Tag Archives: Italy

America’s Public Health Disaster

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Every day seems to bring shocking news. Restaurants and schools close, conventions are canceled, overseas travelers face unexpected obstacles in coming home. The United States of America, like much of the rest of the world, is facing a crisis unlike any in our lifetimes. While I understand many of the protocols because of a background in disaster recovery, my intellectual and professional focus has dealt with natural disasters, not pandemics, so I will not claim any special expertise. I’d rather listen to the medical experts who have studied the issue in depth.

But at 70, I can relate on a personal level to the concerns of older citizens who are most at risk in a way that I know I never could have done at a younger age. While I remain physically fit, I am also aware that maintaining that fitness requires real effort, sometimes more effort than it might for someone half my age. More importantly, I have become more aware that a fitness routine does not guarantee immunity or invulnerability to some of the impacts of aging. Consequently, while exercising, not smoking, and a sensible diet can afford me significant confidence about facing a challenge like the current novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, pandemic, it guarantees nothing. All the recommendations about avoiding unnecessary travel, social distancing, and sanitary precautions still matter greatly in improving the odds against illness.

Already, I confess, some of the simplest impacts of aging have slowed down my production of this blog or at times made it more irregular than I would like, and that is despite no longer working full-time. I do some consulting, some writing, and some teaching, in various proportions, and my days are full, although much of my time currently is also devoted to a volunteer job—serving since January 1 as chair of the American Planning Association’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. That presently has me involved in trying to disentangle commitments for some of our events at APA’s pending National Planning Conference in Houston, scheduled for April 25-28, preceded by some leadership meetings I expected to attend. Tonight, the APA board of directors canceled the conference. Our division executive committee had decided to cancel our division reception in Houston, only to learn that the restaurant planned to close anyway. Life is like that these days. A colleague and I were scheduled, as part of our APA division’s outreach program to planning schools, to discuss hazards in planning at a university graduate class later this month, but that shifted to possibly remote to simply waiting for another school year as most colleges have adopted online learning for the remainder of the spring semester. As I said, life is like that these days.

But back to the subject of aging. One learns we simply cannot control everything, no matter how hard we try. As I detailed in a July 4 blog post last year, life for me had generally gone along well until I began to realize in late spring that my sight was becoming fuzzier and clouded. What began with a visit to an optometrist in April to see if my prescription for eyeglasses needed updating ended in late June with cataract surgery in both eyes, and considerable lost time due to an increasing inability to read a computer screen. That put me weeks behind in preparing a transition of the University of Iowa graduate class in urban planning I teach each fall to an online forum, and with other factors coming into play as the year went on, I never got completely ahead of the curve until the semester was over in December.

But at least cataract surgery, in most cases, is a one-and-done proposition. You get the implants, you have new vision with only reading glasses for assistance, and life goes on. But by late fall, I learned that another malady would force me into hemorrhoid surgery, which took place immediately after the holidays. With certain complications due to an enlarged prostate gland, it sidelined me for the first half of January until recovery was complete.

Now, it may well be at this point that I will not face further difficulties for some years to come. I certainly would be pleased if that became the case. These were the first surgeries of my entire adult life, but they stalled my activities to some extent, and they are a small glimpse of the sorts of things that make many other seniors feel far more vulnerable than I do. It is small wonder that many of them fall victim more easily to scourges like the coronavirus. The elderly and the physically challenged have predictably proven far more prone to the severest consequences of COVID-19, including death.

We also know, however, that many other Americans, and many citizens of other nations as well, will suffer serious economic dislocation as a result of the restrictions placed on economic and social activity in order to stem the upward slope of infections and death. While U.S. accounting is hampered by the lack of testing kits and public access to testing in key regions of the country, the alarm bells are ringing loudly. As I write this, the number of confirmed cases has quintupled in the past week to more than 5,000. We do not yet have any idea when we will reach the peak of this frightening mountain, and how high that peak will be. But we already know that the far smaller nation of Italy has, as of this moment on March 17, more than 31,000 cases that have resulted in more than 2,500 deaths, despite doing far more in an effort to contain the spread of the virus. It is not that we have a smaller problem, but only that we may have begun our steep ascent a few weeks later. Nearly every day, new nations report outbreaks. This is clearly not a “foreign” virus, but a global pandemic.

