On the other side of the railway bridge, then, there were many other attempts to revive the area, as the initiatives were not lacking, as the historian Sergio Barizza: citing the case of Joseph Jappelli, author a plan for the extension of the railway bridge “to the tip of Health for equipping port facilities along the Riva delle Zattere” (is there a parallel universe in which this project was carried out, we stumbled in the parallel universe of large ships ).
Instead, it was the idea in 1867 of Pietro Paleocapa to win, at least for a few years: the its commercial port in the bag of Santa Marta had a troubled birth (it was inaugurated only in 1880), created enormous hardships and several victims at work but seemed destined to become the port of Venice, a small but comfortable. Born already old, the work was not prepared for the increase in the trade in oil and coal nor the arrival of ships to draft getting bigger (a problem we will face in the short), so that it was already looking for a replacement for that area, that today the Venetians call it “Maritime”.
He then started a new bizarre season in which architects and specialists tried to solve the dilemma of the port without even get out of Venice, with results often absurd: who proposed to focus on the Cannaregio district, in the north, who invented an extension of the Maritime, who pointed out a quays of Giudecca, the largest island in the south (see picture). Only at the beginning of the twentieth century it became against the horrible truth: Venice would have to build its port outside of Venice .
March ghe gera
That “outside Venice” proved wide coastal area east of the city, a the place we now call Marghera, although we do not know why. The only history of the place name is intricate as that of industrial and worth telling. A popular legend at the limit with the myth says that the name Marghera is derived from the phrase “ mar ghe gera ” (“the sea that there was”), as had been torn few centuries earlier from the lagoon. Not so.
Before the construction of the port area was already known as the Bottenighi (swampy, uninhabited, was a set of shoals and channels carved in the fourteenth century by the Venetians to divert the waters of the Brenta from the lagoon), while the Marghera name (or Malghera , is not clear) belonged to a village that stood just beyond – near the San Giuliano Park in Mestre. This village was destroyed by the French (after the Austro-Hungarian) after the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797 to make way for a military base, which became known as Forte Marghera. So the name of the fort (today demilitarized, full of cafes and beautiful) taken to indicate that whole area that had the nerve to look out of Venice.
So where does really the name Marghera? Sorry to break the magic of the “sea that there was” but the theory seems more solid than the historic Venetian Wladimiro Dorigo, who claimed resulted from rubble , a Latin term which defined the dry stone walls used to divide landholdings.
Maceria or in March that there was that is, between 1920 and 1950 developed as the first industrial area of Porto Marghera (here map).
A set of insediature, docks and industrial areas traversed by long railway – now ruins left to ruin the tires of cars – in with a successful combination of sea and land, ships and trains. His birth coincided also with the reinvention of the town and its expansion, begun just to tie this area to the city so as not to be the Bottenighi as part of the town of Mestre is in fact decided to join Mestre, Venice and other neighboring countries in a one large common – a move whose deft and purely political aftermath reaching today with a broad front citizen who wants “independence” of Mestre from the lagoon.
The very first twenty years of Marghera were not only dominated from the port: the other side of Via Fratelli Bandiera, limit of the first industrial area, now four-lane road that is the boundary between the town and the industries often abandoned, he was born a small utopia that will not last long, leaving behind him another idea of Marghera, now battered. Here, in 1922, designed by Pietro Emilio Emmer, he began the construction of the residential part of the area on the model of “garden city” theorized during the nineteenth century English Ebenezer Howard. Its Venetian variant was to be built on a large and sparsely populated territory but crossed by major roads around which, dreamed Emmer, would rise a green city made of low houses, popular but decent, far from speculation and from which ban townhouses, housing prototype in which each citizen has his piece of green and you miss that common.
Emmer was aimed at a garden stuck in a country, a country surrounded by all, as a model of Letchworth, location just outside London and the first garden city in history. The dream did not last long and the garden city was never completed: soon his ideal would be eroded by-district high rises such as the “Cita”, which still gives the first welcome to the tourists out of the ring, turning the phrase “Marghera city-garden” from urban planning to tragic oxymoron.
