From the New York Times website today, a story about how Venice is being overrun by tourists who are driving away the locals.
Italian government officials, lamenting what they call “low-quality tourism,” are considering limiting the numbers of tourists who can enter the city or its landmark piazzas.
Here's the whole article:
This story has been published for many years now...it's truly a recycled story that comes out every year. I have a feeling that the lamenting officials are happy to have the cruise ship revenues. Someone's gotta pay for a sinking city that will need a lot more money to maintain it. I think they're as serious and capable of limiting tourism to Venice as Cinque Terre (as in, not very!)
Not a lot of sympathy here for those 'lamenting' officials. They are the same ones who allowed, and are still allowing, the gigantic cruise ships to invade the lagoon because they liked the € that their dockage fees bring in. They had plenty of encouragement and pleas from residents, to limit the number of cruise ships allowed but declined to do so because of their greed. Now they are reaping what they sowed. If they didn't want what they call low-quality tourism, they should never have allowed the cruise lines to inundate the city.
My sympathy is only for the residents and the tourists who choose to make Venice a destination and spend a few days and spend their dollars on hotels/restaurants/museums, etc who can now only enjoy these things in the morning and evening when the day-trippers are gone. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy cruising and I am one of those day-trippers when on a shore excursion at a cruise stop. But I don't think that every interesting destination in the world needs to be open to cruise ship hordes. When certain places are closed to giant cruise ships, or where those giants are strictly limited, the port stops remain wonderful places to visit and don't lose their identity. When those cruise ship hordes descend regularly and often, the local ambience and enchantment is often lost and replaced by that Disney Land atmosphere that literally changes what people wanted to go there to see.
It's the Disneylandization of Italian historical centers. They are all designed for the fruition of visitors rather than residents.
Same is happening in Florence. The relatives I had in the city center have all moved out. And they are not regretting it. The traffic restrictions did it for most of them.
Our addiction to the car crept up on us over the past few decades and we didn't even realize it.
Venice never had car access, but nowadays people are used to speed. Who's got the patience to travel by boat in the 21st century? Once you add the high maintenance costs of buildings plagued by constant humidity, you get the picture.
I hate those cruise ships, which is why I haven't visited Venezia in summer for three years. Most passengers either buy excursions from the ship, so the money mostly goes to the cruise line, or do it themselves and spend €20 euro on a pizza or panino, a bottle of water, and maybe a museum or a made-in-China souvenir. But they can check Venice off their list of places they've seen.
Notice I said "most", not "all".
I was in Venice for 5 nights 21-25 June. I had the good fortune to never see any of those big ships. There are places you can stay where it is quiet and not crowded, but they may be more residential. I didn't notice any large-ish hotels in "my" neighborhood.
My apartment faced the lagoon with the Cemetery Island across the water. I walked through the Campo dei Gesuiti to go to the Coop for groceries. Just a few blocks beyond the Coop was the Strada Nova shopping street with the tiny Calle Ca'd'Oro off it to the vaporetto stop of the same name.
I mostly took that vaporetto to the few sights I visited. On the day I went to St. Mark's, it was oddly very quiet in the morning. Maybe that was because it was a Thursday. The crowds seemed to build later in the afternoon. The vaporetti were always crowded, but I played my gray hair card and sat in the area for people with issues. It was perfectly legit because one of the issues is being 70 or older. Check!
After my touristing, I'd go "home" to my apartment. The apartment owner lived upstairs. It was never crowded or noisy in that part of the Canareggio area. It was so quiet and I had such a great view from my apartment, I liked just being there.
Maybe I was lucky.
This article has been written every year. This is not news. I have been reading annual articles that Venice has been dying from tourism since the first time I went to Italy (1982).
