How do you imagine Venice in the future? Mattia Berto, director, Teatro Groggia

Venice as the protagonist of a contemporary renaissance, a city that takes on the challenge of becoming an experiment in urban and human regeneration: Mattia Berto for #RiscrivereilFuturo of Venice

For the project #RiscrivereilFuturo di Venezia, Venezia da Vivere and the Associazione Piazza San Marco interviewed entrepreneurs, curators, directors of cultural institutions, university professors, hoteliers, event organizers, and citizens. An open debate to foster an idea of a city in balance with the environment, work, and its civitas.

We are delighted to interview Mattia Berto, director, actor, and artistic director of the Teatro di Villa Groggia.

How do you imagine Venice in the future?

I am an optimist by nature; I love challenges and changes of course. I like to imagine Venice as the protagonist of a contemporary renaissance. I imagine a city populated by new inhabitants who become the protagonists of places and projects. A city that takes on the challenge of becoming an experiment in urban regeneration starting with people.

I expect children in the squares, workshops of new realities, wide-ranging cultural projects from the local to the international level, and a new relationship with tourism that focuses on quality rather than quantity. Venice, a thousand-year-old city, as a welcoming port that opens its labyrinth of streets to a magma of vitality.

What can politics and citizens do for a rebirth of Venice?

Managing a city like Venice is not easy, just as it is not easy to decide to live there. I always say that Venice is not a city, but a state of mind, a magical yet complex balance.

I believe that politics can initiate good practices and activate a process to repopulate the city by controlling the costs of homes and shops. Living and working here should be accessible for middle-income families. Apartment rentals with medium-to-long-term contracts should be incentivized. Activities aimed solely at tourism should be limited. Interesting projects that create new job opportunities should be brought to the city.

Virtuous networks should also be encouraged among the categories of people who live and work in the city.
Citizens must open up: open their homes, their workshops, and be generous. They must become protagonists of an idea of a city that puts people and the quality of life of those who choose Venice at the center. Only with the idea of being part of a virtuous network, with everyone involved, can we think about restarting the city.

Propose a specific idea in at least one of these areas: environment, housing, work, culture, safety, tourism.

I have always been convinced that it is vital for the city to rethink how culture is produced beyond the major events that last only a moment, attract many people, and only provide significant profit to those working with mass tourism.

I am convinced that only longer-term projects offer, alongside content of international interest, important services for the local community. I dream of places inhabited year-round where the various local cultural entities offer educational paths, workshops, and recreational activities for children and the elderly.

Not a calendar of events to promote—we have always had plenty of those—but places that are always open, which everyone can take care of; places to inhabit, to get to know one another, to stimulate new ideas, and to learn from others through direct experience, where one can feel like a protagonist.

I also believe that these places could bring together culture, projects related to art, theater, and music, with the valorization and transmission of local knowledge, starting from the specificities of the lagoon: I dream of artisans working on the generational transfer of their knowledge to young Venetians, but also to interested people from all over the world.

The city’s enormous heritage is not only architectural but also human. The city possesses very specific practices and crafts that the rest of the world has not developed, and which are worth passing on.

Mattia Berto, director, actor, and artistic director of the Teatro di Villa Groggia.