The first order of business for the new leaseholders of Poveglia, an island in the Venetian Lagoon, was decidedly unglamorous. They carefully picked their way through the brambles that colonized the land during its five decades of abandonment and collected garbage left behind by an unauthorized campfire party.
Then, members of the Poveglia for Everyone association gave a sound-bite-size synopsis of their 11-year battle to manage the island on the principal morning show of RAI, the national broadcaster: In Italy, that move was the on-air equivalent of planting a flag.
Poveglia was theirs, at least temporarily.
“We did it,” Patrizia Veclani, a member of the association, said with a note of pride while bobbing on a boat to the island. “Now we are entering a new phase to make Poveglia a functional part of the city.”
For these Venetians, the effort to reclaim the scraggly, uninhabited island is about something bigger than a real estate deal. It is a last stand of sorts as faceless conglomerates, wealthy foundations and the ultrarich snap up Venice’s finite real estate, pushing people with more modest financial means to the terraferma, as the mainland is known. In a city whose population in its historic center has shrunk to under 50,000 but that is habitually swarmed by tens of millions of tourists, the association aims to transform the island into a haven for people seeking a rare touch of wildness.
Tourists could go, but a rush seems unlikely, given all there is to see and do in Venice’s city center.
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The post For Some Venetians, This Overgrown Island Is Paradise appeared first on New York Times.
