15,700 tickets have been sold, but this will not solve the city’s problems

On April 25, the €5 experimental tourist ticket to enter Venice that day started. About 15,700 were sold, while 113,000 people registered their right to enter for free, either because they had a business, family, place of residence or study in the city.

Everything went smoothly, but a few hundred people protested in Piazzale Roma. Their objection, as stated in the newspaper, La Nuova, is that it is an invasion of privacy because it is based on digital surveillance and that it involves a paltry amount without the aim of limiting the number of visitors. An Instagram and Facebook petition “Free Venice from Ticket 2024: It’s a cultural battle” has been signed by more than 700 writers and academics, including Donna Leon and historian Pieralvise Zorzi. “Paying to enter Venice seals the cultural decline, not just of Venice, but of Europe: Venice is no longer considered a city, but a money-making machine.”

The demonstrators are absolutely right when he says that Mayor Brugnaro has not set a limit on the number of day visitors entering Venice, and that he introduced the ticket largely to jeopardize UNESCO’s intention last year to inscribe Venice as a World Heritage Site. to thwart.

He himself admits that running it in the first year will cost as much as it will generate, and that it will cause maximum annoyance in exchange for a pittance that will bring nothing to the city. Above all, it does nothing to educate visitors and make them proud to help save the most beautiful and fragile city in the world.

He has dodged charging a reasonable fee because he fears electoral backlash from the airport and the lower tiers of the tourism industry – the pizza restaurants, the water taxi co-op, the shops that sell tat – who benefit from the flood. tourists – on some days as many as 100,000.

Without becoming elitist and limiting Venice to the wealthy, the municipality should instead listen to the experts at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and limit the number of “attendees” (overnighters plus day visitors) to a maximum of 50,000 per day, while raising the cultural expectations of the tourists instead of offering them a theme park cum souq (Luigi Brugnaro’s last proposal was to open a huge disco in the Arsenale).

It costs 25 euros to enter the Uffizi, so Venice with all its wonders can certainly charge at least the same, and a fee of 25 euros to be paid all year round, assuming that an average of 40,000 daily visitors costs about 365 million euros per years, without even taking into account the cost of admission to the Uffizi. the hotel tax paid by overnight stays. This would allow the city to create a project financing plan in which tolls would pay for highway construction. Because Venice will need protective technical and environmental works that cost billions to implement and maintain – forever – if it is to survive the relative rise in the average water level, which is expected to reach at least 50 cm by 2100 – and will rise.

Every visitor to Venice should be seen as a potential supporter and treated as such, and not as a rude intruder or as a sheep to be skinned. The glory of the city, but also the signs of the rising water level, the eroding stone and masonry, the gloomy predictions of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) must be pointed out to them so that they are appointed as a global ‘club of champions of Venice”, contributing to a ring-fenced conservation fund that would be managed on a public-private basis, with progress reports and transparent, audited accounts.

There is now an excessive demand everywhere for places of exceptional beauty and fame, so the concept of managing numbers so as not to spoil their exceptional character is widely accepted. French Polynesia will impose a limit of 280,000 visitors from 2027; the Acropolis now only allows 20,000 per day, down from 23,000, with a time-slot booking system in place from this month. The Galapagos Islands are limiting the number of visitors by imposing a $100 entrance fee, Amsterdam no longer advertises itself as a tourist attraction and Trentino Alto Adige has banned private cars from driving to the alpine meadow, the Seiser Alm. In more and more cities, from Berlin to Barcelona, ​​permission to open B&Bs is being refused so that the supply of housing for residents does not decrease.

In short, we realize that tourism, just like agriculture or mining, must be sustainable. In order not to destroy what we love, it will have to be rationed so that it is maintained and enjoyable for everyone – visitors, residents and surroundings – even though this may mean we won’t be able to go places as often and with just as little planning as in the past.

UPDATE: This article has been updated since it was first published on December 16, 2023