Water works

As a child I read Garratt Mattingley on the Spanish Armada, in the course of which he points up the snooty way in which the ambassadors from the Serene Republic (of Venice) used to report to their masters about the coarse & barbarous ways of the English. This being before Venice, with its grip on the trade with the east, was eclipsed by the new world.

More recently I have been told about how doing business with many former colonies - say of the Soviet Union or of the United Kingdom - is made very difficult by the rampant corruption in such places. But then they are far away, in the middle of Asia or Africa.

So rather taken aback this morning to read in the NYRB about corruption on a very grand scale in Venice, involving no less a personage than the Magistrato alle Acque, a personage who has existed since the times of said Serene Republic. All to do with backhanders, in hundreds of thousands if not millions of euros, to do with the construction of a giant flood protection scheme, a scheme which has attracted a lot of criticism from all kinds of people, not least water engineers who are not in the pocket of the construction outfit principally involved.

To think that Italy is a serious country, one of larger members of the European Community, a member of the eurozone. An advanced western country where they make splendid refrigerators and where this sort of thing is not supposed to happen. In the north of the country too, not in the benighted south, well known to be full of gangsters.

But then thoughts drifts back to the water engineering scandals of the US, not so long ago, which I came across by chance a few years ago, via one Marc Reisner (see http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Marc+Reisner). People of the right might say that large public works of this sort are bound to attract corruption, like lamps attract moths. Leave it all to the private sector, untouched by this particular disease... While the best we can do here in the UK are the relatively minor & shabby dealings of the late John Poulson.

I wonder if the Netherlands, another country which was great in the 17th century and which also has water problems, have water flavoured scandals. Is the boss of the Rijkswaterstaat - the equivalent perhaps of the Magistrato alle Acqueas - as clean as they come? My guess is that he, or she, is.

And then I start to think about the difficulty of preserving large chunks of real estate which have outlived their purpose, which have perhaps lingered on long enough to become an expensive encumbrance. Long enough to have arrived in the world of heritage. We have enough problems with all our stately homes, so doing something about Venice must be a much tougher proposition.