Not missing the crowds
Venice glimpses a future with fewer tourists and likes what it sees
the societies it has ravaged, whether economic or racial inequality, an overdependence on global production chains or rickety health care systems. In Italy, all those problems have emerged, but the virus has also revealed that a country blessed with a stunning artistic patrimony has developed an addiction to tourism that has priced many residents out of historic centers and crowded out creativity, entrepreneurialism and authentic Italian life.
During the lockdown, Rome’s center became as sleepy as a ruin, while the surrounding neighborhoods remained vibrant. The mayor of Florence said he would tour the world, starting in China, to raise private funds for a city hollowed by the lack of tourists. But it is Venice, a city threatened by inundations of tens of millions of tourists as much as it is by high water, where things changed most drastically.
For months, the alleys, porticoes and campos reverberated with Italian, and even with Venetian, dialect. The lack of big boats reduced the waves on the canals, allowing locals to take their small boats and kayaks out on cleaner water. Residents even ventured to St. Mark’s Square, which they usually avoid.
Venice, which gave the world the word quarantine during a prior pandemic, has undergone many transformations in its roughly 1,500-year history. It started as a hideout for refugees, became a powerful republic, mercantile force and artistic hub.
Now, it’s a destination that largely lives off its history and a tourism cash cow worth 3 billion euros, or about $3.3 billion, a year, about 2 billion euros of which is expected to have been lost by the end of summer. But with the money comes hordes of day trippers, giant cruise ships, growing colonies of Airbnb apartments, souvenir shops, tourist-trap restaurants and high rents that have increasingly pushed out Venetians.
That lucrative model is likely to return. But longtime proponents of a less touristy city are hoping to take advantage of the global standstill.
“This is a tragedy that has touched us all, but COVID could be an opportunity,” said Marco Baravalle, a leader of the anticruise-ship movement in Venice who called the absence of big boats and of the passengers they carry, “magnificent.”
In this floating field of dreams, people will come, just other kinds of people. The tourists would be more like the arts crowd that flocks to the Venice Biennale, and they would carry canvas tote bags and be interested in Venice’s heritage, its museums and galleries. Students would stay and become young professionals, draw startup investors, and have families, replenishing an aging and diminishing population. Good restaurants and natural wine bars would push out the awful ones.
“The type of people you attract to Venice depends on what you offer,” said Luca Berta, a co-founder of VeniceArtFactory, which promotes new art in the city, as he stood in his exhibition space.
He said he had rented the premises from a Venetian couple for less than they could have earned by converting it into another Airbnb, citing that as evidence that landlords wanted, and needed, to be part of the solution.
Alberto Ferlenga, the rector of the Iuav University of Venice, one of several colleges in the city, said his goal was to make Venice more a university town, with students and professors making the city their campus.
He said he was working on a project with the city, but also with powerful Italian banks and Airbnb, that would allow thousands of students — including international ones — to live in Airbnb apartments, which are now empty, instead of commuting from the cheaper mainland. He argued that such an arrangement was in the interests of landlords, students and the city.
At the moment, there is estimated to be nearly 9,000 Airbnb apartments in Venice’s historic center, accounting for nearly a quarter of the area’s housing inventory, according to one study.
“Common sense says, ‘Let’s take advantage of it,’ ” Ferlenga said of the available housing, adding that he believed students who stayed and built careers and families in Venice could eventually prove as economically viable as the mass tourism market. “It would change everything. In this moment, there is a temporary window.”
But as advocates of change talk of motivating long-term lending through housing-tax breaks, low interest loans and a restricting of infamously generous squatting rights, the window is already closing.
Earlier this month, the city was opened only to those in the surrounding Veneto region. Still, the place was jammed. The tight Venice alleys and porticoes proved less than conducive for social distancing, and so many people lined up outside the cicchetti bar Al Squero that the police ordered it to stop serving temporarily.
Still, the city was offered a sense of what was, and what could be. Only Italian — and Veneto-accented Italian — could be heard over the spritzes and plates of black squid ink spaghetti. Italians took gondola rides.
“We thought we’d take advantage of this last chance to see Venice when it is only for us, alone,” said Matteo Rizzi, 40, from nearby Portogruaro, whose children carried cameras as he crossed a bridge into the city from the train station. “It’s like having the museum to ourselves.”