We have built-in problems in the American system, most notably the lack of universal health coverage as a result of endless political spats over creating a system that better protects the working poor. Many of the restaurant and factory workers who may face layoffs will lose whatever coverage they had, or may no longer be able to afford it, at the very time when they are facing an existential public health threat. This threatens all of us with the possibility that some workers, unknowingly carrying the virus, may feel compelled to work if they can or simply be unable to visit the doctors they need to see. Our myopic approaches to health care have set us up for massive vulnerabilities in this regard. We seem not yet to fully understand that we are no stronger as a nation than our weakest links. One result of this crisis, however, may be a profound rethinking of the role of the federal government in ensuring some form of universal health care availability. The consequences of making health care unaffordable to the poor have never been laid bare before for us in the way that the coronavirus may do. Disasters can force soul-searching under the right conditions. The question is how deeply we are prepared to think about the issue.

The other question we have never faced before is how we will emerge from this crisis. After weeks or months of social distancing and self-isolation, how will we decide the time is right to emerge from our mental caves and greet other again, and join large crowds again? And how will we feel when we do it, and how comfortable will it feel? My hunch is that the human race is highly adaptable, but that there will be no very clear demarcation point when it is okay to say that the war is over.

This particular disaster may end not with a bang, but a whimper, followed by some happy parties among the most extroverted but also the most fearless, perhaps the most reckless, among us. I like to count myself a “compulsive extrovert,” my invented self-description, but I also like to think I know when to exercise some social caution based on circumstances. This may be a disaster where people like me eventually start to poke our heads out of the foxholes we reluctantly entered, not out of fear of social interaction, but to be sure the landscape is no longer infected.

But when the day comes, it will surely be nice to join a big party where the beer flows and greetings are plentiful.

Jim Schwab

Venice and the Prism of History

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Piazza San Marco in Venice, with the lion, symbol of St. Mark above the stairwell

Earlier this summer, I noted that my wife and I had visited Venice, Italy, as the result of an invitation in late May at IUAV, the Architectural University of Venice. I was asked to speak at a conference on how climate change is changing cities and affecting city planning.

Because Venice is unique in so many ways, it excited my intellectual curiosity. I pulled together four substantial books from the Chicago Public Library, and I eventually completed reading all of them, though not before we flew to Europe. Stealing time night after night, I indulged my habit—I am an unabashed history buff—until I got the job done. I learned one thing about the history of Venice: There are many ways to write the extensive history of even this one small place. The three books I chose on the history of Venice could not have been more different. One other book I will discuss separately because it involves very recent history, dealing not with Venice’s imperial glory but with its current struggle to defend itself against the rising sea.

I started with Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire, the work of Garry Wills, an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University who lives in Evanston, just north of Chicago. I have met and known him for many years, though mostly I have simply shared banquet tables with him at Chicago literary events, and on one occasion presented him with the Society of Midland Authors award for biography—for a book about James Madison. If the combination of Madison and Venice gives you any idea of this man’s intellectual range, you are only beginning to understand his achievements, which are staggering. They include the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 for Lincoln at Gettysburg. Those banquet conversations were perennial reminders of his erudition. He has also written on the subject of church and state, and on the current state of the Roman Catholic Church.

Wills takes the reader on an impressive journey through the history of art in Venice, explaining in remarkable detail the ways in which it reflected the imperial logic of the Venetian experiment. We learn, for starters, that medieval Venetians saw nothing untoward about its merchants slipping into Alexandria in the eighth century, stealing the remains of St. Mark, who was martyred there by a mob in the first century, securing them beneath a load of pork that Muslim inspectors would not touch, and spiriting them back to Venice so that they could fulfill a possibly apocryphal angelic prophecy to the apostle that, “Here you shall find rest.” If God didn’t see fit to end Mark’s life in a city that did not yet exist in his time, the Venetians would see to it themselves, and thereafter use Mark as their shield and symbol—in the form of a lion, an image that most likely never occurred to Mark himself in his entire life.

