Stuff Digital Edition

Red tape halts efforts to save basilica from the sea

A bold plan to build a glass wall around St Mark’s Basilica in Venice to protect its crumbling 11th-century mosaics from rising sea water is on hold, after bureaucrats stopped paying workers.

Construction of the €3.8 million (NZ$6.3m), 1.1-metre-high barrier started in September, but workers have downed tools after their payments were snarled up in red tape.

‘‘The climate is changing, the threat to the basilica is growing, and we’ve got a dramatic problem with bureaucracy,’’ said Carlo Alberto Tesserin, head of the board responsible for the church.

The growing number of floods in Venice has played havoc with the church’s 835 square metres of glittering gold leaf mosaics, the world’s biggest expanse of mosaic tiles, as salt creeps into the building’s brickwork.

As the bricks bulge, the gold leaf peels. The damage also leads to the warping of the 125 types of rare marble that are used in the mosaic panels.

The decorations aged 20 years in a day in 2019, when freak high water flooded the crypt. The disaster led to plans to construct the glass barrier around the church, which faces St Mark’s Square.

Since then, the Moses flood barrier positioned at the mouths of the Venice lagoon has started operating. It is normally raised when flood water rises 130 centimetres above normal.

St Mark’s Square, however, the lowest

point in the city, floods at about 85cm, as does the entrance area of the church. This has flooded about 20 times this northern autumn, perpetuating the slow salt infiltration plaguing the entire building.

Pierpaolo Campostrini, an official at a government research agency monitoring the Venice lagoon, said the problems had left the church unprotected for another winter.

The pay row delaying the basilica’s glass barrier is a warning sign for Italy as it tries to slash bureaucracy to allow the spending of billions of euros in European Union grants and loans to shore up its economy and defend itself against climate change. ‘‘This is a classic case of ugly bureaucracy,’’ Campostrini said.

World

en-nz

2021-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281883006625163

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