Unshod for water

In Venice, during the eighteenth century, there was a craze among women for a curious kind of shoe called the zoccolo. In design it was very similar to the worst excesses of modern-day platform shoes, possessing soles of truly ankle-twisting dimensions. Historians have speculated that the fashion was introduced by men as an attempt to limit their wives' scope for running around after lovers in the husband's absence.  Although good historical precedents exist for using footwear as a form of social control - the deranged Egyptian Caliph al-Hakim went even further in the tenth century by banning the production of women's shoes completely - there may be another explanation.

Perhaps far from being wildly impractical, these shoes were, on the contrary, eminently sensible, and designed to cope with that uniquely Venetian phenomenon: Acqua Alta, those conjunctions of wind and tide which contrive to raise the water levels and so flood the city.

As anyone who has experienced Acqua Alta knows, this produces an extraordinary change in a city already unreal.  Where before you had a delicate but well-defined mesh of land and water, of two superimposed but distinct worlds, now you have some indeterminate state.  Along the Zattere, facing the Giudecca, the waves wash slowly in over the stones, covering them to a depth of several inches. The clear boundary between firm land and inconstant water is suddenly gone; you are left only with a sense of vulnerability, of the unnaturalness of dry land when confronted by the dominant mode of this planet – water.

That element's dominion is perhaps demonstrated most clearly in the central locus of Venice: the Piazza San Marco.  Beloved of tourists ever since Canaletto started producing his definitive vision of spatial harmony, the paved arena and its embracing architecture depicted as the quintessence of control and civilisation, under several feet of water the Piazza's area becomes instead a huge mirror of the lowering skies above, and hence nothing so much as an absence.  Its disappearance proclaims the dissolution of all that hard-won order, the peremptory annulment of Venice's presumptuous ancient marriage to the sea.

Elsewhere in Venice its particular geography - it has no hills, only areas more or less above sea-level - means that any rain is condemned to lie where it falls, until the smaller piazzas and streets and passageways become similarly full of spreading sheets of water.

As a consequence, it is almost impossible to walk in Venice at Acqua Alta and to keep your feet dry. With the exception of fully-fledged galoshes, no type of footwear is immune to the effects of the omnipresent water, crept out now of the lagoon like some ancient monster, to take its revenge on the impious inhabitants of this impossible city built on mud-flats and staves.  And so at this time there is an additional melancholy, born of the sight of all the world walking around with cold, sodden feet.  Just as their forebears did one hundred, one thousand years ago.  If nothing else, this water should remind us that it is part of the human condition to get wet feet in this world: to walk on water is only given to the divine.
 
(25.12.91)

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