The Chamber of Ten

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GEENA HODGE stood on the bow of the water taxi as it chugged toward San Marco, the colors of the Doge’s Palace brought to life by the sun, and wondered how much longer Venice would survive before it crumbled into the sea. Though the Italian government had committed to a seven-billion-dollar project to install a complex system of flood gates to hold back storm surges and seasonal high tides, it was already over budget and behind schedule. Sometimes it seemed hopeless.

But even the most optimistic Venetians were fooling themselves. The city had been built on top of wooden pilings sunk into a salt marsh, with sediment and clay beneath that, which was little better than raising palaces on top of a sponge. Venice bore down, squeezing a little more water out of its foundations every year, and sinking just a bit farther. Between that and the rising global sea level, Venice was screwed. Maybe the new tidal gate system, MOSE, would work well enough—fouling up the Venetian lagoon’s ecosystem in the meantime—and maybe it wouldn’t. Even with the best-case scenario, they would only manage to buy themselves a century.

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