Venice: A Future for a Dying City

Amidst a rapidly changing urban landscape in the tourism hub of Venice, author Neal E. Robbins examines the city's economic, environmental, and social future.

A lively crowd lolls around outside one of the hundreds of bars in the antique city of Venice where a sign taped to the front window says: “NO SPRITZ”. 

Venetians have socialised over the spritz -- prosecco and sparkling water with bitter Campari or Aperol liqueur -- ever since it was introduced by Austrian occupiers in the early 1800s. But at this bar on a street along a canal they exclusively drink wine in fluted glasses. That’s surprising because most Venetians love a spritz. The bright red drink is everywhere. Was this an outlier or a harbinger of change?

“The idea of ‘NO SPRITZ' is to be a bit provocative,” the bar’s owner-entrepreneur, Mara Sartore, explained. “But Venice needs new energy and new ideas because the city is being emptied [of people]. If you stay, you must imagine a future that differs from that of most Venetians, who think that the city has already ended."

Imagining the future occupied many Venetians after COVID-19 transformed the world heritage site — practically overnight — from over-touristed to eerily empty. The unexpected hiatus from the onslaught brought swans, cormorants, and fish to the calmed network of canals. Tranquillity generated hopes that the city might emerge from the pandemic renewed, having learned new ways to live sustainably with tourism.

The tourists have begun to return to a broad welcome, but Venice now finds that the loss of lives, jobs and businesses in the pandemic have exacted a heavy toll. Instead of new beginnings, income gaps are driving the return from lost time and revenues. Long-standing exploitation of the city’s cultural and environmental wealth has resumed. With early indications suggesting the next global wave of tourism may exceed even that up to 2020, there is no sign of an end to the exodus of longtime residents from an already depleted Venice.

“It’s like a family where they sell everything, the silverware, the house, sending the children to do ignoble work... After COVID... anyone can do whatever they want to earn money,” said economist Giampietro Pizzo, a member of the citizens’ group Venezia Cambia. Wary of growing pessimism now for the city’s prospects, he said Venice was becoming a tourism “factory” and that Venice’s pro-business Mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, believes “he is constructing the future... in reality, he is destroying the future of this city.”  

Is tourism to be the 'death of Venice,' then? The city has long evoked talk of its own demise, but the debate has moved on. Now Venetians are focused on making the city a living place.

Historian Mario Isnenghi has asked what happens if Venice lives, the title of his just-published book (Se Venezia Vive). It an oblique response to the globally popular 2014 work by Salvatore Settis, If Venice Dies.

Isnenghi sees Venice not as dying, but as reinventing itself repeatedly in the centuries since the Venetian empire abruptly ended in 1797. “Venice has not remained still in the contemplation of the past. It has known how to change, to adapt its form and speak the language of the changing times,” said Isnenghi, author some forty books on 19th and 20th century Venice. 

What’s wrong with asking whether Venice is dying? I ask.

That is to “believe in the end of history and think Venice is also finished. All these lovers of the Venetian world [of the past] want Venice to stay frozen as it is, as an expression of the end of history. History has not ended and it has not ended in Venice either,” Isnenghi responded.

The idea of Venice as doomed is most associated with Thomas Mann’s 1912 novel Death in Venice, which was about the unrequited homosexual love of a man who dies in Venice during a cholera epidemic. Talk of Venice dying returned after the all-time record acqua alta on Nov 4, 1966, and the subsequent wave of “save Venice” global sympathy. For some, the 'Venice is dying: see it before it sinks' mantra was always just a marketing slogan to attract tourists. It also served well for novelists, who have written hundreds of books that explore and profit from the city’s rich history and form.

Isnenghi said he wrote his book to oppose “poisonous ideas of the death of Venice...That’s the negation of what has actually happened. It’s the forgetting of the real story, in which the memory of the Serenissima,” the most serene empire, as the Republic was known, “overwhelms everything that came after.” So much is focused on the history of empire, he said, that people tend to neglect Venice under occupation, first by the French and then the Austrians, and the whole of Italian Venice after 1866, when a new aristocracy came to power and industrialists fostered what was called “the foreigner industry,” creating the Art Biennale, the Venice Film Festival and the luxury hotels that still host the most glamorous international elite.

