THE FIGHT TO SAVE THE SINKING JEWEL OF THE ADRIATIC

SCATTERING the ever-present pigeons before them, stocky Bavarians strode across the Piazza San Marco, stopping to admire the lofty 11th century basilica, where Christian knights knelt in prayer before setting out on the Fourth Crusade. Not far away, American tourists surveyed the vaulted arches whose proud occupants once presided over Medieval Europe's richest and most powerful city-state. More leisurely visitors sipped wine in the chiaroscuro atmosphere of the Florian Cafe, where modern expatriates from Ezra Pound to Peggy Guggenheim have gathered to talk. Almost everyone, some time during his visit, found time to marvel at the frescoes of Titian and Tintoretto, the sculpture of Rizzo and Verocchio, and the majestic bell towers and loggia of Buon and Sansovino.

Rising Waters. As it has for centuries, Venice last week enticed and entranced a horde of tourists, part of the city's 3,000,000 annual visitors. Few of them were aware that "man's most beautiful artifact," as Art Historian Bernard Berenson called Venice, is sinking beneath their feet.

That possibility has worried Venetians, and those who love Venice, for centuries. Lord Byron foresaw a day when the city's "marble walls are level with the waters." Built on a group of mud islands and reinforced only by ancient wooden piles and wattles, Venice has always been a sinking city. In recent years, however, in addition to losing ground at an ever faster rate, it has been attacked by the pestilence of modern cities--air pollution. As a result, the city and its treasures are now in greater danger than ever before.

The water's higher level is clearly evident in the yearly rise in a slimy black-green line on the palazzi along the Grand Canal. Because of the melting of polar ice, the sea level at Venice is rising .055 in. a year. At the same time, the island is sinking .106 in. a year --partly because industrialists and farmers have been pumping away the cushion of underground water. An even more serious factor has been dredging operations in the lagoon between Venice and Marghera, its rapidly expanding industrial satellite on the mainland.

The digging and filling for Marghera's deep-water tanker canals and protective dikes have not only helped erode the island's underpinnings, but also seem to have unsettled the natural ebb and flow of the tidal waters. In the past, flooding was a rarity in Venice. But now it has become almost a regular occurrence, as winds and new tidal currents trap an overflow of water behind the lagoon's three egresses. Along the canals, water has seeped through foundations to crack and moisten plaster walls --some of them holding priceless paintings. The frescoes by Paolo Veronese in the Church of San Sebastiano, for example, have become cracked and lumped by moisture. A preview of what can happen came in the disastrous floods of November 1966. Whipped by abnormally high winds, the water level rose 6 1/2 ft. above normal, swamping the city and causing $64 million in damages.

The city's air has also become destructive. Venetians customarily heat their homes with soft coal that is released into the air before it has fully burned. Added to this are similar fuel wastes from vaporetti (ferryboats) exhausts and industrial smokestacks. The combined residues, often trapped by the damp Venetian climate, form a heavy sulfurous blanket over the city.

The most shocking toll so far has involved the city's art treasures. Unfortunately, the high carbon content of the marble used in Venice attracts sulfur particles from the polluted air. The two elements combine .in an erosive chemical process that Venetians call "marble cancer." Fingers, noses and ears slowly "explode" from their statues, Cornices and windowsills crumble from buildings. In a similar reaction, ugly pockmarks eat through bronze statues. The four bronze horses above the main arch of the San Marco basilica, for example, are all scarred by pollution-induced cavities. They are part of the best cared-for treasure of Venice; hundreds of lesser works have suffered more serious damage without attracting nearly as much public attention. In fact, more than one-third of the city's edifices and sculpture is already marred seriously by the corrosive air. Professor Francesco Valcanover, superintendent of fine arts in Venice, estimates that about 5% of the city's patrimony is destroyed every year.

Cycle of Decay. The flooding and air pollution have combined with a shortage of modern housing and a high cost of living to create a cycle of decay that is all too familiar to U.S. cities. Young middle-class families are deserting the old city for suburban apartments. Many of them are moving to the suburb of Mestre-Marghera, which is now larger than Venice. Since 1951, Venice's population has dropped by 57,000 people to 117,000. More than 850 buildings, some of them architecturally valuable, have been abandoned. Left unoccupied, they rot at an even faster rate.

Venice's condition has become so alarming that a renaissance movement is finally under way to save the city. For one thing, Professor Valcanover has begun impressive efforts to salvage Venice's endangered art treasures. Working in the San Gregorio Church, his team of experts has restored an amazing 2,500 square meters of major and minor paintings. Aided by funds raised in the U.S., Britain and other countries, they soon will begin to repair Tintoretto's magnificent cycle of frescoes in the school of San Rocco. The professor's experts have also learned how to halt the "marble cancer" with silicone treatments.

Prodded by the restoration-minded Italia Nostra organization, the Italian government has ordered some drastic steps to relieve Venice's plight at least slightly. Pumping out any more ground water in the city's vicinity is forbidden, and industries must attach antipollution filters to factory smokestacks. Next year heating with low-sulfur diesel oil will be compulsory in Venice. These are necessary first-aid measures, but even if everyone complied with them--most unlikely--the results would probably not be decisive enough to save the city.

Italian Providence. There are more basic long-range plans afoot, but these have stirred up enough controversy to shake the foundations of a more solid island than Venice. The preservationists of Italia Nostra were recently successful in stopping work on a new tanker canal to Marghera. They also support a government report calling for a total phase-out of heavy shipping in the lagoon (at present, 8,000 tankers a year sail through Venice), Marghera businessmen sent up howls of outrage at that idea; they argued that do-gooders were out to make Venetians merely "custodians of a museum."

As Italian providence would have it, the daughter of Marghera's original developer, Countess Anna Maria Cicogna Volpi, is also the local chapter president of Italia Nostra; her campaign has divided family and city. A defamation suit filed partly on her behalf against an advocate of modernization is currently the best gossip in Venetian drawing rooms, since the defendant alleged that the Countess is secretly trying to help business interests in another city by throttling new development in Marghera. No one, of course, really wants Venice to become only a museum. On the other hand, it should not become a second Atlantis.

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