Photography by Lee Pellegrini
An 18th-Century lithograph shows two female figures, one in flowing robes and the other half-naked with seaweed in her hair. They stand wrestling on a beach, each striving for advantage. At any moment, it seems, the combatants will topple into the water. The low, steepled skyline of Venice is beyond them, faint in the distance, and above the figures is a banner. Translated it reads, “An element opposes another element.” The scene projects the centuries-long struggle of a city that rose improbably out of the Adriatic Sea to become one of the most celebrated in the world. “Venice was born in the water and out of the water,” says Boston College associate professor of art history Stephanie Leone. That fact “is the essence of what Venice is.”
The clash on the shore captures the persistent danger that has ever plagued the city called La Serenissima (loosely, her serene highness)—the fear that the water might one day swallow the city again. This past October, Venice Marathon runners contended with ankle-deep water as they slogged through the streets, just one instance of the “acqua alta” (high water) that inundates the city some 50 times a year. The water levels can rise by as much as five feet, sending shopkeepers scrambling to keep canals from flooding their stores and tourists sloshing across the Piazza San Marco in their wellies.
“Venice is just the perfect example of how inspiring the environment can be to a city, but also how challenging,” says coastal oceanographer Gail Kineke, a professor in the University’s earth and environmental sciences department. While Venice might have gotten an earlier taste than most cities of water’s unrelenting physics, a projected sea-level rise of anywhere from two to five feet over the next century means more cities will follow. “Every coastal city is going to face those same challenges,” Kineke says, “and those challenges will emerge in commerce and architecture, and whatever makes the soul of the city what it is.”
Leone and Kineke teach a pair of conjoined courses under the overarching title “Living on the Water.” Students who sign up for Kineke’s “Coasts, Development, and Sea Level Change from Venice to Boston” must enroll simultaneously in Leone’s “Venetian Art, Architecture, and the Environment” and vice versa. The classes meet separately—Leone’s in the morning and Kineke’s in the afternoon, on Tuesdays and Thursdays—but on four evenings a semester the students gather with both professors, for a “reflection session” that may introduce a guest speaker. There are also field trips.
Earth and environmental sciences professor Gail Kineke and students consulting a satellite map before heading to Nauset Beach.
The professors reserve these courses for freshmen, specifically for 19 freshmen in total, as part of the Enduring Questions series that the University launched during its renewal of the Core Curriculum in 2015. This fall, 19 Enduring Questions pairings were offered by professors in economics, law, education, and theater, to name a few. They included “Finding the Animal” and “How Animals Made the World,” taught by associate professors Robert Stanton (English) and Zachary Matus (history), respectively, their question being, “What is a human, and who is an animal?” Biologist Michelle Meyer and theologian Jeffrey Cooley’s courses were both titled “In the Beginning,” and the questions on the table were, “Where did we come from, how did the world come to be?” The aim of such tandem investigations is to draw first-year students into intellectual explorations that take them beyond the classroom—to foster intellectual growth as well as a maturing citizenship around “subjects crucial to the human experience,” in the words of the program’s founding document.
That sea-level rise is a crucial subject is apparent. One need look no further than the “bomb cyclone”—the tidal surge coupled with a nor’easter that hit downtown Boston this past January, leaving dumpsters floating down streets and cars frozen in several feet of ice, in the city’s worst flooding in history. Or the storm surge in the coastal Carolinas in September from Hurricane Florence, which, combined with as much as 36 inches of rain, left areas flooded for more than two weeks.
By any right, Venice shouldn’t have been a city at all—never mind one of humankind’s “masterpiece[s],” as UNESCO declared in 1987. It started as an archipelago of marshy islands in a lagoon off the Italian coast, protected from the sea by a narrow spit of barrier islands. The area’s first settlers around 400 CE were refugees fleeing the invasions of Germanic tribes after the fall of the Roman Empire, who rightly surmised that the barbarians wouldn’t swim across the lagoon for such thin spoils.
“From the beginning, the environment shaped Venice’s history,” Leone says. The residents’ first challenge was to create solid ground out of a marshy muck, which gave early Venetians a sense of purpose and identity. “In order to create the land, they had to create a sense of community different from the other cities forming at the time,” she says. “From the eighth to the 18th centuries, Venetians thought of themselves as being very unique, and different from the rest of the Italian peninsula.” As the city grew, its inhabitants cut down thousands of trees across the sea in Istria, in modern-day Croatia, bringing them home and driving their trunks like piles into the marshy earth; overtop was layered Istrian marble to form the foundations for small islands.
