Free On the Shores of the Mediterranean by Eric Newby Page B

entries such as ‘the water rose to the height of a man in the streets’ (on 23 September 1240); ‘the water rose from eight o’clock until midday.Many were drowned inside their houses or died of cold’ (in December 1280); ‘roaring horribly the sea rose up towards the sky, causing a terrible fear … and with such force that it broke the Lido in several places’ (in December 1600).
    In 1825, the murazzi , neglected since the fall of the Republic in 1797, were breached during an enormous storm, but were made good again. On a day in 1967, the first year in which accurate measurements were kept, the water rose five feet above the average sea level. In the forty-seven years between 1867 and 1914, only seven exceptionally high waters, those more than three and a half feet above the normal level, submerged the city; but in the fifty years between 1917 and 1967 Venice sank beneath the waves more than forty times, an extraordinary increase, so that looking at a vertical graph of these high waters during the period from 1867 to 1967 the lines representing them appear as eight more or less isolated trees between 1867 and 1920, some thick clumps in the thirties, late forties and early fifties, and a dense, soaring forest in the late fifties and sixties. The longest line of all is the one showing the acqua alta of 4 November 1966.
    During the night of 3–4 November, the sirocco blew Force 8, the barometer fell to around 750 mm, there was continual heavy rain and waves twelve feet high roared in over the Litorali, submerging Cavallino, the northernmost one, smashing the elegant bathing establishments on the Lido and hurling aside the outerworks of the murazzi on Pellestrina, the great boulders piled fifteen feet high, then breaching, in ten different places, the walls themselves, composed of huge blocks of marble six feet long, but on which no proper repair work had been done for more than thirty years. This time the water at Venice rose six and a half feet above the average sea level, and the result was spectacular.
    It poured under the 450 or so bridges (scarcely any Venetians, let alone outsiders, agree about the number of bridges in the city,or any other of the following figures), overflowing the 177 – some say 150 – canals, the rii , 46 of which are branches off the Canalazzo, the Grand Canal, inundating the 117, or 122, or whatever number of shoals or islands on which the city is said to be built, the 15,000 houses in which large numbers of people were living on the ground floors in the six sestieri , or wards, into which it is divided, and the majority of the 107 churches, of which 80 were still in use. It also inundated 3000 miles of streets and alleys, the various open spaces, the campi , so called because they were once expanses of grass, the campielli and the piazzette , not to speak of the only Piazza, St Mark’s, with an unimaginably vile compound of all the various effluents mentioned previously in connection with the Lagoon. To which was added diesel oil and gas oil which had escaped from the storage tanks, leaving the city without electric light, means of cooking or heating, or any communication with the outside world, not to speak of the awful, immense, much of it irreparable, damage done to innumerable works of art.
    The acqua alta persisted for more than twenty hours. The most dangerous moment came at six in the evening, when the water reached the highest level ever recorded. This was the moment that the Venetians call the acqua morta , when it should begin to go down but doesn’t. By this time the glass was down to 744 mm and if at this moment a fresh impulse had been given to the waters by the sirocco, forcing it to yet higher levels, Venice might well have collapsed. As it was, a miracle occurred. The wind changed. It began to blow from the south-west, a wind the people of Venice and the Lagoon call the vento Garbin , and by nine o’clock that night the waters began to fall and the city was saved, at