But imperial ventures must be justified in the public realm, and Venice spared little expense in creating its own mythology, including an improbably precise date in the fifth century when the city was officially born (at a time when Italians of the area were building in the lagoon mostly to protect themselves from marauding Lombards on the mainland). Like most ultimately powerful national enterprises, including our own in the U.S., Venice started small and humble but grew steadily and aggressively and needed a solidly aspirational manifesto to motivate its citizens and intimidate its enemies. Divine sponsorship by St. Mark combined with ruthless mercenary skills to produce a Venice that dominated the seas. But manifestos need all manner of effective communication to maintain their appeal, and artists in service to the state, says Wills, provided that backbone to an unabashedly imperialistic city-state. And empires, Wills reminds us in his closing chapter, are inherently predatory.

One of the most appealing aspects of Wills’s book is the liberal use of plates and drawings, combined with his explications of their significance and meaning, to convey the nature and value of all this art, and the important fact that one should not overlook a single detail in mining these works for their nuances and symbolism.

Wills does not spend much time telling us just how predatory such a venture can become because his primary mission is to explore the use of art in service to such a venture, one that distinguished itself repeatedly from the power of the Pope and felt free to defy him. It takes the story-telling prowess of English historian Roger Crowley to pursue such details. In City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas, Crowley, a scholar of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, explores precisely that question—how this small city-state built on wooden pilings into a lagoon at the north end of the Adriatic Sea was able to dominate the Mediterranean for centuries until its power was eclipsed by more westerly nation-states building empires in the New World and the Pacific. This is a nation that ruthlessly suppressed rebellions in maritime colonies like Crete and Cyprus. It is also a state that led Crusaders in 1204 to invade and plunder Constantinople in repeated defiance of Pope Innocent III, who had threatened wholesale excommunication if the Venetians launched an attack on another Christian nation—which they did. They solved all problems of Crusaders’ potential fear of excommunication by simply refusing to share the news of the Pope’s communication on this point. This extraordinary achievement against an internally rotting Byzantine Empire not only did terminal damage that set the stage for the eventual Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, about which there are several worthwhile books (including one by Steven Runciman: The Fall of Constantinople: 1453), but freed Venice to acquire and exploit its maritime colonial holdings in the first place. But, like every other imperial system, this too was destined to collapse due to its own weight and that of unforeseen historical forces. By 1798, Venice was an empty shell of its former republican self and fell easily to Napoleon Bonaparte. From that point forward, including its incorporation into modern Italy under Garibaldi in the 1860s, Venice primarily became the artistic playground of European writers, poets, and painters who found its charms timeless and its environment inspiring.

The culture that now makes Venice a world heritage site is the focus of Joanne M. Ferraro, a professor of history at San Diego State University and the author of Venice: A History of the Floating City. Considerably more academic in tone than the other two, her book explores the social and material life of Venetians from the Middle Ages into the post-Renaissance period. Like Wills, she is less focused on the military and political evolution of Venice as a state than on the soul of its people, which she dissects with analyses of everything from cooking utensils to clothing to the ways in which imported spices altered cuisine and the exposure to ship-borne rats ravaged the city with bubonic and other plagues on a periodic basis. It is a very scholarly work, but for those willing to bear with the writing, a nice balance in some ways to the work of Wills and Crowley, who are definitely more engaging as writers.

As I said at the outset, there is no one way to write the history of a city with such a compelling story. The rise of Venice occurred in a power vacuum, in an age when competing powers were few and when its people had a unique ability to advance the cause of commerce in the midst of a continent dominated by feudalism. In hindsight, the days of such an empire were clearly numbered; between the rise of the Ottomans to the east, and the discoveries of new lands to the west, Venice became an anachronism by the 16th century. Nonetheless, Venice took another century or two to realize that its decline had become irreversible. It has been the fate of every great power in world history to look over its shoulder to see who’s gaining on them.