The return climb from Nauset Beach.
Leone’s own love affair with Venice started one year out of college, when she interned at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection museum, situated on the Grand Canal. Since arriving at Boston College in 2001, she has taught courses on the Italian Renaissance and Baroque. In 2016, she introduced a course devoted to Venetian art and architecture.
When the Core Renewal Committee was looking for topics for Enduring Questions courses, Leone attended an event to match up potential faculty partners. “It was like speed dating for teaching,” she says. As soon as she heard Kineke say she studied coastal oceanography, “I made a beeline for her.” For her part, Kineke has studied estuaries and coastal sediment transport from San Francisco Bay to the Amazon River. In 2002, she participated in a project in the Adriatic to look at how sediment from rivers travelled along the Italian coast, called the Po and Apennine Sediment Transport and Accumulation project. “It had the best acronym—PASTA,” Kineke says.
In effect, the two professors were looking at the same area from different directions. “Professor Leone was looking at Venice as located on the northeast coast of Italy, I was thinking of Venice as being on the northwest coast of the Adriatic Sea,” Kineke told the assembled class of freshmen during their first meeting in September. That wasn’t the only difference in their viewpoints, Kineke admitted. While Leone dealt in the subjective language of cultural expression and brushstrokes, Kineke has focused on the hard science of wave formations and climate patterns.
“We are just sort of this oddball pair,” Kineke told the students. “But we found some way to make it work, and we both learned a lot.” Connecting the two disciplines, she said, is an emphasis on place—and how we make sense of the places we are in. “How do the natural processes impact where we live and the structures we might build?” Kineke asked. “And then how do we respond to the changing environment—one of the greatest challenges of which is sea-level rise?”
From the beginning, the Venetians struggled against the sea, even as the sea would come to be their lifeblood. “There was a constant need to maintain the city,” Leone lectured in class in September. Houses were built up with heavy brick and stone, which were less sensitive to water than wood, and seawalls were erected to protect against the waves and divert sediment away from the lagoon—a measure necessary to ensure access to ships. At the same time, the heavy buildings and lack of natural soil replenishment caused the city to sink over time.
Venice’s coastal location made it a main pass-through point for religious pilgrims to the Holy Land, and eventually a jumping off point for the Silk Road to the East. The city became a shipbuilding nation, its inhabitants setting sail to trade with, and eventually to conquer parts of, the eastern Mediterranean, bringing home influences from the Arab world.
“The earliest Islamic pieces in Venice were spoglia,” Leone told the class in another session—that is, spoils of war that were repurposed for a Christian context; for example, an enameled glass bowl used to hold holy water. By the mid-14th century, Venetians were creating their own glass and metalwork designs based on Islamic practices—sometimes covering pieces in pseudo-Arabic inscriptions—for export throughout Europe. As the city became richer, it plowed its wealth into monumental churches and—its crowning artistic achievement—Renaissance paintings, in which the sea also played a major role.
The interior courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, on the edge of Boston’s Fens, is beautiful any time of day, but it is especially lovely at night. Soft moonlight filters from above into the dimly lit museum, illuminating a mosaic centerpiece and bubbling fountain surrounded by spindly palm trees and chrysanthemum flowers. The students of “Living on the Water” have gathered here on an October evening to see a bit of Venice. Gardner was a fan of the Floating City, spending every other summer in a palazzo on the Grand Canal—and she brought back her own spoglia, including the Venetian stone medallions set into the inner walls of the museum courtyard.
In the Gardner Museum, gazing up at The Coronation of Hebe. Leone is at center in scarf.
Gardner was living in this palatial home when she opened it in 1903 as a museum. “My desk is right where her bedroom was,” says Molly Phelps ’14, a cataloguer and administrator who is giving the class a special tour. Phelps leads the way up stone stairways to the Veronese room, named for the Venetian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese (1528–88). “All of the works in this room are connected to Venice in some way,” Phelps says, pointing out the opulent leather wall coverings and lace borders meant to convey the luxury goods of Venice’s Golden Age.
