After several days of rain Venice feels not so much like the Jewel of the Adriatic as the Jewel in the Adriatic. Sirens herald the coming of acqua alta, high water, when the Adriatic invades the streets and piazzas closest to the sea, and tourists and locals alike don rubber boots below to match their umbrellas above. It's still a romantic place in spite of that, although perhaps November is not the best time to be here. Early in the mornings the city is shrouded in fog so that you can scarcely see across the Grand Canal. Gondolas glide in and out of the mist, and the great palaces loom dramatically through it. Yes, it?s romantic all right, and a photographer?s dream. But the bedraggled honeymoon couples, studying their sodden maps, look already halfway to divorce. If they survive a wet week in a cramped hotel room in Venice they will probably survive anything. There is a sadness about Venice that every visitor feels. Here is the most spectacularly lovely city on earth that became one of the mightiest powers of its time. The Venetian empire in the fifteenth century extended from the Dolomites to Cyprus. Now, there?s no getting around it, the place is a Disneyland and a shopping mall. Jumbo jets bring in tourists by the thousands every day to Marco Polo airport, and gigantic cruise ships come and go, dwarfing the historic buildings and flooding the streets with yet more tour groups. Even in November you can scarcely move in the most popular parts of the city. I used my time in Venice to see it in some detail, while it is still here to be seen Each day I walked a different district, getting wetter and wetter, and making best use I could of the lumbering Vaporetto or water buses that are almost as slow and noisy as New York City buses. Venice is of course a treasure trove for the cultural pilgrim ? famous museums and galleries, fine theater and church concerts (Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Gabrieli ? any composr whose name ends in ?i?) and of course literary history too ? Henry James, Thomas Mann, and not least Donna de Leon, whose atmospheric Venetian crime stories I love. Yet still the wheel of history creaks around, raising up one place after another and dropping them back into the pit of powerlessness and tourism. Istanbul was once the center of a great empire, as were Rome, Babylon, Machu Pichu and Memphis (not the one in Tennessee). No doubt one day tourists will come to Washington to gawp at the monumental buildings without knowing or caring anything about their glorious history ?Look on my works ye mighty and despair,? as Shelley might have put it if he had had my gift for words. There are over a hundred international organizations debating how to save Venice from the sea and from the tourists. We are here for just such a conference, although it seems like an expensive lost cause. Venice has already been reproduced in a Las Vegas resort hotel, which offers drier weather and more convenient to access to bathrooms, slot machines, and guns. I know I shouldn?t say it ? shouldn?t even think it - but, on a wet day in November, with the sea pouring in, one is sorely tempted to say: basta, basta, enough, let nature take her course In Venice, this is DB

After several days of rain Venice feels not so much like the Jewel of the Adriatic as the Jewel in the Adriatic. Sirens herald the coming of acqua alta, high water, when the Adriatic invades the streets and piazzas closest to the sea, and tourists and locals alike don rubber boots below to match their umbrellas above. It's still a romantic place in spite of that, although perhaps November is not the best time to be here. Early in the mornings the city is shrouded in fog so that you can scarcely see across the Grand Canal. Gondolas glide in and out of the mist, and the great palaces loom dramatically through it. Yes, it?s romantic all right, and a photographer?s dream. But the bedraggled honeymoon couples, studying their sodden maps, look already halfway to divorce. If they survive a wet week in a cramped hotel room in Venice they will probably survive anything. There is a sadness about Venice that every visitor feels. Here is the most spectacularly lovely city on earth that became one of the mightiest powers of its time. The Venetian empire in the fifteenth century extended from the Dolomites to Cyprus. Now, there?s no getting around it, the place is a Disneyland and a shopping mall. Jumbo jets bring in tourists by the thousands every day to Marco Polo airport, and gigantic cruise ships come and go, dwarfing the historic buildings and flooding the streets with yet more tour groups. Even in November you can scarcely move in the most popular parts of the city. I used my time in Venice to see it in some detail, while it is still here to be seen Each day I walked a different district, getting wetter and wetter, and making best use I could of the lumbering Vaporetto or water buses that are almost as slow and noisy as New York City buses. Venice is of course a treasure trove for the cultural pilgrim ? famous museums and galleries, fine theater and church concerts (Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Gabrieli ? any composr whose name ends in ?i?) and of course literary history too ? Henry James, Thomas Mann, and not least Donna de Leon, whose atmospheric Venetian crime stories I love. Yet still the wheel of history creaks around, raising up one place after another and dropping them back into the pit of powerlessness and tourism. Istanbul was once the center of a great empire, as were Rome, Babylon, Machu Pichu and Memphis (not the one in Tennessee). No doubt one day tourists will come to Washington to gawp at the monumental buildings without knowing or caring anything about their glorious history ?Look on my works ye mighty and despair,? as Shelley might have put it if he had had my gift for words. There are over a hundred international organizations debating how to save Venice from the sea and from the tourists. We are here for just such a conference, although it seems like an expensive lost cause. Venice has already been reproduced in a Las Vegas resort hotel, which offers drier weather and more convenient to access to bathrooms, slot machines, and guns. I know I shouldn?t say it ? shouldn?t even think it - but, on a wet day in November, with the sea pouring in, one is sorely tempted to say: basta, basta, enough, let nature take her course In Venice, this is DB