Floating Away: The Dangers of Over-Tourism in Venice

Chris Stein (SFS ‘20) is a guest writer for the Caravel's travel edition. The content and opinions of this piece are his and his alone. They do not reflect the opinions of the Caravel or its staff.

Venice, City of Bridges, Queen of the Adriatic, La Serenissima. The historic city of about 60,000 people was founded on 118 islands in the Venetian Lagoon during the fall of the Roman Empire as refugees from nearby Padua and Treviso fled successive invasions by Germanic and Hunnic armies. The city rose to prominence in the Middle Ages as a center of trans-Mediterranean trade routes connecting the terminus of the Silk Road in Constantinople (today, Istanbul) with Europe. On the back of its maritime trading dominance, Venice became one of the world’s richest cities. The wealth from this trade paid for the fantastical architecture, art, theatre, and music for which Venice is today world-renowned.

But, the very survival of Venice is threatened by tourism, which can draw crowds of 65,000 people per day to the city during peak seasons. Trends suggest tourism will only continue to increase; tourists stayed a collective 1.3 billion nights in foreign countries in 2017, double the number from 2000 and quadruple that of 1980. Alongside this growth in the gross number of tourists, international tourism has grown more concentrated in the internet age, defying the expectations of many 1990s and early 2000s travel agents. Instead of the internet making it easier for tourists to explore new and out-of-the-way places, social platforms like Instagram have contributed to bucket-list tourism, where visitors choose locations to get the best pictures with the most famous landmarks.

Bucket-list tourism has proven challenging for Venice, truly one of the world’s most picturesque cities—but also one of its most fragile. Built on marshy islands, the city was sinking at an alarming rate until the banning of artesian wells in the Lagoon in the 1960s; today, scientists estimate that it continues to sink at a rate of one to two milliliters per year. The Italian government is completing a €7 billion ($7.95 billion) engineering project to mitigate risks from flooding, or acqua alta, which ravaged the sinking city as recently as October 2018. The project creates air-pontoon gates at the entrances to the Venetian Lagoon that are inflated when tidal surges exceed 110 centimeters (43.3 inches). These gates should prevent extreme flooding by regulating the water level in the Lagoon. For context, flood waters cover the famous St. Mark’s Square when the surge exceeds 90 centimeters (35.4 inches).

Some scientists believe this flooding is made worse by the massive cruise ships that dock in Venice to deposit thousands of day-trippers each day. The Italian government has banned the largest cruise ships from entering the Lagoon and is exploring plans to relocate the cruise terminal to one of the Lagoon’s three entrances and ferry passengers to Venice’s historic center. The wakes from large ships can cause erosion and they also contribute to air and water pollution in the lagoon. Local Venetians have led a fierce political movement aiming to ban cruise ships from the Lagoon entirely, but the Venetian government is concerned that such a ban could harm the economy—this is the fatal paradox of Venice’s tourism problem: it cannot survive at the current levels of tourism, nor can it afford to limit tourism, upon which its entire economy is built.

Venetian businesses are also finding it difficult to capture value from those tourists who plan to visit for more than just the day. Visitors increasingly spurn expensive hotels in Venice proper, instead opting (as I did) to stay on the mainland in Mestre and use convenient and affordable public transit to enter the city every day. Along with this and the associated growth in Airbnb stays, local businesses have suffered—the Economist reports that many day-trippers do not even eat a meal in Venice; instead, they pack food for picnics. Venetian officials have responded by banning picnicking in St. Mark’s Square.

Airbnbs are also pricing-out locals. The population of Venice’s main islands has fallen by half since 1990, in part because red-hot demand for Airbnbs makes renting apartments to locals less attractive by comparison. The government is implementing several new tax schemes to raise the revenue needed to repay municipal debt that stood at €60 million ($68 million) in 2016, the last year for which data is available. An existing stopgap measure charging overnight visitors to Venice a seasonal per person fee has been extended indefinitely thanks to a measure in the 2019 national budget that will also enable Venice’s government to levy a new day-trip entry tax ranging seasonally from €2.50 to €10 ($2.84 to $11.37) beginning in summer 2019. The mayor of Venice hopes this new tax will help fund efforts to improve sanitation, security, and infrastructure maintenance.

It is only fair for visitors to contribute to the preservation of Venice, but the government must be careful that its efforts to raise revenue do not disincentivize tourism in Venice. A tax on day-trippers is logically sound, but Venice should end its levy on overnight stays in hotels because such a measure is counterproductive—it makes Venetian hotels more expensive and staying on the mainland correspondingly more attractive.

Many of Venice’s most beautiful palazzos exist in a state of preserved ruin. The city must address over-tourism to ensure that the charming canals, bridges, churches, squares, buildings, and artworks which have delighted tourists and inspired writers for centuries do not become living ruins in our time.