Photographer: Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images
Venice has been inundated with epic rainfall, flooding historic jewels like St. Mark’s Basilica and devastating shops, businesses and homes in a city that attracts more than 20 million visitors a year.
Climate change may be partly to blame as more than half of the most serious flooding since 1923 has occurred in the past two decades, coinciding with the changing weather patterns linked to global warming.
More localized effects are also at play, with politics, bureaucracy and corruption tripping up an engineering fix that aimed to tame the waters. Project “MOSE,” a series of mobile gates that can rise to control the level of the city’s lagoon, is already three years behind schedule and billions of euros over budget.