Matteo Gabbrielli was easy to spot in the early-morning rush of tourists at St. Mark’s Square. Slender, dark hair peeking out from his 1920s cap, narrow brown eyes and that arresting Venetian nose—he had to be our local guide.
“You are Matteo?” I said as we sat down for a coffee and pastry on a cool June morning. Bill and I had arrived the day before on the overnight train from Paris. Even after several visits to Venice, the first sight of the city never fails to take my breath away. I was muttering about the city’s insane beauty, the light on the water, the masterpieces in the churches, Matteo nodding his head. Then I asked why only Japanese were lining up outside the basilica. “They are always the first to come. They spend fifty-five minutes on culture, then one hour buying souvenirs—‘Venetian’ masks made in China—then back to their buses.”
How could they come all the way to Venice and spend only one hour seeing the glories of one of the world’s great cities? This former Mediterranean empire was home to merchants who traded in all corners of the known world, a naval power that conquered cities as mighty as Constantinople and a cultural mecca whose artists created a treasure-house of churches and paintings, sculptures and bells ringing over noble palazzos from the Renaissance and Gothic eras.
Matteo shook his head. “Venice is dying, slowly, slowly. But it is dying.”
He wasn’t referring to the classic Venetian problem of rising water. A flood in 1966 nearly destroyed the foundations of this magical city of islands. That near disaster spawned countless “Save Venice” committees and convinced donors and governments to spend $4 billion constructing an underwater system of sluice gates between Venice and the sea that will limit the flooding of the city. The United Nations’ UNESCO has an office in Venice to oversee this and the newer problem of global warming that has added to the issue of rising waters.
The disease that Matteo believes is killing Venice is tourism; the crowds of tourists gathering all around us, crowds descending from enormous cruise ships whose wakes often cause more damage to the city foundations than the famous “aqua alta” following heavy rains. Tourism is hollowing out the city. Venetians are being pushed out by businesses that cater to tourists with the blessing of the city fathers. Rents are astronomical. Real estate is prohibitively expensive. Zoning favors the hotel business and international chains rather than local businesses or local residents. The population of the historic city has dropped to 59,000 today from 164,000 at its peak. Every year 20-to-24 million visitors descend on Venice. That means that on any given day, there are always more tourists than Venetians. If and when the waters again flood Venice, only the tourists will be threatened, he said with black humor.
“It would be hypocrisy for me to complain about tourism but, yes, tourism is killing Venice,” he said. Matteo pointed toward the square, rousing us to our feet with descriptions of the Byzantine and Renaissance roots of the masterworks around us. He holds a doctorate in archeology, with a specialty in Islamic architecture, and spent five years on excavation projects until most of that work disappeared as budgets were cut. Determined to stay in Venice, he sat for the tour guide examination, passed and became one of only 200 guides wearing the badge of an official guide. (In Rome, he said, the city gives out 3,000 tour guide badges.) We were the beneficiaries of his studies. Guidebooks alone don’t begin to give you the sense of place and history that someone like Matteo provides. From plaza to plaza, he pointed out the Byzantine influence in archways, the Gothic traits in decorations. What booty came from the Venetians’ endless naval victories; which paintings celebrated divine intervention in those battles. We stopped at a fondaco, a building that was once a state-owned storage and living space that traced its name to the Arabic word for “warehouse.” The famous merchants of Venice bought and sold their goods from these fondacos: the warehouse was on the ground level, offices on the first floor, living quarters on the second floor and servants’ quarters on the top. We passed through twisted, narrow alleys without seeing another tour group. “Most tourists don’t go beyond St. Mark’s or the Rialto Bridge, missing most of the city.”
Matteo’s parents are native Venetians who were forced out when the price of living rose beyond their means. He has gone to great lengths to become an official resident, refusing to relinquish the city to tourists, especially wealthy foreigners looking for a vacation home. “Mine is a mission of repopulation with Venetians—it is idealism.”
I thought of those French tourism officials who said their greatest fear was too many foreigners buying up property until entire villages lost their souls. And I thought of the British lawmaker who tried to put a hold on more foreigners buying up properties in rural England. Venice most nearly reflects the real nightmare of those officials. The city has become so popular with foreigners buying up properties, hotels replacing homes, and poorly regulated tourism, that locals are being forced to abandon the city.
• • •
The three men arrived on time for a 10:30 morning coffee near the Rialto Bridge. Flavio Gregori, a professor of English at Università Ca’ Foscari. Claudio Paggiarin, an architect. Marco Malafante, tourism professional. The last two are Venetian natives; the professor is a long-time resident. They agreed to give up a Saturday morning with their families to explain to me why they were active in 40xVenezia, an organization of mostly young professionals in their forties dedicated to reining in the runaway tourism in Venice.