If Venice Dies, in fact, has no truck with all that, making a sharp and timely warning about Venice as an example of historic cities that are increasingly square pegs being forced into a round modern mould of megacity-style consumerism and production. Settis also warned Venice’s traditions, its past and its characteristics could be forgotten, as its community melts away. The city is already well down that road.

Source: Dimitry Antalkin via Unsplash

“If Venice Dies, in fact, has no truck with all that, making a sharp and timely warning about Venice as an example of historic cities that are increasingly square pegs being forced into a round modern mould of megacity-style consumerism and production. Settis also warned Venice’s traditions, its past and its characteristics could be forgotten, as its community melts away. The city is already well down that road.”

Isnenghi looks at how in remembering the past — as in Venice, perhaps more so than other old cities — the weight of history gets in the way of the city’s own future. He regrets, for example, a decision Venice made in the 1950s. When a collapsing palazzo on the Grand Canal was in need of replacing, a new modernist design was proposed by the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It would have stood out on the iconic waterway, a different kind of beauty, perhaps. But the city’s authorities rejected it, sticking instead to the idea that monuments at the end of their lives, should be replaced “com’era, dov’era” (how they were and where they were). The same thinking was applied when the Fenice theatre burned down in 1996. It was replaced with in an identical structure, one that many decry as in many ways unsuited to modern needs.

“As we are even more in love with our city even than [outsiders] are because we live in it, it poses a problem when we are faced with issues of respecting the past while we are in the changing present,” said Isnenghi. “It is never easy to balance the past and present, even less so here, but this is the challenge facing Venice. So as not to lose Venetians, Venice must change the jobs on offer, the type of housing, everything; and so as not to lose Venice the Venetians -- all those who work in Venice regardless of whether they are born there -- have to find the right balance between past and present. That’s extremely difficult. But the solution is not to stop everything with the argument that history is over.”

In fact, not everyone is quite so downbeat as economist Pizzo, but many share a sense that Venice is at a turning point. “It’s a moment when the city can decide its future,” said the director of the Venetian Hoteliers Association, Claudio Scarpa, who praised the mayor for acting decisively on such things as banning new hotels. He said the future had to grow from collective action. “If we Venetians begin to abandon our divisions, mutual hatred and anger, and begin to work together on concrete proposals in a few years we could see a different Venice,” he said, adding that, “frankly, right now, what prevails are our disagreements.” 

That spirit is behind a larger mission at the bar, Vino Vero, one of several with a natural wine, “no-spritz philosophy,” said Sartore. A few steps away, one of the mooring poles stuck into the canal is the city’s first electric charging point for boats. She and her fellow innovators want the city to multiply these points, thus ending the reign of noisy, polluting marine combustion engines and making Venice the “most ancient city of the future”.

This is one of the many futures Venetians imagine.

Source: Dan Novac via Unsplash

Though fatigue and defeat cast a pall, not least due to the last big acqua alta floods of 2019, many Venetians see a city living in harmony with the lagoon, and where mass tourism gives way to sustainable tourism. Some Venetians, losing faith in political solutions, dream of outside sages taking over, making Venice into an internationally-run city. Others want simply to conserve the community, repopulate and make housing and jobs available for young families; the business-minded see a gentrified city of highly paid smart workers in a fast-moving but still pedestrianised Venice with a diversified economy, buzzing cultural life and underground trains bringing in lower-paid workers from the terra ferma. 

These futures are at best decades away -- or they could be pipe dreams. 

The low-lying coastal city and the north Adriatic coast, much of it nearly 2 meters below mean sea level, faces the existential threat of sea level rise of half a metre or more this century. Venetians are no less prone to climate denial than anyone else, but they can more easily envision Venice as a watery Pompeii or Machu Picchu. They can even envision tenacious tourists who would arrive despite everything, “even if they had to visit in submarines,” as one recently suggested to me. That’s a future too. But Venetians, including all those who have adopted Venice as home, won’t give up without a fight -- and Venice is now in grave danger.

