It’s time to finally commit to our future.With the rapid spread of global pandemic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), people around the world express panic in various behaviors. It’s time to finally solve this conflict between the two Venices, the one for tourists and the one for Venetians. “But it’s time to rethink what Venice can be. “Venice in many ways has been a perfect lover, willing to give everyone what you want without asking for any commitment for the future,” he told CNN. Mattia Berto, who runs a theater company in Venice, believes the city can find the right balance. What happens next in Venice is in the hands of the Venetians, perhaps for the first time in centuries. When the plague hit, they decided the only way to protect the city was to isolate incoming ships for 40 days, or quaranta giorni, which became known as the quarantina, what we now call quarantine. The very word quarantine was born out of the city’s response to the Black Death more than 700 years ago when the city was a powerful trading hub that brought merchants from around the world. What happens next in Venice is crucial for its future.Īfter all, this city has risen from pandemics before. The virus has revealed just how few residents remain in Venice. “Saving Venice is a very particular mission, but we are on a roll right now.” “We feel more than ever that this is the moment,” Conn says. She envisions the tourist apartments housing students and bringing new energy to the city. ![]() She also sees an opportunity in the vacuum created by the absence of mass tourism due to travel bans instituted by the pandemic to lure academic programs back to the city. “We need to focus on the Made in Venice brand, to promote local artisans and bring that Venice back and offer a better quality of life to the people who live here and who visit.” “We don’t want it to become a Monte Carlo,” she says. “We are going to need to rethink Venice, to bring it to a higher level.”īut she’s not talking only about designer shops and luxury goods. “We’re going to see empty shops,” she says. “We are confident that we can rebuild, reestablish and rethink Venice, concentrating on helping the city withstand the elements and tourism.”Ĭonn knows that pulling the plug on the sort of mass tourism that Venice has experienced in recent years will cause some businesses to close. “What will follow will be slow tourism, not mass tourism anymore,” Conn says. Jellyfish seen swimming in Venice's canals Mark’s Square, which is a highlight on any Venetian port call. Last summer, that inner struggle with mass tourism came to a head when the government, worried about the ecological effects of mass tourism on the city’s canals, threatened to ban cruise ships from entering the historical port by way of St. “When the city locked down and it was just Venetians here, you could see how few we really are.” “The virus shows just how tourism has massacred the population,” Secchi, who is also in the hospitality industry, says. Things have only gotten worse since then. Secchi’s group even helped stage a funeral for Venice in 2009 when the population dropped below 60,000. The population of Venice has dropped from 175,000 after World War II to just over 52,000 today. In many ways, Venice has lately become a victim of its own popularity in a worsening struggle between overtourism, fed by the popularity and affordability of cruise ships and low-cost air travel, and the steady decline of local residents who have been fleeing the tourist invasion in record numbers. The bad old days - tourists have been squeezing residents out of the city. “Tourists won’t really start coming back until the borders are reopened and international travel is allowed.” “When the city reopens next week, it will still be much like it looks today,” he told CNN in an eerily empty Venice this week. ![]() Instead the noise is from vacuum cleaners and sanitation crews inside stores that are getting ready for the grand reopening on May 18.īut even as shop owners prepare for whatever post-lockdown Venice looks like, everyone here in this deserted tourist town is asking the same question: who are they reopening for?Įvery year, as many as 30 million tourists from all over the world descend on Venice, pumping up to $2.5 billion into the local economy, according to the Italian Tourism Ministry.īut few are Italians, who have never been as enamored with the lagoon city as the rest of the world, according to Matteo Secchi, head of the tourist group Venessia, who says Venice has always attracted far more international tourists than national ones. A few days before Italy is set to lift restrictions across much of the country after being locked down since March 10, the streets of Venice are starting to spring back to life.
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