Venice: cruising towards oblivion

Venice is dying as a functioning city. Most of its permanent residents have left, and the city is swamped by the day trippers who pour in by car, bus, train and, increasingly, cruise liner. It's time for a radical solution to a pressing problem, writes FRANK McDONALD,Environment Editor

LA SERENISSIMA is dying on her feet, strangled slowly by tourists. The hordes of day trippers flood into Venice by bus, car, train and, increasingly, cruise liners much larger than anything else in the watery city, even the Doge’s Palace; some of these behemoths can carry more than 2,000 passengers.

Many other cities, Dublin included, would welcome them with open arms. But Venice is being overwhelmed by tourists, to the detriment of its remaining residents. And last year, when it was confirmed that the population had dipped below 60,000 – the lowest level for centuries – protestors staged a mock funeral for the city.

A sombre flotilla of gondolas escorted a pink, flower-draped coffin along the Grand Canal, accompanied by pallbearers in black capes. It was intended to symbolise the impending death of the one-time Most Serene Republic, caused by the impacts of tourism, a low birth rate, a dearth of basic services, prohibitively expensive housing and, of course, the acqua alta, or high water that regularly floods the city.

The funeral was organised by Matteo Secchi and Andrea Morelli, who maintains a digital display in his pharmacy window near the Rialto Bridge that records the city’s steadily declining population – now barely more than a third of what it was in 1951, when Venice had more than 170,000 residents. By 2050 the city could be almost empty.

As Newsweek noted in a feature, “Ciao, Ciao, Venice”, last November, “wealthy foreigners have skewed the real estate market by paying top dollar for dream vacation apartments, all to get a chance to live like the very Venetians they are driving out”. Secchi said: “Behind the famous postcards, the population is decimated and on the edge of extinction.”

David Newbold, warden of St George’s Anglican church in Dorsoduro, across the Grand Canal from the tourist-infested San Marco district, recalls that the historic city had a population of more than 80,000 when he arrived there, in 1985. Since then it has been losing nearly 1,000 permanent residents a year.

“Another grocery shop closes, another mask shop opens – and so it goes,” he says wistfully. Only one grocery shop is left in the eastern end of Dorsoduro, not far from the magnificent church of Santa Maria della Salute, selling ham, cheese, bread, milk and other victuals. But then most of the apartments in this area are second homes.

That’s another reason for the decline in population: so many Venetians have sold their homes to outsiders, both from Italy and overseas. Walking around Dorsoduro or San Marco after dark, there is little sign of life – no light peeping through shuttered windows, no gatherings of neighbours in a little campo like in other Italian cities.

Go looking for a tube of toothpaste in Venice, as I did – maddeningly – for nearly an hour one evening four years ago. There is a multitude of luxury-brand stores, particularly on the narrow, congested tourist route between Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge, but very few shops selling things that people actually need.

That’s not the case everywhere in the city. For Lawrence Carroll, an American painter living in Venice, one of the pleasures of his stroll to the studio he has in Giudecca is that he passes a bakery, a grocery and a butcher’s shop catering for locals. But the city now lacks many of amenities that would be taken for granted elsewhere.

Although the Venice Film Festival is the world’s oldest, now running for 68 years, the films are all shown in the historic Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido, the 11km sandbar that creates the Venetian Lagoon. Of 10 cinemas in the city itself, just one survives. The old Ritz Cinema is now a tourist trinket bazaar, although we saw some Venetians watching Alice in Wonderland outdoors on Campo San Polo.

Venice by night is quite a different place from Venice during the day, an inverse of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The day trippers have all gone, after spending several hours gorging on the city’s edible architecture and perhaps even buying a Venetian mask or a garish piece of Murano glass; increasingly these are made in China, according to Carroll and others.

On Riva del Vin, near the much-photographed Rialto Bridge (itself just another shopping mall), a line of tourist-trap restaurants does a roaring trade, as if coachloads of visitors have been dropped off at a feeding station. But some of the day trippers don’t even bother to have lunch; their average spend some years ago was put at just €15.