The battle for the tidal lagoon out of which the city rises is already centuries old. Even under the empire, Venice had to undertake pharaonic re-routings of rivers, canal digging and gigantic seawall building to protect it. The lagoon, an unstable formation that endures only with human intervention, needs constant work.

Since last year, the periodic raising of the controversial €5.5 billion MOSE dams at the openings to the Adriatic Sea has made for ambiguous progress. They may be the best short-term hope to stop repeated flooding of the city, but are already out of date.

The August, 2021 banning of the eye-catching cruise ships from passing through the city, meanwhile, was “an enormous, historic victory... but with shadows,” according to Tommaso Cacciari, champion of the decade-long No Grandi Navi (No Big Ships) protests. The “shadows” concern the unworkability of rerouting the ships via a 19 kilometre detour and the impracticality of finding them a home at Venice’s industrial port of Marghera. 

He concludes that giant ships are “incompatible with the biosphere – the model of tourism must change.” Lidia Fersuoch, president of the Venice branch of Italia Nostra, the oldest and largest environmental group in Italy, regards the decree as “an epochal defeat” that succeeded only in moving the ships out of sight while condemning the lagoon to worse erosion as they pass through a even narrower channel. “We want ships completely removed from the lagoon,” she said, as UNESCO itself has been recommending, and a shift to smaller, lagoon-compatible shipping under 25,000 tons (compared to the 230,000-plus-ton cruise ships).

Meanwhile, the hopes that Venice might relaunch itself have come up against another reality. 

Authorities and business are now pulling all stops to reopen the doors to tourism even more widely, expanding transport access to Marco Polo airport, building new electronic street monitoring of tourist movements, digging a new fast-access canal to Burano, creating more Biennale exhibitions, adding thousands of new visitor hotel rooms all around the lagoon, and further deregulating business to boost tourism profits. This is not a city preparing to moderate over-tourism.

Dangerous peaks of 80,000 tourists a day by August, 2021 already resemble those of before 2020 when Venice was deluged by 30 million annually. “These numbers are insupportable for the community that tries to live here,” said Stefano Croce, president of the Venice Tourist Guides Association. “If they occur next year there probably will be public order emergency... a collapse.” No one can say for sure, but by 2022 or 2023, according to hotelier Scarpa, “The situation will get back to what it was, and that was objectively unsustainable.” 

“It is never easy to balance the past and present, even less so here, but this is the challenge facing Venice. So as not to lose Venetians, Venice must change the jobs on offer, the type of housing, everything; and so as not to lose Venice the Venetians — all those who work in Venice regardless of whether they are born there — have to find the right balance between past and present. That’s extremely difficult. But the solution is not to stop everything with the argument that history is over.”

This is deeply disturbing for Venetians. Over-tourism undermines human relations. Knots of flâneurs blocking the narrow alley ways, make daily life – getting to work or to school – unbearably difficult. More boats, more refuse, and more traffic add to urban overloading, while housing availability, jobs beyond the tourism industry and above all, population, have been relentlessly driven in the wrong direction. 

The population in historic central Venice was down to 50,582 in October. 2021. (The actual figure may be much lower, perhaps as low as 30,000, if you subtract second and holiday homes.) It has declined steadily ever since a World War Two peak of 190,000 to 200,000, when both sides agreed to spare Venice from bombing. The number of residents plummeted to 145,402 by 1960, halved to 95,222 by 1980 and on reaching 60,000 in 2009, a mock funeral was held for Venice.

“That was for us the point of no return,” said Matteo Secchi, spokesman for the citizens’ group Venessia, which organised the funeral protest. “We thought perhaps 60,000 was the death of the city.” He is nonetheless upbeat. “The exodus could be stopped at any moment” by taking action on housing, jobs and tourism. That doesn’t happen “because the political will is lacking.... because to the machine of business, the inhabitants are seen sometimes almost like annoying side effects... They protest, want to live in Venice and take space from the tourists.”  

