Saturday 17th of February the countess Teresa Foscari Foscolo died in her palace of San Samuele in Venice, at the age of 91; she was a woman to whom Venice, as the mayor Massimo Cacciari said “..must be very grateful, for the strong and passionate work she has done for the defense and safeguard of the city”.

With the countess Foscari another piece of Venice left us. She was a woman very proud of her Venetian identity, uncomfortable in the role of the aristocratic. She had been at the head of the lagoon section of Italia Nostra and, after the flood of November 4, 1966, she managed to get Venice’s issue to be known internationally, inviting to Venice the senator Ted Kennedy, whom she brought to visit the submerged Murazzi of Pellestrina; those pictures went all around the world and everyone realized that with the flood, Venice had risked to be swept away by the fury of the water.

After that, and thanks to her commitment in the safeguard of Venice, she became the voice of the Venetian ecology movement, and she was renamed “the red countess”, the ecologist countess, even though her position in favor of the Mose project caused a rift with the Venetian section of Italia Nostra.

“ Symbol of an age during which the citizens of Venice were committed for their city” said about her the writer Alvise Zorzi, …..“ She was a woman very aware of having inherited the great tradition of the Foscari, the Cini, the Gaggia families”, said the architect Giorgio Bellavitis, one of the intellectuals that joined her in her battle for the safeguard of Venice. Gabriele Zanetto tells: “She was the one that after the flood was able to unite a social grouping absolutely new for those times, and in a way she represented them….”. And the writer Ivo Prandin said about her: “ …A rich and also humanly complex woman. In Venice she was precious, with her pride of belonging to a city in which she felt good and in which she believed….”