Blacklisting Venice To Save It From Too Many Tourists And Too Few Venetians

Venetians do not want to live in Venice any longer. And as their population dwindles, the mega-cruise ships spew tourists by the tens of thousands into its narrow streets and canals, dwarfing its port and endangering the environment of the city and its lagoon.

Underpopulated and overtouristed, Venice is not only close to losing its hallowed status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site but of entering the "In-Danger" list - a category normally reserved for war-ravaged ruins and dilapidated historical sites in Third World countries.

UNESCO's worries about the gigantic cruise ships, mass tourism and the irreversible damage they're wreaking on the fragile lagoon ecosystem are not new. Italia Nostra, Italy's principle heritage protection agency, said that such concerns “have been met with empty promises but not concrete proposals.”

Already the World Monument Fund placed Venice on its watch list due to the fact that its “large-scale cruising is pushing the city to an environmental tipping point and undermining quality of life for its citizens.”

“En masse, we tourists are toxic," the Guardian warns. "Venice, a city of 54,500 resident, receives 30 million visitors a year, of whom many are grab-and-go day-trippers."

Hotelier Alessandro Possati of Bauer Hotels told the paper: “It’s ironic how for a timeless city no one has any time for her. From bottlenecks on bridges to overflowing ferries and death-by-carnival clowns, La Serenissima feels anything but serene.”

Last month, during Easter weekend alone, the city was gorged by 300,000 tourists. To the list of woes, the inhabitants, who have organized numerous protests over many years, complain about the destruction of historical sites, vandalism, crime, inflated real estate prices, public urination and bathing in historical fountains.

Problems between locals and tourists have been brewing for years. Last summer, the city was covered with flyers bearing a message from the frustrated residents to the masses of visitors: “Tourists Go Away.”

Each year, some 1,000 residents abandon the city for the mainland, exiled due to unaffordable rents or the lack of refuge from tourism. “If the population falls below 40,000, Venice will not be a viable, living city any longer,” warned Jonathan Keates, chairman of the organization "Venice in Peril."

Some measures have been taken to appease UNESCO and to try to crack down on the number of tourists, especially in the northern, most popular areas.

The city is planning to install people-counters at high-traffic areas such as the Ponte degli Scalzi, the Ponte di Calatrava and the bridges over the river Novo in order to monitor the numbers of visitors and share those figures in social media in an effort to avoid overcrowding.

The city also will launch marketing campaigns to promote lesser-known metropolitan areas, and include them on the transport tickets and in maps issued at local tourists offices highlighting alternative routes and facilities like picnic areas and public bathrooms so that tourists don't use public monuments for those purposes.

Following the example of Barcelona, another city afflicted by over tourism and its attendant problems, Venice is announcing that it will limit the numbers of tourist accommodations with the hope of restricting visitors’ numbers and curbing the exodus of locals.

Tourism police will reinforce those campaigns and crack down on unauthorized B&Bs.

Also, the city has established a "locals first" policy for its water buses, which transport 70 million passengers a year, and charges tourists €6 more per ticket. “Those with a ‘Venezia Unica Oro’, or gold card, proving they’re Venetian, will be given priority boarding,” reported La Repubblica.

The measure will kick off in June as a trial in eight vaporetto (water bus) stations including Canal Grande, Santa Chiara, Santa Lucia e Rialto train station, as well as San Marco and the islands of Lido, Murano and Burano.

Until now, frustrated resident commuters in the historic center have had to share the vaporetto ferries with the tourists and their suitcases.

But, for many - including UNESCO, which has been pushing for a strict cruise ban - all those measures are merely cosmetic and fail to respond to the need for bolder revenue-raising measures to finance and implement serious conservation efforts.

Experts agree that the city's biggest problem is the big cruise ships docking in the Venetian lagoon.

Behind the megaships there are enormous economic interests that are the real reason paralyzing any radical measure. Jonathan Keates, the chairman of Venice in Peril, told The Guardian that the cruise ships “are an abomination whose size threatens the dimensions of the city”.

“The city authorities are unapologetic about welcoming the vast ships into the lagoon. The city cruise association says that Venice keeps the entire Adriatic cruise industry afloat and provides 5,000 jobs.”

The government has announced plans to reopen the Vittorio Emanuele channel in the zone of Marghera, a very polluted petrochemical area, as a new port of entry for the cruises.

An option presented to the council to create a reversible cruise terminal outside the Lido entrance to the lagoon, was rejected. The last proposal for removing the ships from St Marks’s Plaza sightline is considered insufficient and dangerous due to the fact that the Vittorio Emanuele Channel is already heavily polluted and in any event not far from the heart of historical Venice.

Proposals to charge entry fees to many of the most popular sites have also been rejected. The head of the city’s tourism, Paola Mar, has said that except for considering ticketing at St. Marks Square, the city’s biggest drawn, her office won't approve of charging for any other sites.

The shopkeepers’ association also opposes any such proposal.

The government has asked UNESCO for a final reprieve in a document that remains secret because the authorities don't want to open their proposal to scrutiny.

For many, the situation has reached such a critical point that the best option, despite the international embarrassment that it could cause, would be for Venice to be blacklisted so that the city gets under international oversight as a way to ensure its survival.

For UNESCO, “saving Venice means saving the Venetians.”