Last time I was in Italy there was a Venice. It’s still there, I suppose. You can still see St. Mark’s tower and the Doge’s Palace pushing out of the stormy waters. There are still people there too, but instead of the gondolas and fishermen and cruise ships, its only the wealthy that still park their yachts out in the lagoon. They’re the only ones who have the kind of money to pay the extravagant permit fees to take their ships out to float over what was once the maritime capitol of the world.
I don’t have that kind of money, so I hire one of the smugglers. Men and women that typically ferry even less fortunate men and women across the Adriatic to what they hope will be the safety of Europe. The man I meet, Saul, is confused when we rendezvous on the Italian side of the water and becomes even more suspicious when I tell him I don’t want to go deeper into the fortress of Europe. I don’t have a family or group of refugees to take with me, just a bunch of equipment, none of which is contraband. He’s wary, but I pay in gold, which he’s too greedy to argue with.
It’s enough that he doesn’t ask any questions when we don’t go into the city. We get close, but then follow along the old rail lines that ran between the Serenissima Repubblica and the mainland. In my mind, I can almost see them, the tracks that used to carry the working class and tourists back and forth between Venice and Marghera, rusting under meters of seawater.
She’s down there somewhere, in one of the last passenger cars that was swamped by the cyclones and all of the corruption and finger-pointing that followed. I’ve been a diver a long time and I know what the sea can do to wreckage, human or otherwise, but a part of me knows that a piece of her is still down there. And I’m going to bring her home.
See the author’s published work here.
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