Luke 🇮🇹🇬🇧

The first one happens all the time. It’s happening in Austin right now!!! Housing is not exempt from Supply and Demand!

JUST IN🚨: France is hotter than 99% of the planet right now

Until my childhood, there was a fountain ⛲️– often a very spartan one🚰 – on every corner of every old city center I visited in Sicily – but not in Venice. By the time I turned ten, all those fountains were gone. I was a few times a character in small scenes where an elder would ask why I was so thirsty, couldn’t I drink from the fountain? And I would answer that the fountain was gone. The disappearance of the fountains was the by-product of a long bureaucratic campaign of “modernization”. The government had decided they were unhygienic quaint relics of a poorer time. Health inspectors kept writing reports about lead pipes and stagnant basins; municipal engineers spoke of water loss and inefficiency. The local aqueducts, which may have served each town for centuries, were absorbed into an elephantiac centralised organisation – the EAS, destined a generation later to file for bankrupt – that no longer saw fountains as civic pride but as liabilities. In fact, my home city refused to hand over their aqueduct, but they took away the fountains nonetheless! Droughts and water rationing gave the final pretext: open fountains were wasteful, unsustainable, obsolete. Some were stripped of their bronze fittings and marble ornaments by thieves; others were buried under asphalt when the roads were “renewed” – in my home city they threw away the century old marble slabs and poured black asphalt instead. By the mid-1980s, progress had silenced the fountains. The new city planners wanted clean lines, smooth pavements, car lanes, and uniform lighting. The old cast-iron pumps and stone troughs looked too rustic, too provincial. They did not belong to the modern country the authorities so wished to project. Once the fountains were gone, they started to focus on the removal the trees. 🌳