FS-Venice is always described as a fragile city needing a lot of attentions, and these attentions are certainly something that has to be given from all those who administer all the complex tasks that each city, Venice included, has to fulfil every day. To ensure people’s mobility is definitely one of the most complex functions of the urban machine. In the historical centre of Venice, people’s means of transport coincides with public transport, contrarily to what happens in the main big cities. What does it mean to its company the handling of a reality that assigns to public transport an important and relevant role of “exclusiveness” and “responsibility”?

GR-It is an important task that has to be read as an occasion of renewal for Venice. Mobility is by far the decisive function in determining the quality level of an urban area. From London to Madrid and Milan, local policies all focus on the shifting of flows from the private means of transport to the public one. In the historical Venice, collective transport absorbs the whole demand. It is as if in Florence everybody would move by streetcar, without the use of cars or motorbikes. Steamboats are an essential part of the appeal of Venice, above all for tourists. The company Vela has developed a complex communication and orientation system for the city users, both resident inhabitants and tourists, thus qualifing as the natural channel to improve the relationship with citizens and most of all to support the city’s cultural and institutional initiatives. The 14 millions of visitors surely go through Vela’s box-offices, also through our call-center or our Internet site. In my opinion, an essential contribution would be to convoy in the best way the arrival and the presence of visitors’flows, in order to avoid an excess of looseness that would lead to negative consequences produced by disruption. Nonetheless we offer to the city the chance to promote public services and events, as well as cultural happenings, reaching directly the inhabitants and tourists.

FS- The issue of mobility presents a criticism which is linked to Venice’s characteristic feature of concentrating most of the arrivals in just one area, that of Piazzale Roma, the railway station and the Tronchetto island. What we now have is an “Access district” for which it is necessary to go beyond the fragmentation and arbitrariness with which the area has been forming, and to promote an integration and cooperation reasoning between places and means of transport.

GR-I hope that integration will be the theme of 2005. Through the electronic box-office we aim to combine fares progressively, so that workers and commuters, students and tourists can move inside the enlarged metropolitan area of Venice, that embraces around one million inhabitants, using just one transport card. What is important is to reorganize the arrival points, also beacause there are works in progress, like the bridge, that will change the set-up of the arrivals area. The second access to Venice through the “sublagunare”, an underwater lagoon subway, remains unquestionably fundamental, because only a rebalancing project like that will be able to improve accessibility. I can understand the fact that this issue creates argument, and not only for noble reasons, but also for personal interests on the area.

FS-The steamboat, as well as the gondolas, represents a symbol of Venice; on Thursday 21st October 2004 the book “Vaporetti, a century of public transport in the lagoon of Venice” has been presented to the public. Will the steamboat be still a symbol in the new century, and how does the topic of tradition and innovation go with it?

GR-As general manager of Vela, I aimed to bring out the technological and symbolic heritage present in the lagoon transport service. I fear that Venetians do not fully understand up to which point steamboats have favoured the city’s modernization. Anyhow, the great interest aroused by the book we have promoted has confirmed the almost “loving” tie with the navigation in the lagoon by public transport. The future focuses entirely on innovation, in order to minimize energetic and environmental impacts, using hydrogen engines and getting rid of the wave motion. My dream would be to rethink the whole system, also the landing-stages, the function of the rive, the shores, and the planning of new kinds of boats. Now I would be satisfied with the full remake of the agency in Piazzale Roma using a beautiful project of us, worthy of the bridge by Calatrava.