The real attraction, however, is on the ceiling—an enormous, 12-foot square painting by Veronese’s studio titled The Coronation of Hebe. It depicts a lush cloudscape, with gods ascending into the sky in colorful robes to welcome Zeus’s daughter, the goddess of youth. “This is an excellent time to admire the range of colors and brush strokes,” says Leone, as students crane their heads upward to get a better look. An even more impressive piece is located in the room next door, The Rape of Europa by Venetian artist Titian, a 1562 painting depicting Zeus in the form of a white bull carrying off the virgin in a sweep of motion and color.
The fact that these paintings are here is because of Venice’s relationship to the sea, says Leone. During the Renaissance in Rome and Florence, the epitome of an artist’s talent was his ability to draw directly onto the surface of walls or ceilings—hence the beautiful frescoes by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. In Venice, however, the ever-present moisture from the watery environment caused paint applied directly to walls to crack within a few years. So instead, Venetian artists adopted a new technique, painting with oil on the canvas that was readily available from sailmakers.
That practice changed the course of Western art, making the use of color and the texture of brush strokes the main signatures of an artist rather than drawn lines. “They created a tradition in which the individual hand of the artist can be seen through the way they paint,” Leone says. Those canvases also had the virtue of being portable, and so in addition to filling the walls of Venetian churches and social halls, the great paintings of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Carpaccio made their way across Europe—and some eventually to America.
Phelps (left), with Titian’s "The Rape of Europa" on the wall to her left.
After admiring the paintings, the students are set loose to select a work of art relating to Venice that they will analyze on their own. “I live for this,” enthuses Katherine Jeszenszky ’22. She chose The Birth of Caterina Cornaro, a 16th-century work of oil on a maple panel by an anonymous artist. A slight 16 x 20 inches, it is populated by upward of a hundred figures—including nymphs, children, pets, ladies-in-waiting, a Moorish prince, and a Native American chieftain. “Usually,” she says of the works the class has been studying, “there is an underlying meaning to be uncovered by the viewer. With this piece, there seems to be more than one story at play, and my senses are almost overwhelmed.”
The art in the Gardner Museum is not the only thing Boston has in common with Venice. Boston also reached its prominence through maritime trade, when its clipper ships sailed to the Far East in the early 1800s. Boston, like Venice, is built on landfill—including the Back Bay neighborhood a few blocks east of where Mrs. Gardner’s museum stands. And like Venice, Boston is protected by a barrier island of sorts—the long arm of Cape Cod.
The class visited Cape Cod on a brilliantly sunny Saturday in September, to see the pristine 40 miles of outer beach set aside as the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961. “It could never happen today—it was a real gift,” Kineke says. Just because the coastline is unspoiled, however, doesn’t mean it has stayed put. The beach is constantly vying with the ocean, as winter storms born by strong northeast winds slam into the dunes, sometimes creating breaks in the shore that last for years. Eventually the breaks heal, or they migrate down the beach as the sand reforms in their wake. “The natural system will accommodate it if it can,” Kineke says.
While they’d looked at pictures of the Outer Cape in class, says Wisconsin native Christopher Rizzo ’22, that was no substitute for seeing it in person—”how the beach had evolved, how the lagoon behind the barrier had filled in, and how it had been breached by nor’easters.”
That dynamic action stood in contrast to the more built-up area of the Cape near Falmouth, where Kineke has lived for the last 16 years and where the class went next. There, the beach is fixed by jetties and seawalls, and houses are built on stilts in an effort to survive the ocean’s desire to punch holes in the coast. As Kineke explained in class, the size of waves during a storm surge are directly related to the speed of the winds and the depth of the body of water out of which they grow. As sea-level rises, and as climate change causes storms to become more powerful, the size of storm surges increases, and the damage worsens in vulnerable populated areas on the coast.
For Venice, it’s not nor’easters that threaten the coast in winter, but the Sirocco, a dry wind that blows up the sea from North Africa, and the Bura, a strong wind from the east that zooms down from the cold mountains of Croatia—both of which push sea water northwestward toward the city. Sergio Fagherazzi should know—he grew up on Lido, the narrow barrier island (population 20,000) that separates the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic. Now a professor of marine geology at Boston University, he told students during a reflection session in October about finding storm-tossed trees washed up on the beach, carried down from rivers further north. As Venetians created jetties and seawalls to protect the lagoon from sedimentation, Lido’s beach eroded and storms surged through the channel into the lagoon, or washed over the island entirely.
When the Core Renewal Committee was looking for topics for Enduring Questions courses, Leone attended an event to match up potential faculty partners. "It was like speed dating for teaching," she says.
