A GROUP of building site workers are unloading a forklift truck from a barge onto the Molo that leads on to Piazza San Marco in Venice.
Having got the vehicle onto the quayside, the workers then produce four slats of reinforced wood, approximately six feet by six feet. The slats are placed flat on the ground for the forklift truck to drive over.
The process is terribly slow. The truck moves forward six feet onto the next slat and then stops while the workers pick up the slat from behind and carry it round to the front for the process to be repeated. Slat after slat, the forklift inches forward at a rate of about eight yards per minute.
The truck is required at a site just behind the other side of San Marco (St Mark's Square). On a normal tarmac street, it would take it about three minutes to get to its destination. In Venice, it will take it up to an hour-and-a-half. The site foreman jokes: "This is the only piazza in the world with a preservation order on it, and you can't just drive in with a forklift truck".
Such is Venice, a city of beguiling beauty caught not only between land and sea but also between the need to survive commercially while at the same time safeguarding its unparalleled cultural patrimony. In terms of everyday living, everything in Venice from fixing a broken window to getting a new part for your washing machine - is immensely complicated. In terms of visitor sightseeing, nowhere is more immediately easy or bewitching.
Behind the construction workers and their forklift truck, there is one of the most famous sights in all the world as you look out across the Bacino di San Marco at the top of the Grand Canal where it sweeps past the old Customs House. The waterways are busy too, with low-bottom, barge-style craft of all types zigzagging in and out of each other's way, guided by pilots who appear to have taken their navigational style from that of their landbound compatriots as they casually skim past one another.
The vaporetto (Venice bus), police barges, an Algida ice-cream barge, a Coca Cola barge, a rubbish barge, a barge with a commercial skip for dumping and the celebrated gondolas, complete with straw-hatted gondoliers, all fight for space on the waterway.
Further down the canal, three magnificent gondolas carrying Japanese tourists have stopped momentarily in mid-Grand Canal. Even though it is 9.30 on a frosty February morning, a gondolier is singing to them to the accompaniment of an accordion. They have seen it at the movies, and now they've seen that it's true.
To the rest of the world, Venice conjures up images of gondolas, San Marco, the Rialto and the Grand Canal. It also prompts images, of a decaying city in permanent crisis, an image reinforced by the worldwide publicity that attended last week's burning down of the city's famous opera house, La Fenice.
That disaster once again prompted a question that has been doing the rounds ever since the 500-year-old Venetian Empire suffered an irreversible setback when Turks captured Constantinople in 1453. Namely, is Venice so much on the way down that it will eventually literally disappear under the lagoons waters?
Maestro Riccardo Muti, arguably the most famous Italian conductor of the day, summed up the sense of Italian (and Venetian) shame and embarrassment when he said on the day after the fire: "How do you explain to the foreigner, the Canadian, the American, the Japanese, that a theatre in the centre of a city famous all over the world because it is built on water, that this theatre burnt down because water couldn't be found to put the fire out? I'm telling you, we've made a right show of ourselves in the eyes of the world."
Architect Roberto D'Agostino, Assessore all'Urbanistica (a sort of city manager), is one of the current team of city fathers fully engaged in the desperate battle to preserve Venice, alive, commercially well and above water. He reflects sadly on the burning of the opera house and comments: "La Fenice did not just burn down because of an isolated incident. No, it burned down because it was the last point on a "vicious circle."
IN Mr D'Agostino's subtle analysis, the "vicious circle" represents a perverse process whereby Venice's historical decline and its recent maladministration have led to commercial decline, leading to further political negligence, leading in turn to further commercial decline.
To begin with, points out D'Agostino, Venice is not simply the centro storico (historic centre) comprising the Grand Canal, San Marco, and so on. For the city's municipal authorities, the ancient city centre is but part of a much larger area, part of a lagoon containing 117 islands and including Italy's biggest petro-chemical complex at Marghera and Mestre, not to mention a tourist resort at the Lido di Jesolo and intensive market gardening in the litoral islands.
D'Agostino suggests that today's Venice faces a fourfold series of problems related to its physical site, its geographic diversity, its over-bureaucratic administration and the inertia of recent corrupt city regimes. First, there is the obvious problem created by a lagoon which in part is losing its mudflat floor (at a rate of 1,200,000 cubic metres per year) and which in other parts is silting up.
Second, the administrative and infrastructural requirements of a sprawling terra firma suburb such as Mestre have little in common with the peculiar, requirements of historic Venice. Third, in a land of byzantine bureaucracy, Venice is king since it has been calculated that even the most basic building or maintenance project requires up to 35 different approvals from more than 20 individual city hall offices.