Officially, in fact, this exodus is not an exodus. “Those who talk of exodus from Venice are mistaken,” said the city’s top tourism official, Simone Venturini. In fact, new people are coming to the city, just not nearly as many as die or are born. The trend to push out residents was supercharged in part by the advent in 2009 of the AirBnb sharing platform, which streamlines short-term letting and makes possible “virtual hotels” of separate apartments. One in four of the 40,000 flats in Venice had been claimed by tourists by 2019. The number fell to one in five during the pandemic, as some returned to residential use.

With so many people having lost work in the pandemic and with prices rising, however, now “more families are being pushed to rent to foreigners,” said Emanuele Dal Carlo, who runs the FairBnb.Coop, a non-profit sharing platform. “With fewer Venetians the city becomes more a tourist location and less a city.” 

The thinning of residents also denies tourists the experience they crave. “People who I take around want to engage with the community. The love to see children playing in the campi (squares), and how I stop to greet friends on the street,” said Cristina Gregorin, a tourist guide for 30 years. “Tourists like to meet local people, but that doesn’t happen anymore,” due to the excessive crowding. Visitors “want to feel Venice is a living city” and are “repelled by...Venice as a theme park.”   

The viability of local life has been further undermined by neoliberal deregulation that has occurred since the 1990s. In Venice this has permitted a rapid conversion away from shops residents need — from bakeries to fruit and fish sellers — to those for tourists: souvenir shops, fast food outlets and bars. The process pushed up rents, largely decimating once-thriving traditional Venetian artisanal trades. Other touristed cities, such as Barcelona, Paris, New York and Amsterdam, have passed new laws to protect residential accommodation.

The Italian parliament’s failure to pass such legislation ties the hands of local government, but has also been used as a cover for speculators and others profiting from Venice. According to independent councillor Marco Gasparinetti, Venice’s entrepreneur-property-speculator-multi-millionaire mayor Brugnaro panders to the residents of the terra ferma, who see a commoditised Venice, while thinning transport needed by residents. He has weakened enforcement of renting rules, given priority to property owners and developers. He has failed to convert badly-needed empty flats for new residents and missed chances for economic diversification. 

For now, the key solutions put forward for Venice by authorities have been technological.

The city will track tourist movements in real time by collecting mobile phone data, including age, sex and country of origin, and use of hundreds of surveillance cameras. It will use new €3 to €10 tourist fees collected online, in-person or added to hotel prices, along with gates to control entry to the historic city. Everyone, even residents and their visitors and the 40,000 of workers who commute into Venice daily, will have to prebook and present a QR code for access. 

Tourism official Venturini insists that the system going live -- barring unforeseen pandemic events -- in summer and fall 2022 is “the only solution on the table.” In coming decades, “many more millions of people traveling the world...will make their way to Venice because, like it or not, everyone wants to see Venice once in their lifetime,” he said, predicting that the controls will improve the mix of tourists now dominated by the so-called “eat-and-run” day-trippers. Almost 70 percent of visitors, the day-trippers, impose the greatest stresses on transport, refuse collection and monuments. He wants a “slower and more experiential” tourism.

Source: Ludovico Lovisetto via Unsplash

Though many worry about the invasiveness of collecting data from the mobiles of unsuspecting tourists, (authorities insist the data is anonymous and privacy is protected), Venetians generally accept the need for limits on tourist numbers. They disagree on methods. Closing Venice with gates is particularly controversial, as many believe it will turn the city into a theme park.  

Authorities “have flaunted this ‘Smart Control Room’ Big Brother system,” said tourist guide Croce, “but this is no way to manage tourism. It’s a way to understand it.” More data seemed unnecessary to Fersuoch of Italia Nostra, calling the controls “a delaying tactic.” The city should reduce tourist flow at source, setting limits on organized group visits, rather than attempting to manage the deluge of tourists already in Venice, Gasparinetti said.   