The first major warning was in 1966, when, in an unprecedented acqua alta, the water rose more than six feet, causing catastrophic flooding throughout the city. “Venetians knew about sea-level rise in the 1960s,” Fagherazzi said. “That is why we were more advanced in understanding the tragedy of the shoreline.”
Venice’s current response to the threat of sea-level rise is a proposal called MOSE, which stands for Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (and also evokes Moses’s biblical parting of the Red Sea). Put simply, it would consist of a massive underwater jetty—constructed as a series of hollow plates—that could be raised to completely block the channel entering the lagoon in the event of a storm surge. Partially completed, the project, which has already cost more than $5.7 billion, was supposed to be implemented in 2011—but after a series of complications, including fouling of the hinges by mussels and other sea life, it is planned for operation in 2022. “They are still waiting for funding from the government,” Fagherazzi sighed.
Even if MOSE is implemented, however, the project may not be adequate to save the city as sea level continues to rise. New emphasis is being placed on restoration of the marshes along the edges of the lagoon, which have historically served as a natural buffer, absorbing water from storm surges and reducing the overall size of floods. As scientists and engineers confront the full force of sea-level rise around the world, they will have to consider a range of solutions that go beyond building bigger walls, Kineke says.
“Building big seawalls will protect what’s behind them, so you save the house, but you completely lose the beach,” she says. And once the beach is gone, waves strike with more power, putting buildings, roads, and property at greater risk, especially as sea level rises. Accommodating the ocean’s destructive force in coming decades will require working with natural processes as much as against them. “The way Venice developed was so tightly coupled to the kind of environment it has; and the environmental problems it is facing today are directly coupled to the choice of how it developed,” Kineke says. “Understanding that as it relates to Venice can help make those connections as they relate to other coastlines too.”
Though Christopher Rizzo is still planning on being a history and classics major, he’s been surprised at how fascinating he’s found the scientific aspects. “My grandparents live in North Carolina on Ocracoke Island, so the coastal geology and how that’s been changing is really applicable to them,” he says. The subject matter has hit even closer to home for Magisha Thohir ’22, who is from Jakarta, Indonesia. Like Venice, her city has been sinking, due to fresh water pumped out of the earth from private wells. “Our coastline has significantly started to erode,” she says. “People have lost their homes—primarily fishermen but I know it’s something that could affect me in the future.”
A student in the Carroll School of Management, Thohir has always been interested in architecture and rural development, and taking the course about Venice has given her a deeper awareness of the issues facing her own archipelago. “We take a lot of things for granted,” she says. “It opened my mind to being more aware of my surroundings and the relationship we have to our environment.” She is thinking about a career in planning and development.
“An element opposes another element,” engraving by Venetian-born Andrea Zucchi (1679–1740). Image: Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (1379-080)
Whether or not any of these first-year students choose art history or environmental science as their path, Kineke and Leone hope that the experience causes them to look differently at their relationship—and responsibility—to the environment, wherever they end up living. “The Enduring Questions we were trying to answer, are really, How do humans affect the environment, and How does the environment impact humans,” says Kineke, “both in indirect ways like art and architecture and direct ways like, if we want to live here, we have to build differently.”
Although it’s not discussed in class, the environment of the Enduring Questions courses, with their intensive Tuesdays and Thursdays and occasional evenings and excursions, has an effect on the students. “The chemistry of the class is different,” says Kineke. “With all of them being freshmen, they are all in the same place, and it’s clear they got to know each other as a group very early. When I come into class, they are usually quite animated,” she says. “They’re talking across the room, and everyone is in on the conversation. I believe they are more willing to speak up in class because they are more comfortable with each other as a community.” Students share her observation. “We know each other better, and I think we all know how we think,” says Rizzo. “We all hang out together to get work done, and it’s really nice,” puts in Leah Gerrish, who hails from southwest of Boston.
As a final project, Kineke asks students to consider how cities should respond to sea-level rise, looking at specific examples, from Venice to Boston—while Leone asks what makes Venice even worth saving. “Venice is something that shouldn’t exist,” Leone says: a cultural and artistic jewel created out of the sea. “You could think of it as overcoming the challenge of nature or, better yet, working with what nature has presented,” she says, to build a place that expresses “the heights of humanity’s creative and intellectual capabilities.”
Boston-based writer Michael Blanding’s most recent book is The Map Thief (2014).