Venice was like a second home for me during my first 14 years here since it's so close. We used to go often, sometimes every weekend and every time was magical. In 2014, we relocated to the US and I thought I'd never see Venice again so I wrote an "Ode" to the city on my blog, not knowing that we'd be returning here less than 3 years later. In it, I touched on this very topic, about how it is getting harder and harder to enjoy Venice. If you will all indulge me, here is what I wrote:
"...Venice, I've noticed, is starting to turn on itself. These days it survives wholly on the tourist dollar yet it is becoming more unfriendly to tourists every day. Gone are the pigeons in San Marco since the city suddenly and inexplicably decided to start enforcing the years old ordinance of not feeding them. Now they actually have security guards whose sole job is to patrol the Piazza San Marco and tell tourists that they are not allowed to sit down anywhere on the Piazza except on designated benches. Chinese entrepreneurs have slowly but surely taken over many of the shops and cafes. My favorite pub, the Devil's Forest, raised the price of a pint of Guinness almost overnight from 5 euros to a whopping 8 euros, the most I've paid for a pint anywhere in the world. Despite my love of Venice, it gets harder and harder to enjoy it as I once did as I see the things I loved about it disappear, little by little. And yet the tourists still arrive daily in droves, oblivious to the blight they are paradoxically helping to feed and blissfully unaware that the Venice of their imagination does not fully exist anymore..."
The perennial "Venice is overrun by tourism" articles in the world's
media seem to suggest so; or at least suggest it is an easy item when
some lazy hack has to produce a few hundred words by a deadline.
Apparently, many locals feel the issue needs attention:
The 8 EUR Guinness pints don't seem to have hurt business at the Devil's Forest Pub. It was packed when I was last there 1 1/2 years ago, but then it was the start of Carneval. I think I stayed with the Wieselburger, although I have absolutely no recollection of what I payed. Maybe that is why they can raise prices with impunity.
Sounds like the old complaints about "shoe bees". From Urban Dictionary:
Lower middle class persons who day trip to the Jersey Shore. The origin of "shoe bee" goes back to the 1930's when day trippers from Philly would come down to the shore and carry their lunch in shoe boxes, as was common practice at the time.
Needless to say, those "shoe bees" didn't drop any of their cash in restaurants or lodging establishments, while adding substantially to the crowds at the beach, thus earning the disdain of the chamber-of-commerce types. Maybe they were the first "low-quality tourists".
Keith, very kindly but I think you're missing some of the points? I don't think anyone is necessarily demonizing tourists themselves but an industry which has overloaded a place not designed for the numbers it is having to accommodate, and authorities who are digging in their heels where putting some reasonable controls on those numbers is concerned.
Aside from too many bodies, the affordable, available housing issue in Venice of particular concern. From a 2015 article:
"...over the past two decades, property owners have increasingly converted apartments into hotels or Airbnb rentals, driving up the costs of permanent housing. The result: only the wealthy can afford to live here."
"Longtime residents are being driven out by housing owners – who can make more money from wealthy foreigners buying swanky vacation apartments than they can renting to families – and by day-trippers, who don't spend enough money for the city government to acquire the kind of taxes it needs to set aside affordable housing for locals."
Lose the locals and you risk losing the culture.
Italian government officials, lamenting what they call “low-quality
tourism,” are considering limiting the numbers of tourists who can
enter the city or its landmark piazzas.
These government officials only have themselves to blame. It was government officials who OKd the building of the cruise port. These same officials have the power to limit the size and number of ships allowed into the port. What's stopping them?
Here's an important excerpt, from those hoping to travel to Venice:
At night, many of the tourists return to their cruise ships or tuck in after early dinners. The result is a momentary reprieve but also, like Venice in its slow winter months, a time warp to an earlier Venice.
For me it is the one I first encountered nearly 20 years ago, before Google Maps, when I could get lost and stumble onto seemingly deserted or forgotten campos. At night, away from the city center, a couple of tourists celebrating their wedding at a divey cafe was not cloying, but charming.
Kathy, I don't think it's a risk, but a certainty.
The comment about ".. only the wealthy can afford to live here" sounds like the S.F Bay Area. Unless you live with your parents of sleep dorm style six to a room in an apartment. I was last in Venice in 2011 as a two-night stop on a cruise in the month of October. We did not find the crowds to extreme at all that time of year, but from what I read it may have been ruined since then by being loved too much. Like Cinque Terre, I am not sure that I am that eager to go back.
Early morning and evening are def the best times to go see the big sites (unless you want to go inside, of course, or shop on the Bridge). Nothing like going out at 6:30 am and sharing St Mark's Sq with only a dozen other people.
After a few visits, I learned - go out early, stay out later...rest in the afternoon and stay away from the cattle run between Rialto and San Marco at peak hours if possible.
I know many people only have a few days and aren't able to really get away from the crowds, but it doesn't leave a very good memory if that is all you experience.
