It is almost twenty years that my working life interlaces with the development of Venice, to begin with my convinced participation to the adventure of Expo 2000, and continuing with steady and punctual considerations about the dynamic of the city, especially concerning its integration with all the North East region and, during the last years, with the feverish evolution of all the territory of South-Eastern Europe.

My attention was thus focused on the dynamic of Venice towards the outside, progressively analyzing the different components of that dynamic, from the commercial, to the logistic and financial ones. I therefore took no interest in the city’s intern problems, also if they were, and still are, complex and urgent, from the physical safeguard to the demographic impoverishment. It is exactly who, like me, profoundly loves Venice, that is more clearly inclined to understand its deeper flaws, and to express a certain suspicion towards who claims that the city can make it by itself and by the inside, without having to look for challenges and synergies with dynamics from the outside. Thirty years ago I wasn’t so pessimist: I still remember how much confidence I had in the possibility of a “shock” caused by the housing and urban renewal programs promoted by the so-called “Comitatone” (big committee); and how much confidence I expressed towards the planning of the great safeguard works for the city and the lagoon. A planning which took too much time (and the fault was not of the planners, but of central and local authorities which had to transform it in concrete tasks), but allowed to keep everything going until the permission, given last year, to realize the MOSE system. I want to compliment, if I am allowed to, those who had the necessary patience and firmness. Those who were sure that Venice was able to change also thanks to an inner dynamic, and not only as a tow of the development of the Veneto Region and of the North-East.

Those who know, also superficially, the MOSE project, know that in it are involved two elements of radical, and not incremental, evolution of the city. On one side the occupational element, since its direct relapse in term of vacancies is of about 100 vacancies each year for eight years, a figure that in a reality so demographically little as that of Venice can have multiplicative effects. And, on the other side, the element of technological innovation will be exploited; indeed the special “oneness” of the work (that, contrarily to other similar works in the Netherlands, England and Russia, had to combine the defence from waters, the safeguard of the lagoon environment and the sustainability of urban development) drove to highly sophisticated technological solutions which in practice promote innovative processes at a local level, and can be an important heritage for all the economy of Venice and of the Veneto region. So it revives, in me at least, the hope that Venice be able to express vitality also from the inside. The realization of the MOSE system can represent a firm link to which it is possible to link a policy of development and technological innovation, respecting the specificity of the lagoon ecosystem, of the historical city’s conditions and of its needs of preservation through innovation.