Tourism has a long history in Venice. 

Pilgrims came through with crusaders from the 11th century, and the city was on the the 17th to 19th century Grand Tours itinerary. A craze for bathing brought the rich to Venice’s Lido in the latter half of the 19th century.  

The exodus from Venice began in earnest after the First World War, when industrialists led by Giuseppe Volpi initiated Venice’s modern port and its petrochemical and metallurgical industries. As outlined in a 2021 anthropological study by Clara Zanardi, they decided Venice needed a “bonifica umana” which is the name of her book. It means a “human clear out”. The effort pushed politicised, working classes out of the Venetian islands, freeing housing for redevelopment at higher rents, in part for tourism. This policy was enthusiastically advanced under the Fascists in the 1920s, and 30s as part of its “anti-urban ideology” and “would be taken up without modification after liberation and remain the ideological line of urban development during the second half of the century as well,” she writes. 

As industrialisation began to peter out after World War Two, leaving behind a nightmare of toxic wastes, Venice relied ever more on tourism. When Venice suffered record flooding during 1966, devastating many ground-floor residences, further departures ensued. Again, the working classes lost out as government-funded housing renovations favoured the property-owning upper classes, Zanardi shows.

By the 1970s and 80s, as neoliberalism spread from America and Britain, deregulation loosened the reins on property and began undoing welfare state reforms, “with the explicit intent of bringing in a new user, one more cosmopolitan and mobile, and necessarily earning a higher income,” to afford property owners higher rents, states Zanardi. The policy of promoting tourism above all else became even more explicit under the mayoral administration of left-of-centre Massimo Cacciari from 1993. One of his deputies, Councillor D’Agostino was famously quoted as saying, “Venice is a cultural and historic heritage that must be put on the market; it’s not like it’s not for sale and transformable.” The policy, which has made Venice an international cultural centre as never before, has been pursued ever since, by left and right, making property speculation, hospitality and rental to tourists the biggest piece of Venice’s annual €10 billion economic pie. 

“Far from being a dying city, Venice represents ... a global model of development, to which many other destinations are going with force,” says Zanardi. “In this sense, it is a successful postmodern capitalist experiment that is absorbing the unyielding otherness [of Venice] in the name of characterless development and now more than ever it seems to be nearing its objective.” 

That may not be an acceptable outcome, but it’s not the same as the more poetic idea that Venice is in its death throes. 

And for all its faults, this is the same capitalism that built Venice, and in this imperfect context a great many people are working to give Venice a future. This summer, the G20 launched a new foundation dedicated to making Venice the world capital of sustainability. The city itself has a “plan to make Venice even more an international capital of the art and fashion world,” said tourism chief Venturini. 

There are many dreams for Venice. 

One of many examples is SerenDPT, a centre fostering entrepreneurs. For its director Fabio Carrera, Venice needs to address “the real problem,” depopulation, with economic diversification. Twenty years from now, “more people will grow their families in [a] Venice repopulated with...  maybe 100,000 people, one that’s more business friendly with a subway system [to improve access]... where the balance between residents and tourist is reversed,” he said. 

Venetians are leaving, out of financial need or a wish to profit from their properties, but there is another group, who tenaciously stay for its lifestyle and traditions. 

Take Katia, a former postal worker. She and her accountant husband Elio had a choice to stay or go in the 1990s. “If we had gone to the terra ferma we would have had a very big house and a car out front. We turned that down for a 70-square-metre, two-bedroom flat here in Venice,” she said. “I could not think of living in a place different from here.... We thought that perhaps making some sacrifices was worth the trouble. We thought if everyone went away there would be no one left in Venice.” 

Others around them have rented to tourists, but they will have none of that. “Venice must live,” Elio said.

Neal E. Robbins, who lives in Cambridge, England, is the author of Venice, an Odyssey: Hope, anger and the future of cities, published by La Toletta, in Venice in 2021.