Letter from Venice Tony Clayton-LeaThe eye is seduced by the staggering amount of faded glory. Venice is undoubtedly one of the few cities in the world that trades on its past; one has to venture upwards and beyond the Canal Grande to catch a glimpse of anything approximating a modernised region.
A short walk around the Lido, a long island at the south of Venice, is almost a culture shock after three days of Venice itself: the Lido is positively NYC cosmopolitan by comparison.
Flashy hotels stand side by side along the seafront; beach huts can be rented daily for an absurd amount of money.
You can almost appreciate why Thomas Mann set Death In Venice here: the languor of the Lido as a one-time fashionable resort for the moneyed just about remains. But one doesn't go to Venice for cosmopolitan. People with whom I have chatted on a recent visit say cosmopolitan is for Milan or parts of Rome. Venice? That's for tourists.
Itruth Venice bears up to scrutiny - it really is as fabulous as it's made out to be. Those photographs you've seen of the Basilica di San Marco, of the Palazzo Ducale, of the palaces along the Canal Grande have not lied. The movies which show Venice as a mixture of the sublime and the potentially malevolent (The Comfort of Strangers, Don't Look Now) appear to have captured the place in all its dark-alleyway mystery.
Tourism is the life and death of Venice - the city and the region boasts more tourist accommodation than any other in Italy. Its high season, too, is longer than anywhere else in the country (although many hotels and refurbished palazzos tend to ignore the seasonal changes, ensuring that in general, high prices don't change from one season to the next).
This is but one of the reasons why natives are clearing out - they can't afford to live there. They move to either the local areas of nearby Mestre-Maghera (where housing is much cheaper) or to other parts of the country.
Added to this is the statistic of Italy having the lowest birth rate in Europe - 25 per cent of Italian families have no children. Another says that no city has suffered more from the tourist industry than Venice - almost 10 million people pay their respects each year and about half of those don't even stay one night, yet without such an influx of people Venice would hardly survive.
At the close of the second World War, about 170,000 people lived in Venice; now, the local population stands at fewer than 70,000. The majority of Venice's population are over 55, which means that over the next few decades it will become even less indigenously populated.
Little seems to be done about the gradual and growing amount of less able-bodied people. One person told me that it is every Venetian's nightmare to end up in a wheelchair; with more than 400 bridges and God knows how many steps to negotiate, even manoeuvring a child's buggy is difficult enough.
The essence of Venice, wrote Henry James, is "a narrow canal in the heart of the city - a patch of green water and a surface of pink wall." In a city where the gorgeous palace facades face canal-side and where the atmosphere, location and scenery are unique, it seems such a pity that the city authorities have failed to open it up to everyone. But then, with a city which has fewer than 25 plumbers, what can you expect?