2011 june 27th

2011 june 27th Today, at university, I read about an architectural contest, something kind of “visionary”: a few architects attempted to interpretate Venice in a future not far away, and yet not that close either. I saw an odd project, where these architects thought about a Venice totally underwater… the lagoon was not there (!) and to see Piazza San Marco you had to move through strange underwater pipes, like those of Futurama by Matt Groening!! […]

2011 september 25th Last night there was the awarding of that contest I heard about a couple of months ago, Venice City Vision, about the future of Venice. It was a lovely evening, I went with a couple of friends who knew about the event.. We saw all kinds of different proposals and I also saw once again the project about Venice underwater. This time I looked at it very carefully to understand what was in the mind of those who designed it: in the end, the idea is not bad at all, it’s actually good.. we will all live on renewed abandoned ships, like the residentialShip or the publicparkShip, we will go to the supermarketShip, and there was even the ikeaShip, so cool! […]

2018 january 06th

Today at noon I saw the news, they were saying about something I heard yesterday at work: Venice is inevitably sinking, high water will be a problem we will have to deal with every day, it will no longer be just a sporadic few days issue, but a constant condition instead.. This makes me restless, and my mind goes back to a few years ago, when I saw that visionary project (who knows weather it actually was that visionary) that I saw a few years ago: Venice was part of a huge aquarium, what if I will really have to look for a house on a ship, go shopping on a tanker and to the park on an aircraft carrier.. […]

2025 july 22nd

The situation here is becoming very difficult, downtown is totally stuck, just a few of us still live in their houses and we are forced to move around with small boats, most of the people is moving to Mestre and the surrounding area. I heard they started working on the “famous” floating Venice idea, the one from that contest I saw few years ago, that seemed so absurd to me back then.. but now I start to believe this is truly going to be the future of my city. […]

2041 february 18th

Tomorrow will be the big day, we will finally get the apartment on the “Ammuriana R026″ residentialShip, i have a meeting in the morning to sign the purchasing contract. I am so glad, eventually me, my wife and my sons will be able to leave this hole we now live in (for such an expansive rent) and go back to our Venice. We chose a wonderful apartment in the Ammuriana section, northside from Murano (and a few meters above!), it is the first section of the new Venice to be completed, though they plan to keep working to finish the whole ring-system in about twenty years: the demand to go, or better, to come back to stay in Venice is massive.

2043 may 5th

Today we celebrated two years since we moved into our apartment on the “Ammuriana R026″, and I must say we are very happy..  If I think back to when I saw that contest about the Venice of the future, showing the two faces of the city, the historical part completely covered with water and the new floating part with all those underwater pipes.. certainly I’d have never said that one day I’d be living in such a utopia! Surely all that before looked like an uncertain and difficult future, today is sparkling, brand new and totally functional reality, which brought many Venetians back to live their own city.

2051 august 15th

Terribly warm and close, summer starts to be quite heavy today, though I always manage to get my daily dose of relax on the “CVH-550 Cavour”: it’s a wonderful sensation, the park is so big it looks like a nature reserve, it just feels like being anywhere but on an abandoned aircraft carrier. From time to time I take a walk with my nephews and I tell them about how this new-old city was born, Venice… perhaps one of these days I will take them to the underwater pipes, and show them the old apartment I used to live in when I was a boy… today a few meters down in water!

2063 december 25th

Many years have passed, and finally all the stored experience I carry on my shoulders pays me off: yesterday the editor confirmed me he’s going to release my book about the story of my city, telling about how I lived it through the years of the transformation (and this diary helped me a lot), the evolution I experienced myself, from the inexorable sinking of the city until today: a delightful brand new present that I’d never have expected.

Well, I actually was not even that “original”: all I’ve written in my book is just exactly what those young architects had thought and proposed back then, far away in 2011, with that  project for the Venice City Vision contest, I still vividly remember that. I should have thanked them for their careful vision of the future, they granted me a lovely past.

My past was their future.

Their future was my past.