How Venice keeps an eye out for carnival security

　　by Marzia De Giuli

　　MILAN, Feb. 13 (Xinhua) -- Surrounding the Carnival of Venice, which takes place in the water city until Tuesday, there is a lot of work to prevent fatalities from tarnishing one of the most renowned annual events in Italy.

　　St. Mark's Square, the heart of Venice where many of the dozens of the Carnival's events take place, is usually packed with 80,000 visitors, according to the Venice police headquarters.

　　During the 18-day event, some 1 million people are estimated by organizers of the Carnival to visit Venice, which counts less than 60,000 residents and around 25 million tourists a year.

　　"But Venice, built on water, is not an ordinary city. It is a maze of canals, bridges and alleys which can become very dangerous when so crowded," Venice police headquarters spokeswoman Erika Veronica Di Francesco told Xinhua.

　　For this reason, she stressed, security is a priority at the Carnival of Venice which contributes to its success.

　　A fundamental step, Di Francesco pointed out, is dividing Venice into zones that are watched by policemen with the task of directing the traffic of people.

　　Special "areas of containment" are kept empty so that they can serve as a "gatherer" to calm crowds in case of sudden mass movement. Meanwhile, health units are positioned in strategic and easily reachable places.

　　Stronger security measures have been adopted in crucial points, like St. Mark's Square, where there is a large presence of plainclothes policemen and police camera operators on top of surrounding buildings.

　　Their images are transferred to an operating room where officers can keep everything under control and constantly communicate with organizers to give indications from the Carnival's stage in St. Mark's Square in case of emergency.

　　"We collaborate with museums all around the square which have put their terraces at our disposal to monitor the area," Nicola Catullo, executive producer at the Venice municipality's company which organizes the event, told Xinhua.

　　"In case of an emergency, the screen above the stage can immediately broadcast a warning in different languages, asking people to move in a certain direction and providing maps and signals," Catullo added.

　　He said around 100 people work in the complex organizational structure of the Carnival, excluded the hundreds of masked artists who are the protagonists of the event.

　　"The modern celebrations of the Carnival of Venice were born in 1981, but it is only in recent years that we have seen such increasing flows of visitors, with peaks of 120,000 a day," Catullo noted.

　　However, he said, no serious accidents have been registered during the Carnival of Venice.