Venice in September: The Festival, the Regatta, and the City Behind Them

In the space of a few days the international press has given us three Venices. The Guardian reviewed Toni Servillo in a new Neapolitan ghost story at the film festival and noted that the festival is unthinkable without him. Al Jazeera reported a twenty-five minute ovation for an Israeli documentary on Gaza. Euronews showed the Grand Canal filled with colour for the Regata Storica. Each is a true picture; none is the whole one.

What the festival coverage captures well is Venice as a stage on which the world argues with itself. A film about Gaza premiering in a lagoon city is not an accident of scheduling; it is the festival doing what it has done for decades, which is to make a small, waterlogged place temporarily central to arguments much larger than itself. The Guardian's own reviewers, meanwhile, gently note when Italian cinema serves up its own stereotypes for foreign consumption. That self-awareness is worth recording.

The Guardian also reported this week that tourist taxes, unfamiliar in England, have long been a quiet earner for Italian municipalities. Venice is the obvious case, and the reporting is fair: the levy is real money for cash-strapped councils. But a tax is a measure of pressure, not a solution to it. The Regata Storica and the film festival both depend on a city that still has residents, and the foreign coverage rarely asks who is left to row the boats.

We take no position on which film deserved the Golden Lion, and we cannot tell readers what the lagoon will look like in twenty years. We can note only this: the world's Venice is a calendar of events, and the lived Venice is a calendar of departures. Both are reported. Only one is usually reported well.