Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged (Hardcover)

by John Keahey (Author) "Who knows when the first prehistoric people, standing on the edge of the Italian mainland and scanning the horizon toward the rising sun, first ventured..." (more)
Key Phrases: mobile gates, acqua alto, lagoon dwellers, Venice Against the Sea, Thames Barrier, Grand Canal (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
"Venice is in trouble," writes John Keahey. The city is sinking into the sea. It has lost six feet over the last millennium and soon will lose more. The problem has become so bad that hotel concierges routinely distribute rubber boots to guests, and tourists cross historic squares on elevated boardwalks. Long-time residents flee not only the rising water, but also the rising cost-of- living and the rising industrial pollution. Venice, according to Keahey, "is evolving into a crumbling museum." Once, of course, it was an economic powerhouse with global reach; later it became the repository of some of the finest art and architecture in the world. Now it's sinking, largely due to the remorseless facts of geography, but also because the city's residents have abused their underground water resources. In Venice Against the Sea, Keahey offers a detailed description of what's gone wrong--and explores how the city might be saved, at least temporarily, through innovative engineering. This is a book anybody who has fallen in love with Venice will want to read, yet it issues a stark warning for people in coastal cities all over the world. If sea levels continue to rise, Venice's bleak fate may also be their own. --John Miller

From Publishers Weekly
Built on a lagoon, Venice is now in constant danger of becoming a new Atlantis, explains journalist Keahey (A Sweet and Glorious Land) in this fascinating look at the ecological disaster facing the city of canals. Not only is sea level "sixteen feet higher than it was six thousand years ago when the lagoon was formed," a situation made increasingly worse by global warming, but the foolish extraction of ground water for industrial uses has accelerated the city's sinking. Indeed, a catastrophic flood in 1966 was a clear warning, and in 1996 there were "ninety-nine tides over thirty-one inches," all of which flooded St. Mark's Square. Keahey writes perceptively of Venice's ecology and history its mythic founding by descendants of Trojan warriors, its involvement with the Crusades and the development of medieval trade routes quoting a wide variety of sources from Livy to Jan Morris to scientists at the 1997 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While the situation looks dire (malfeasance on the part of the Italian government has only made things worse), Keahey investigates several possible solutions, like a potentially promising plan for barrier gates similar to the ones London uses to control the Thames. This informative book examines an urban environmental crisis in the making.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1 edition (March 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312265948
• ISBN-13: 978-0312265946
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #506,215 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good, gets a little technical towards the end, July 23, 2002

By A Customer

The first three-quarters+ of the book is excellent. It provides a good overview of Venetian history and explains how/why the city is essentially sinking. The author then gets into a TREMENDOUS amount of depth (no pun intended) concerning funding for a proposed gate project, various changes of Italian government, etc.-- probably more than you need to know, certainly more than I needed. Overall, though, the book was very good, even for someone who knows Venice as well as I do.