NEW YEAR’S EVE IN ST MARK’S SQUARE: MORE COMMENTS AFTER THE INTERVIEW WITH ALBERTO NARDI

The dispute over the New Year’s Eve celebrations in St Mark’s Square continues. After yesterday’s comments by the president of the Associazione Piazza San Marco, Alberto Nardi, the local press - the Gazzettino in particular - collected others on the need to restrict access to St Mark’s Square on specific occasions. Many share the need to increase surveillance and if this is not guaranteed to restrict access, as requested by Nardi. The city councillor for Tourist Development, Angela Vattese, thinks that ‘in future more care is needed to protect the Square and consequently greater investments made in surveillance and in quality events that involve the public, entertaining them and thus maintaining greater calm’. The art historian Franco Miracco, current councillor for Culture in Trieste, implicates the Curia, asking that ‘the Patriarchate makes its voice heard in defence of the Square, given that the civic authorities do not feel this need’. Monsignor Antonio Meneguolo, director of the Patriarchate’s Ecclesiastical Cultural Assets, replied that the question is related to common sense and the common sense of individuals rather than the crowd. Finally, David Scalzotto, news editor of the Gazzettino di Venezia, claims in his article that there was an ‘affront’ to the monumental area, writing that ‘seeing people climbing up the 16th-century columns of Sansovino’s Loggetta at the base of the St Mark’s Bell Tower cannot leave anyone indifferent’.