The sun was scorching. We found a café on the canal with umbrellas and ordered drinks. The men started talking at once, laughing as they interrupted each other.
First, the problem as they saw it: “When our population reaches under 60,000, Venice stops existing as a living city. We are worried from several points of view. All the prices are boosted up by tourism. Whenever there is a palace for sale, it’s very likely to be bought by a major hotel corporation. I used to work in a palazzo, now it’s been sold by the university and it will become a hotel,” said Flavio, the English professor.
When they saw their lives in Venice threatened, they created 40xVenezia in November 2007.
Claudio picked up the story. “We felt excluded from the government and the decisions of the city. Our coming-out was a demonstration ‘Venezia non è un albergo’—‘Venice is not a hotel.’ ”
Since this is Venice, the demonstration they held the next spring was anything but ordinary. At the sound of the noon bells of San Marco nearly 1,000 protesters froze like statues. When the bells stopped, they all applauded and then rushed behind an enormous banner that said VENEZIA NON È UN ALBERGO. The police arrived on the scene.
“The children held the banner. The chief of police took it away from them and the children started crying. And the tourists took pictures,” said Claudio.
The group was protesting a proposed law to further expand the dwellings in the city that can rent rooms to tourists. Already the city had allowed the number of properties offering tourist accommodations to rise by 450 percent since 2002. (The city leaders had also granted permission for double the number of cruise ships to visit Venice.) “Basta—enough” they said.
The protesters won; the law didn’t pass, but the city still felt imperiled. The next year another group of protesters—younger and more daring—staged a mock funeral for the death of Venice. They placed a plywood coffin painted neon pink into a gondola and floated it down the Grand Canal, again at noon to the sound of the bells of San Marco. The citizens of Venice were finding their voice.
“We’re not opposed to tourism,” said Marco, the tourism professional. “We’re opposed to losing our city to tourism.”
Evidence of that loss is all around.
“Here’s an example,” said Flavio, the professor. “A few years ago, I had to dash to my butcher for meat for dinner and wasn’t paying much attention to where I was going. I entered a shop and realized I had made a mistake. It was a souvenir store selling masks. I said I was sorry and was about to leave when they said, no, I wasn’t mistaken. The butcher couldn’t pay the higher rent and they had replaced him. The next year I lost my greengrocer and then my neighborhood bakery. Now I wait in long lines with the tourists at a new bakery. It’s the same boarding a vaporetto (boat taxi). Sometimes you can’t get in, waiting behind tourists. Try going around the streets with a baby stroller—it’s about impossible with the crowds.”
Real estate prices are astronomical because zoning laws have loosened up, favoring wealthy foreigners and international companies. Even the laws meant to protect locals are poorly enforced, these men said. People buy houses and pretend they are primary residences but then rent them out under the table to tourists. In sum, locals can no longer afford to live and own a business in Venice and are forced to leave for the mainland. As they disappear, so too do the clinics, schools and other services necessary for a city in a seemingly endless chain of cause and effect.
“Just apply the law. Everything has to compete with tourism for space: student housing for our universities versus hotels; workers’ housing versus hotels; local shops versus souvenir shops and big-name designer boutiques. There is no space for locals. We always lose,” said Claudio. “Our politicians have to consider the social consequences of giving in to the tourism lobby—it is so powerful with so much money. We want the Venetian leaders to acknowledge that this is our city; that we deserve to live within our own patrimony.”
The 40xVenezia group has remedies. First, they want authorities to enforce all the laws against cheap foreign copies pretending to be fine Venetian crafts. Murano blown glass has been undercut by cheap foreign copies, leading to more local unemployment. Kempinski Hotels recently bought up one of those abandoned factories on the island of Murano. The press release announcing this new hotel said: “This veritable gem of a building offers dazzling vistas across the lagoon to Venice and is directly connected to Rio dei Vetrai Canal. Apart from its outstanding location, the hotel will feature approximately 150 rooms and suites, a sun terrace, bar with a terrace, café, spa area and fitness center, a ballroom as well as meeting and convention facilities.”
With factories transformed to hotels, “Murano glass” as well as souvenir masks are more likely to be mass-produced in China than made in Italy.
To alter the city leaders’ fixation on tourism, the group has asked that the city’s books and audits be opened up to determine how much the city, and the city’s inhabitants, actually gain from tourism and how much goes into deep pockets elsewhere. They want to regulate the number of tourists. They want to reroute the cruise ships out of the canal to sail directly to the mainland, eliminating the damage being done in their wakes. “Why not send them around so they drop off their tourists to take small boats and buses? The majority of Venetians don’t like these cruise ships smashing into our city. Don’t let them just dive into the city as if we were their theme park.”
“You could organize tourism better and at the same time give other industries a chance to exist in this town,” said Marco, the tourism expert, who listed a better Internet system, protection of traditional artisans, emphasis on education and high-end conferences.