Even today, visiting the center, you can see a particular city structure, made of fairly broad avenues and quartierini popular invaded by green, as aged badly. An unexpected view to anyone who knows Marghera for its palaces overlooking the ring road and its chimneys: “Marghera sensa factories sary healthier / ‘na de jungle Panoce, tomatoes and marijuana” in the words of Sir Oliver Skardy.
In 1971 there was the peak of employment and began a decline which became steep parabola since the eighties
After the first industrial zone, built between 1920 and 1950, was born the second between 1953 and 1958, the largest the last, and in 1963, with a quickly suspected, it was planned the third, even more extensive in the areas south of Fusina.
These are the decades of petrochemicals, which opened the area in a different industry, heavy, forever changing Porto Marghera, its function and its perception in the public eye (the years in which the word petrochemical became almost entirely synonymous).
In 1971, as mentioned, there was the peak of employment and began a decline which became steep parabola since the eighties, a time in history when, as written by the candidate Regional Council in proportion five stars Anthony Candiello in volume Marghera 2009. After industrialization , “in our country, something happened that changed (damage and to compromise) the evolution” of the port, the start of “a conservation strategy, tense to maintain the existing, reducing the immediate effects on employment and at the same time to require limited investment companies. Leadership comfortable, acceptable to the union, manageable for local governments but dangerous economically, “especially in terms of industrial renewal area.
The eighties were mainly the years of unsuccessful merger between Eni and Montedison, one of the many errors caused by a logic sly conservation, attention to the status quo that has undermined the possibilities for development and evolution of Marghera in a decade when the world changed radically.
Marghera did not notice or pretended not to notice. It is more or less at this point, thirty years ago, that the refrain “we must revive Marghera” became ubiquitous. Slow agony that, according to historian Laura Cerasi, author of Forgive Marghera (Franco Angeli, 2007), is her turning point in the new millennium, on the evening of November 28, 2002, when “one discharge of chlorinated pitch in department Td5 Dow Chemical Company, within the Petrochemical [...] generated an accident near a reservoir of phosgene gas lethal if inhaled even in small amounts. ”
Four workers came out intoxicated but, fortunately, there was no fire, it “would kill the population of Marghera, Mestre, Venice and the neighboring territory.” At the time I was a kid, the 11 September was increased from just over a year; I remember the paranoia of terrorism scroll between people, as a conditioned reflex. But Al Qaeda, it was learned shortly after, had nothing to do: it was only the dear old petrochemical. I remember a surreal sense of relief that shows how the chemical hazard, for those who live a few kilometers from Porto Marghera, has always been a threat familiar, inevitable. Breathable.
And so here’s the program agreement of 8 January, came after all this, after hundreds of strikes, after the first epidemiological survey of 1975, after cancer, hundreds of deaths, raises and failures. On the whole, then, the mantra: “We must revive Marghera”.
“Marghera nearly died of agreements,” said Paolo Costa, former Minister of Public Works Prodi government (1996-1998), MEP, former mayor of Venice and now head of the powerful Venice Port Authority (APV). “After Porto Marghera was born exploiting labor and energy resources at low cost. Behind it all, however, there is the proximity to the sea, the real ‘mine’ of the industrial “.
Today, however, labor and energy at low prices there are more; remains close to the sea, to be managed in a different way: “Marghera – but the same phenomenon is occurring in the world – is moving towards the port-centrism,” says Costa. This agreement provides for huge investment in logistics: new motorway and train connections, 15 million euro for the access roads of the first industrial zone, new car parks (one million euro), a road connection between the SR11 and via Electricity (three million).
