The world heritage committee of the UN’s cultural agency Unesco on Friday began debating its list of World Heritage Sites, with Australia and Britain furious over looming changes to the status of the Great Barrier Reef and the historic docks in the city of Liverpool. — The South China Morning Post

Venice is doomed, says, Salvatore Settis, unless there is a moral revival in Italy. He is a professor of archaeology who has been an advisor on cultural matters to the Italian government and was head of the Getty Center for the Arts and the Humanities in the 1990s. Italians know him from his eloquent denunciations in the press, which say that everything that has made La Bella Italia so beautiful is going to hell in a handcart. — The Art Newspaper

The Venice Lagoon is the most endangered heritage site in Europe, declared the pan-European heritage organisation Europa Nostra at an event today [...].

Rising sea levels, swelling number of tourists, large cruise ships in the lagoon, the erosion of the sea bed, dredging deeper channels and the lack of an agreed management plan for Venice has created a perfect storm of threats to the city’s preservation.   — theartnewspaper.com

Unesco, which for too long has been silent on the growing environmental threat to Venice and its evident mismanagement, as revealed by the exposure of massive corruption in the construction of its flood barriers, has at last shown its teeth. At the meeting of its World Heritage Committee in Doha this June it passed important resolutions that show that it intends to call the Italian government to account and put Venice on its World Heritage at Risk list if it is not satisfied. — theartnewspaper.com

More than 50 leading figures from the worlds of art, film, fashion and architecture have signed a petition calling for a ban on giant cruise ships sailing through Venice. [...]

Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery in London, Richard Armstrong, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, the architect Norman Foster and his wife Elena also endorse the appeal which has been launched by the Association of the International Private Committees for the Safeguarding of Venice [...]. — theartnewspaper.com

Opposition to the project began last year among Venetians and Italians, who are tired of seeing Venice abused by the vast cruise ships and mounting examples of the crudest commercialism. — The Art Newspaper

called Palais Lumière, [it] will be a glittering menagerie of private apartments, hotels, commercial spaces and even a fashion university, and it would transform a dilapidated industrial area bordering the Venetian lagoon. Mr. Cardin has described the Palais, actually three structures linked by six flat discs, as a “habitable sculpture” and said it was his dream. — NYT