Several groups even challenged whether Venice should continue to enjoy the status as a United Nations World Heritage Site if local and national leaders refuse to protect it. UNESCO, the U.N. agency that oversees those sites, paid for a full-page advertisement recently praising the “collective riches” of the city and warning that tourism “could help send the vulnerable Venice to a watery grave.” UNESCO recommended a combination of putting a physical ceiling on the number of visitors, diffusing the flow of tourists, coordinating bookings and offering incentives “to make tourists more aware of the challenges.”
There was more. We spent an hour going through the need for subsidized housing for the working class, new laws to preserve public spaces and services like health care, schools, sanitation and high-speed Internet. The city had to concentrate on reducing expenses for the inhabitants, to create “the political will to make things happen outside tourism. Otherwise, Venice becomes a golden cage.”
We finally rose from the table. I was depressed by the litany of wrongs afflicting this city, described as the “greatest surviving work of art in the world” by Evelyn Waugh.
I took refuge in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Palladio masterpiece, to remind myself why Venice is known as “Serenissima,” the Most Serene One. One hour at the church, whose exterior pillars open into the sunlit altar, paintings and sculpture, and I recovered from the dispiriting conversation with those Venetians who had to live with the worst of tourism. I met Bill back at our hotel, the Pensione La Calcina. It is informally known as the Ruskin house because the English art historian John Ruskin stayed there while researching his influential Stones of Venice, a multivolume examination of the art and architecture of Venice published in the 1850s. The city was already considered an open-air museum by then, thanks in part to Lord Byron’s verses about the city of canals as a decadent former beauty. “Venice once was dear/ the pleasant place of all festivity/ the revel of the earth/ the masque of Italy.” In his classic novel Death in Venice, published on the eve of World War I, Thomas Mann famously described the city as “half fairy tale and half tourist trap.”
So while the current crisis was long in the making, it was now being pushed over the edge by twenty-first-century industrial mass tourism.
The next morning as we sipped coffee looking out across the Giudecca Canal, a cruise ship sailed right in front of us: then another and another. Bill counted five within the hour. Passengers were lined up against the deck railings, looking down on us while amplifiers blared out incomprehensible remarks about the city. This time we didn’t look at the ships as a weird oddity but from the viewpoint of the Venetians we had met over the week—Marco, Flavio, Claudio and Matteo. They were worried about the flood of tourists and the pollution from the diesel engines that are kept running while the ships are docked (the engines act as their major power source). The air pollution from just one of the docked giant ships is the equivalent of 12,000 idling cars every day. In a city that bans automobiles, that is a major source of air pollution.
With our new vision, we headed toward St. Mark’s, going by vaporetto, the efficient if crowded water bus system of the city. We caught a boat at the Accademia stop and crossed the Grand Canal in search of a true Venetian souvenir. Along the way we started counting the oversized advertisements hanging like banners from building scaffolding with photographs of famous actors selling designer clothes, champagne, watches, and perfumes. While Venetians may abhor these ads, the city says it has no choice but to accept them in order to pay for the necessary preservation work being done behind the scaffolding. This is Italy, after all, one of the worst-governed countries in Europe, with corruption and mismanagement at all levels. It is also the country with the most historical treasures; Venetians know that they can’t rely on often-unscrupulous politicians in Rome to fully fund their budget for restoration and preservation. Since all of the advertising money goes directly to those projects, the mayor said there should be no complaints. Commercialize this city of art in order to save it. Some citizen groups believe a new tax on tourism to cover maintenance costs would be better.
At St. Mark’s Square we ran into the real problem. We wanted to buy a beautiful piece of Murano glass and instead we ran into blocks of brand-name fashion stores that rivaled the Champs-Élysées of Paris. Familiar Italian names like Prada, Armani, Gucci and Ferragamo were joined by Dior and Burberry. The night before, we had dined at the fabled Osteria da Fiore, an extraordinary one-star restaurant that uses Murano glasses, which enchanted Bill. He asked for the name of the shop where we could buy a good piece of glass. There it was—the Venetian gallery called L’Isola—the one local artisan showroom buried in the midst of those high-end boutiques that you can find in any major shopping city of the world.
We walked in and were stunned. Bright oranges, purples, greens and yellows swirled in playful patterns on perfectly formed goblets, vases and water glasses. I spoke in my mangled French-Spanish hoping to hit upon a word that would sound Italian. The salesman switched to French and after a few minutes asked my nationality. I said American and he smiled, answering in perfect English. “We don’t see many Americans anymore. Welcome to our shop.”
His name was Brian Tottle. He was British, married to an Italian, and a twenty-six-year veteran of the Venetian glass industry. After we bought a wine carafe, I asked him what had happened to the glass business in Venice.