The agreement
“It’s not a defensive plan,” according to Costa, and this would be his most valuable: you leave the maintenance of the status quo and the protection of the great industries are present here, “among all the Eni”, and in a scenario in which the production of industrial goods has been transferred elsewhere, in Marghera is granted a great little hope represented by the concept of hub : less production and more logistics, focus on creating a huge hub for sorting to aim for a restructuring the fine chemicals and green. In a phrase, move heavy industry that has always been interested in the area (that word again: Petrochemical) to one based on manufacturing and services.
Stephen Syrians deals with working harbors. He is the director of the master’s degree in economics and management port of the Ca ‘Foscari of Venice and follows the inevitable question from time-to-raise-Porto Marghera. “We can say that the program agreement arrived late, of course,” says now, “but better late than never, because the situation of Marghera is so complicated and so difficult national context that the fact that it is close the deal relatively quickly it is in itself a good thing. Why the late nineties, when the area was classified national interest, there were agreements that have often involved the reclamation “, interventions needed to save the site and the Venetian lagoon overlooked gem treated for UNESCO years as an illegal dump.
“What does this program agreement different? Here we allocate the money they really are and the objectives are very clearly indicated. The plan, then, is very much geared to the economic level, they speak of reclamation and marginally above interventions hydraulic safety, improvement of the environmental management system and especially of transport and infrastructure. ”
The goal is the “economic regeneration of the pole”, a huge industrial conversion that update to twenty-first century. Relevant then the role of the Port Authority of Venice, “which is focusing a lot on the south shore and quays area MonteSyndial”.
Why this area? What did the MonteSyndial so important to find himself at the center of a plan by 153 million euro? It’s no mystery as unfathomable: the solution lies in another project – this is not yet approved and not included in the agreement – to which many, including all Paolo Costa, take much. A project that, according to the port authority, could really change the fate of Marghera. And Venice.
Out from Venice, out of the lagoon
The Venice lagoon is a narrow and not very accessible, all characteristics for which was chosen in the fourth century Christ as a shelter from desperate people fleeing from the barbarian hordes that terrorized the current Northeast (on all cities of Aquileia and Concordia Sagittaria, the current Portogruaro).
After repaired in Torcello and other islands and learned how to sow the muddy ground of long wooden poles with which to support homes and churches, refugees could now be said to be sedentary and quite wealthy thanks to the salt trade.
They began to fraternize with the land, their only salvation: date back to the fifth century, the first settlements of the islands of the lagoon area of Rivo Alto, future Rialto, the heart of Venice. The reasons that led to the blossoming of the maritime republic – the defense guaranteed by the lagoon, the narrow inlets easily defensible, the proximity to continental Europe and, at the same time, its projection towards the far east – recur today in a combination problems and opportunities.
The port project offshore aims to circumvent the first to take advantage of the latter: on paper, the proposed project will consist of a 4.2 km long breakwater to be built eight miles off the coast, or offshore, where an oil terminal will arise and a container terminal that will be able to land the big container ships getting popular in Asian ports and northern European. Here they will be discharged and charged through a system highly automated.
And that has to do with MonteSyndial, stuck as it is in Marghera, with the open sea? To understand this, we go back to the relationship between the mainland, the lagoon and the open sea, the three pillars on which Venice blossomed between the sandbanks. The offshore would ensure greater freedom of movement for boats giant, giving the Venetian harbor in the Adriatic unique opportunity to trade with the East – as in ancient script – and the lagoon of a bridge to the mainland. The Po Valley, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe.
But is it really necessary to build an offshore port?
The problem is the naval gigantism but, at least in this case, we are not talking of the matter “big ships” crossing the placid giants and the San Marco basin. Rather we refer to the phenomenon that the container ships are getting bigger: because the maritime transport sector is one of the keys to the global market boats must move on waters with deeper draft.
Teu is an important symbol for the sector, the standard unit of measurement for cargo ships: a TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent unit) is the volume capacity of a container six meters long.
The port of Venice, with its depths to 12 meters, can accommodate vessels of a maximum of seven Teu while the shipping world is now based on monsters to eighteen thousand TEUs (twenty-two thousand of those Teu are under construction, and are the future).