Jim Schwab

First Impressions of Venice

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Gondolas on the Canal Grande at the Accademia Bridge

 

If you are a veteran of Venice prone to sniff at the observations of a first-time visitor, this commentary may not be for you. I was invited to speak at a May 23 conference on climate change and cities at IUAV (Architectural University of Venice). I spent the next four days touring the city with my wife. I cannot pretend to be an expert, though I spent a modicum of time trying to absorb Italian, via Rosetta Stone, in the weeks preceding the trip. I also dived into a tour guide, plus Garry Wills’s book, Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire, and other sources to begin to divine what brought this gorgeously remarkable city into being and what sustains it today. I have learned a great deal quickly, but I am well aware of how much more there is to learn. It was a pity to have to return home, but most of us cannot afford to stay indefinitely. Too many other commitments lay ahead to allow me the luxury. For me, Venice was a brief encounter that begs for more.

I will blog more than once about Venice because the subject deserves it. Let me start this time with some general observations.

First: I have visited a few countries, though not dozens. Venice is absolutely, objectively unique. The sheer density of high-quality artwork produced per capita in this city over the centuries is astounding. Nothing appears in Venetian paintings by accident. Throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods, this art was almost entirely religious in focus, yet, as Garry Wills observes, art and religion were in the service of empire. Venice claimed St. Mark as its patron; to ensure that the point was not missed that he belonged in the city, Venetian merchants in the eight century stole his remains from Alexandria, where he had died at the hands of a mob. In the Venetians’ view, they repatriated them to what is now the Basilica San Marco. The palace of the doge, the ruler of Venice, was located in the same piazza adjoining the basilica. No one was to miss the point. This relationship is just the tip of the iceberg. One could spend considerable time exploring the intricacies of Venetian politics in the days of the city-state’s independence. Whole books have endeavored to do so.

Second: But there is more. The unusual setting—a city built atop a lagoon—is directly attributable first to the attempt by people in the area to escape the marauding Lombards in the fifth and sixth centuries, and then to the uniquely defensible attributes of this floating city with a navy to rival any in its time. European cities on “terra ferma” built moats and walls to defend themselves. Venice had none of that, but it built around and between canals and water bodies in ways that made it nearly unapproachable by any enemy that did not want to engage that navy, which even for the Turks could prove an exhausting enterprise. It has now been more than two centuries since Venice was independent, but the city that remains lacks cars—there is no place for them—but allows people to move about on foot or in boats. Take a map. We strolled the many narrow streets and squares (campi), crossed numerous bridges across both the narrow canals and the Grand Canal, got lost a few times, found our way again, and took water buses (vaporetti) in the rain, but the experience was special enough to justify every little frustration and every wasted minute. In fact, no minute was wasted. Turn a corner, wander down a narrow alley, discover some more history. In how many cities can you say that?

 

Jean and I at Accademia bridge, enjoying a beer.

 

Third: Of course, when you wish, you can stop. And rest. Or eat. Or watch the boats go by. Near the Rialto, having spent a morning finding small gifts for friends, we simply stopped at a ristorante  at the edge of the Grand Canal, ate a lunch of two types of spaghetti far better than most we are used to, imbibed some red wine, all while sitting outside just five feet from the Grand Canal, in the shadow of the Rialto. It would be hard, if not impossible, to find such settings in other cities so easily. On another occasion, having wandered from the Gallerie Accademia to the Santa Maria della Salute church, built in 1631 after the plague had struck the city, we found our way back to the Accademia bridge to discover a small restaurant and bar in its shadow, sat down for a pair of beers, and watched others hop into a gondola for the expensive ride (80 euros for 40 minutes)—all on a day when the temperature hovered around 70° F. with a slight breeze off the water. I could have stayed there much longer. Despite the concerns about Venice’s eventual fate as a result of global warming and sea level rise, for now at least, the climate seems quite congenial, if sometimes damp.

This is not much of a start, I know. It is merely a teaser to a sampler. More will have to come in bite-size installments throughout the summer. But it is a tiny hint of the richness of a visit to Venice. I can only wish I had been in a position to make it last longer.

 

Jim Schwab