“Mass tourism,” he said. “Cruises, bus tours, they take tourists in boats to the island to so-called glass factories where they are taken into showrooms. Real glass factories are closed to the public,” he said.
High-pressure salesmen tell tourists they can buy the glass at a “50 percent discount,” but still they pay more than twice what it’s worth. It isn’t Murano glass. It’s shoddy glass mass-produced somewhere else: Taiwan, China, Russia, the Czech Republic—who knows.
“We’ve complained to the authorities that this is false merchandising. The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t do anything to help honest tourism, either.”
In the meantime, his company simply refuses to work within that corrupt system. No commissions from tours or taxi boat drivers or concierges to steer business their way. And you will never find phony, knockoff glassware in the store.
Then he walked out on the street with us and pointed out the stores that had been pushed out by the high-fashion stores on his street. “That first alley on the left—it used to have a butcher, a florist and a bread shop. All disappeared. It’s only the international fashion people who can afford the rents.”
With our package in hand we strolled to a taverna for lunch. Matteo had told us where it was but made us promise to never tell another tourist. And, sure enough, we were the only people in the intimate restaurant who did not speak Italian. The only other foreigner was a Norwegian woman who had lived in Venice for several years and was back visiting friends. The antipasto was a buffet the likes of which I had never seen. I filled my plate with voluptuous red peppers and eggplants dribbled with olive oil from heaven, saving a small space for delicate anchovies. Our entrée was fish, caught that morning and delivered to our table without a word; it glided on our forks. What a luxury to eat at a restaurant that offers one entrée that is the best the day can offer. The only decision we had to make was whether to drink the house red or white wine. Superb!
Back in the street we started noticing the other trend that worried our Venetian friends—the wave of Chinese tourism hitting their already overcrowded city. Matteo had pointed out the pizza parlors and cafés recently purchased by Chinese in order to cater to the rising number of Chinese tourists. I suggested there was something racist about worrying specifically about the Chinese and not, say, the Russians, who are just as likely to buy up property but are harder to distinguish by their looks. No, said Matteo, the Chinese are doing business specifically for Chinese tourists. I countered that this was what international hotel chains did as well. The French want to stay at a Sofitel; Americans at a Marriott. Matteo said it was worse. Some Chinese were caught setting up dress factories in Italy using illegal Chinese labor just to be able to put a “Made in Italy” label on the clothes. I guess it is China’s turn to be the “ugly tourist” after we Americans and then the Japanese played the role so well. But then again, only the Chinese are expected to break all records and take 100 million trips every year beginning in 2020.
• • •
Donna Leon is the author of a mystery series set in Venice. Guido Brunetti, the series’ fictional hero, is a police detective who knows the vaporetto schedule by heart as well as the best trattoria in any neighborhood. In the series, the waters lapping the canals are both welcoming and menacing as Brunetti solves crimes despite endemic corruption and modern intrusions, like tourism. In the novel A Noble Radiance, Brunetti says: “I remember when, for a few thousand lire, you could get a good meal at any trattoria or osteria in the city: risotto, fish, a salad and good wine. Nothing fancy, just the good food that the owners probably ate at their own table. But that was when Venice was a city that was alive, that had industry and artisans. Now all we have is tourists, and the rich ones are accustomed to fancy stuff like this. So to appeal to their tastes, we get food that’s been made to look pretty.”
A few months after our trip we attended a reading by Donna Leon from her latest book—the twentieth of the series. During the question period I asked her to expound a bit on why she writes about tourism as if it were a major problem for Venice.
“It’s at the top of the list of problems of anyone who lives in Venice,” she answered. “It has changed everyone’s life.”
Then she recited all of the environmental, social, cultural and financial problems tourism has caused, problems that were now familiar to Bill and me: the homes that are now hotels, the dwindling populations, lost industries, lost jobs and the damage from cruise ships, including the pollution from the engines left idling for power.
“Living in Venice now is like living in a parking lot,” she said. “And the city says cruise ships cause no damage.”
“So of course people who don’t benefit from tourism are distressed at how the city bends over backwards every way it can for tourism,” she said, pointing out that there are “perks” to be had by playing along with the industry while publicly claiming to do all that is necessary to limit tourism.
A member of the audience called out that Venice had no choice, that tourism was its only industry.
Leon shot back: “In a way that’s like saying to a drug addict mainlining heroin that it’s the only life he knows.”
Like a drug addiction, she said, the Venetian addiction to tourism was gradual, over three decades, as bit by bit tourism was given special treatment by politicians that led to the disappearance of other businesses and a dramatic rise in costs so that Venice today is “virtually an unlivable city for the average person.”
“Venetians who own tourist enterprises—they favor it,” she said. She does not: “I think of tourism in terms of drug addiction. It’s too late now. It’s the only industry.”
And as anyone who reads her books knows, Donna Leon has a special passion against those cruise ships.