It is probably fair to suggest that most Venetian local government of the last 20 years lacked either the political will or know-how to tackle the city's problems. While local functionaries, with limited ability and less initiative sat in key positions in the city council, the city was dominated by absentee political landlords such as Gianni De Michelis, the infamous, portly, disco- dancing former Socialist foreign minister.
De Michelis, along with Christian Democrat cohorts, has been convicted within the ambit of the celebrated Tangentopoli investigation for taking his "cut" (on behalf of the party) front many Venetian public contracts.
No one at today's city hall suggests that such "misdemeanours" explain all Venice's current problems. Yet they certainly suggest something about the climate of local government (and not just in Venice).
Professor Stefano Boatto, leader of the Greens on the city council, however, has campaigned for years for an autonomous Venetian authority which would have the power, for example, to finally install the famous floating dykes to protect the lagoon rather than spend years arguing about their appropriacy.
He is less than optimistic about the future, arguing that all the Venice authorities consistently underestimate the damage suffered by the lagoon from pollution and erosion, instigated both by petrol tankers steaming up and down and by loss of mudflat floor. He feels that Venice wasted yet another important opportunity two years ago, when a proposal for an autonomous metropolitan area was thrown out by the Veneto regional council.
Given the inefficiency of existing local government structures, perhaps Prof Boatto is right about the need for a new one. For example, architect D'Agostino estimates that in the last two years Venice City Council has spent only 50 per cent of funds available to it, while the Venice Regional Authority has spent only six per cent, and this because of "inefficiency and incompetence". Which makes one wonder about the $2.5 billion awarded to Venice as special funds by the Italian government over the last decade.
D'Agostino, like many others in authority in Venice, is especially concerned about the continual exodus from the historic centre, an exodus which has seen numbers fall from 120,000 in 1966 to 72,000 today. Life in the centre of Venice costs practically twice as much as on dry land. Houses and rents are at least double. If you run a small business, then transport costs are also doubled by the waterbound last leg of the journey through the canals. In the end, only those in the tourist trade are not tempted to move out.
D'Agostino says that Venice and Venetians face a simple choice. If they wish that Venice remain a living organism, then they must settle for global, long-term policies which take into account both of the lagoon's geographic diversity and of sometimes conflicting requirements of industry and tourism. If they fail to do this, the Venetians might as well accept that the historic centre will be turned into one huge museum in which they will have bit parts, running restaurants and ferrying Venice's estimated 30 million annual tourists around a giant mausoleum. The recent history not only of Venice but of Italy itself hardly prompts optimism about the possibility of farsighted, coherent and honest public administration. D'Agostino, however, who came to power two years ago as part of the team headed by the city's inspirational leftist philosopher and mayor, Massimo Cacciari, argues that you have to start somewhere and that, La Fenice fire notwithstanding, this city regime may have begun to turn things around.
He cites the $260 million project on the Giudecca island as an example of how modern Venice should move forward. Here, the city authorities have supplied only 12.5 per cent of the funds for more than 40 projects which range from art restoration to factories, and in which the private sector has invested, not as an act of charity, but to make money.
He points to the dredging of the canals in the city centre as another sign of the changing times. Corrupt and inert administrations had allowed them to silt up since the early 1950s and this, in turn, meant that heavier boats, such as those containing firefighting equipment, could not use them.
Ironically, the dredging project backfired cruelly, on La Fenice, since water could not be taken from dried-out canals on three of its four sides. However, the fact that the canal on the fourth side had been dredged and refilled meant that firefighting equipment could at least get close to that side.
Looking at the burnt-out ruin of the opera theatre, the fragility of Venice is all too tangible. The houses beside the theatre are less than eight feet away across a medieval-width street. If a strong wind had been blowing on the night of the fire, then Venice might today be facing a much more serious tragedy.
Ironically, too, if and when La Fenice is rebuilt, exactly as it was on its present site; then it will immediately fall foul of modern building regulations which stipulate a distance of five to six metres between houses.
The La Fenice fire notwithstanding, Venice retains all its charms. Its intense artistic patrimony, its silent, car-free environment, its changing light and reflected half-light will always make it a magic place. Perhaps the American writer/director Woody Allen, due to play his clarinet at La Fenice later this month, was not joking when he said last week: "Clearly, the Fenice was burnt down by a lover of good music."
Or a lover of Venice.