Day trippers account for at least 70 per cent of the 20 million tourists who flood into Venice every year. That works out at an average of nearly 55,000 per day – almost as many as the resident population. But, as most of them arrive in the summer, as many as 100,000 swarm through the city daily during the high season.

This includes passengers from the cruise liners that usually arrive in the morning, docking at a terminal in Tronchetto, near the causeway that links Venice to the mainland. It’s one of the busiest cruise ports in the Mediterranean, with nearly 500 ships calling in annually, disgorging some 700,000 passengers to spend the day swanning around Venice.

It is quite a sight to watch the big liners getting tugged down the Giudecca Canal into the lagoon, their decks lined with people enjoying their last view of St Mark’s Campanile and Doge’s Palace before they’re taken overnight to Dubrovnik or wherever. Many can be seen waving to all the tourists thronging Riva degli Schiavoni, the waterfront promenade that runs along St Mark’s Basin.

Some of them come looking for the real Venice, according to Mattia Bassegio, who runs a locanda, or inn, in the still-populated district of Cannaregio. “But 80 per cent of them come for a day, visit St Mark’s and disappear. They miss the very essence of Venice. And it’s a culture that is fast disappearing,” he told the BBC in 2006.

Given that the relationship between day trippers and Venice is essentially parasitic, there have been calls for a ban. Enrico Mingardi, deputy mayor in charge of transport, has championed the idea of restricting entry to visitors with hotel bookings, saying that Venetians “can no longer tolerate the discomforts” caused by throngs of tourists.

But the vested interests are so strong that this proposal is unlikely to be implemented any time soon, if at all. Forty per cent of the historic city’s population is involved in the tourist industry, in one way or another, and at least 250,000 people commute to Venice every day from the mainland to staff the hotels, restaurants, shops and boats.

A quarter of the remaining permanent residents are over 64, compared with an average for Italy of less than a fifth, and the city must be very difficult to negotiate for anyone who’s infirm. To get anywhere involves walking over bridges with many stone steps, while seats on the vaporetti, or motor boats, are at a premium because they’re packed with tourists.

SQUALID COMMERCIALISM that reeks of Berlusconi’s Italy has also entered the frame, with scaffolding on the eastern end of the Doge’s Palace covered by a huge advertisement for Coca-Cola that wraps around the famous Bridge of Sighs. Indeed, it’s hard to tell from a distance whether the bridge is real or merely part of the colourful poster.

Scaffolding needed to restore important Venetian buildings used to be covered by a gauze mural depicting their facades. This year it’s the turn of Ca’ Rezzonico, one of the palazzi on the Grand Canal, but they haven’t bothered to cover the scaffolding with anything. Perhaps they should talk to Pepsi about it.

One of the appealing features of Venice, however, is its picturesque decay: the peeling stucco on ancient buildings, exposing the brickwork beneath it, often at the water’s edge. And the overwhelming sense of this city being doomed by the acqua alta even though the authorities are building a sea barrier to protect the lagoon.

Naturally, it will have gates to allow access by the cruise liners, whose passengers keep the tourist shops busy. Writing about Nice in 1977, Maeve Binchy observed that “the prices are insane and the shopkeepers have developed faces and hands like lizards from collecting the money”. The same might be written of Venice today.

As long ago as 1963, in her travel book Venice Observed, the American journalist Mary McCarthy wrote that “the tourist Venice is Venice . . . a folding picture postcard of itself. It has been part museum, part amusement park, living off the entrance fees of tourists, ever since the early 18th century, when its former sources of revenue ran dry.”

But with a population now lower than Blanchardstown’s, the city faces a bleak future. “The problem is that for the last 20 or 30 years the people who run Venice have not tried to foster an economy other than tourism,” says Franco Maschietto, former head of the Venetian Hoteliers’ Association, whose family has lived there for nearly four centuries.

If Venice is not to to be reduced to a stage set, an Italian version of Disneyland, it will have to restrict entry to tourists with a reservation for at least two nights’ hotel accommodation and ensure that there’s a supply of afforbable housing and shops to cater for real people. Only then would it be possible to save this captivating city in the water.