This is why, according to Costa, Venice must – for the first time in its long history – look for his salvation out of the lagoon, where the depths reach around 20 meters. Arriving there, the cargo will be “dragged” by huge semi-submersible barges called mama vessell , a term illustrated by this video.
But this has yet to happen, as the site of the port authority talk as if it were already a reality, and it does not even part of the program. Nevertheless Marghera and offshore are two connected elements, tactical moves that are part of a field, that of the ports of the Adriatic, pretty crowded.
From Asia to the Baltic
The history remembers the match between Genoa and Venice, the two Serenissime Mediterranean. The twenty-first century, from parts of the Adriatic, on the other hand sees the battle between Venice and Trieste. The heart of the matter is called Ten-T, a European Union project which aims at the creation (or improvement) of trade corridors for trade on the continent.
As in the days of Marco Polo and the Silk Road, Venice and around the northern Adriatic (ideally an area ranging from Ravenna to Rijeka, the former River), represent the ideal door for Southeast Asia’s booming economy to enter in continental Europe. For this port authorities of these cities have founded an organization, the Napa (North Adriatic Ports Association) which includes Venice, Trieste, and the Croatian ports of Koper and Rijeka (Ravenna has left the project).
Together, the four horsemen of the Napa should prepare for traffic coming from the Middle East and Asia, taking advantage of the Suez Canal. should . Because the tendency to go it alone is likely to frustrate the message Community Association. And it is a problem, according Suriani, because “Adriatic ports have everything – draft, areas, infrastructure – if they are examined as a unit. But in reality all these elements are disaccorpati: Venice has very large areas and good infrastructure but does not have adequate depths, as we have seen; the same can be said of Ravenna; while Trieste and Koper (Koper) have excellent accessibility natural (20-24 m draft) but a severe shortage of areas to treat the container. ”
So you can imagine how the proposed offshore Venetian has been granted, in Trieste. Debora Serracchiani, governor of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Deputy Secretary of the Democratic Party has repeatedly rejected the idea, pointing out the importance of the “synergies between the ports of the other Adriatic” and, in a recent meeting with the mayoral candidate for the municipality Venice Felice Casson reiterated the concept. The same Casson seems very cautious about the issue, saying that “the financial plan for the port includes offshore re-entry long for investors. I do not know who might have wanted to put the money. ”
The issue of private is definitely the focus of everything: Costa claims to find them easily, his critics seem more skeptical and tend to remember what happened with the last great work built in these parts, the Mose (the system of locks created to defend the city from high water), and the “Tangentopoli Venetian” that ensued. Each has its own horse in the race, and precise Suriani, “the approach of Costa is different, is based on Venice and its situation, its depths of 12 meters and the same Moses whose final activation further affect port activity “.
The offshore, according to Costa, “is not a work but a strategy.” Not the only possible course.
According to Professor Suriani, for example, there is nothing forcing Venice to become a hub of the dream by the size of the program and the port authority.
It is an attitude “that someone could be called defeatist but it is worth considering,” according to the scholar, because it is not required to turn in a small Marghera Rotterdam. Trieste and Genoa could widen continue to be the largest port in northern Italy while Venice “could remain with the cruise port and a commercial-industrial small-medium for ships that can enter the lagoon.” A proposal defeatist, perhaps, but, even worse, destined to be folded by the zeitgeist world, which has long since married the naval gigantism.
No matter what happens, we now have the agreement of the program and the overall conversion of Porto Marghera. The offshore project that has had excellent awards abroad, will follow. Maybe. The future of Marghera, once again, has the taste of blackmail: something must be done to avoid wasting the potential of the logistics and not be cut off – by the Turks, very active in the Mediterranean, or the Croats, who already have grown tremendously. The risk is the isolation caused by a revolution in commercial techniques and the old pleasure of defending the status quo – all things that Venice lived in the seventeenth century onwards, when the colonization of the New World rewrote trade routes. We all know how it ended.
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