Venice is a city of paradoxes and contrasts: listed as the most famous world heritage site, the city is continuously sinking and might perish eventually from humidity and floods. While the city has one of highest concentrations of four-star hotels, its inhabitants are forced to relocate to small apartments in the periphery. The city enjoys the cultural life of a great metropolis, staging art festivals and high-profile events that are on the agenda of the entire world. Meanwhile, its inhabitants speak the local dialect, which remains incomprehensible to most Italians and struggle to shrug off their separatist dreams of resurrecting an independent Republic of St Mark. (Kostylo, 170)
According to Kostylo, Venice's past identity has long been eroded. Division and conflicts are generated by the increasing number of Chinese, Bangladeshi and Eastern European immigrant workers. While an overwhelming mass of tourists flood the city daily, the local population is shrinking and has fallen to less than 60.000 residents. The cultural initiatives promoting cosmopolitanism would appear to be linked to imagined cosmopolitan values more than reflecting a genuine feeling and the lived reality of Venetians.
Floating Mosque. Installation from 2009 Biennale, 'Making Worlds'.
"The heritage of Venetian architecture is the heritage of Islamic architecture"
 Kostylo's essay contains this and similar examples of xenophobic sentiments and hostilities widelyspread amongst Venetians (187)(188). Migrants coming from East Europe, the Middle East region or from Asia are perceived as culturally alien and strangers to the Venetian ways, unable to truly appreciate the historical importance - or even the aesthetics - of the city's landmarks: claiming the duty to protect their traditions and heritage, the locals seem to forget about Venice's own cosmopolitan past and about the time the Republic was deemed the most 'eastern' city in Europe. Anti-Muslim graffiti sprayed on the posters advertising New Mosque in Venice. Photo by Joanna Kostylo. (Kostylo: 185) Venice, Gateway to the East |
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Venice's cosmopolitan past was favoured by its geographical position which allowed the city to mediate between East and West and to become a major port in the Mediterranean and a flourishing trade centre. It attracted not only a vast populations of merchants but also religious minorities, war refugees and emigrants from the East: Slavs, Moors, Albanians, Ottomans.
The cross-cultural interactions between the various ethnic communities in the city's squares and markets created a network of contacts and exchanges across social, ethn-linguistic and religious divides.
Nonetheless, the Republic's political measures were greatly self-serving. As a matter of fact, the foreigners - by means of their trading, money landing, banking - greatly contributed to create a lively and thriving economy: by defending the interests of the different ethnic communities, Venice was also safeguarding its own economic interests.
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Moreover, while the city prided itself on the political and religious protection it could offer, the attitude of the state was often contradictory: the distinction between a citizen and a foreigner was marked not only on a social scale but also through legal and economic discrimination.
Sixteenth-century Venice segregated its growing Jewish population in the old foundry area of the city (getto), walled for security reasons and which Jews were only allowed to leave during the day. The protection guaranteed to the Jewish community was contingent on their ability to constitute an economic resource. Other areas of foreign traders were the so called fondachi, which functioned as commercial centres and residential quarters for Germans, Turks, Greeks, Arabs. Each ethnic community - sharing the same language, religion and culture - lived together as opposed to dispersed through the city.
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| Andrea Zannini's Venice open city: foreigners and the Most Serene Republic (2009) offers a portrait of the economical, political, and social dyamics involved in the relationship between Venice and foreigners in the past while also reflecting on our globalized present |
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Following the Turkish military advance
in the Balcans region, many
Albanians fled and found save haven
in Venice. Albanians in Venice
(149-1552): Migrations and Integration by Lucia Nadia (2008)
explores the Republic's policy of integration
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The relationship between citizen and foreigners was, therefore, articulated also geographically through specific arrangements of the urban space in a way that anticipates the creation of enclaves and ethnic quarters in modern cosmopolitan cities. [See: Cosmopolitanism: the migrant and the city]
Martina Cincotto
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