6 - Larry Krotz, "Trapped by Tourism: Sustainability Questions for a World Fueled by Travelers" (2024)

 

Larry Krotz, Trapped by Tourism: Sustainability Questions for a World Fueled by Travelers, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham: 2024)

 

CHAPTER THREE – What Happens When Too Much Is Too Much?

 

There are alarmists who speculate that within a decade—by as early as 2030 according to some—the fabled, iconic city of Venice could be rendered a ghost town. That is, so far as its permanent residents are concerned; no one will actually live there any more. Two scenarios are put forward. One, that the island that is home to one of the most enchanting cities on the planet will sink under the weight of its architecture into the ever-rising sea. Ankle-deep water already occasionally washes over the pavements of St. Mark’s Square, better known as the Piazza San Marco, before receding back into the lagoon. The other scenario is that the city will be fatally overwhelmed not from water, but by tourists. Venice, in this picture, will be relegated to some sort of Disneyland, its piazzas, churches, and markets turned into a kind of weird theme park of both history and fantasy. There will, in this one, be no room for the “real” Venetians, the “real” locals.

The blueprints for both outcomes are already in place. While the region (the Veneto) with a population of 4.3 million and the city of Venice, in totality 260,000 people, have been standing put, the Centro Storico, or the large island that most of us think when we think of Venice, saw that its population of permanent residents had fallen, in 2022, below 55,000, less than half of the 120,000 of forty years earlier. The population in the 1950s, was 170,000. Resident (and self-declared surrealist anarchist) Matteo Secchi told the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine: “If it continues like this, we will become a ghost town like Pompeii.” “Mr. Secchi and supporters from his organization, Venessia.com, warned of a continuing exodus, dubbed ‘Venexodus,’ as young people grow tired of soaring food prices, increasing tourist numbers, high rents and going without cars.”

Either of Venice’s potential fates would be epic in the annals of civilization’s catastrophes. Described sometimes as an ongoing compromise between land and sea, Venice is truly a water city. The main aspect of both the regional and urban geography is the shallow, crescent-shaped lagoon fed by three rivers that flow down toward the sea from the Dolomites. Over time, silt, carried by those rivers, built islands atop the heavy clay bottom of the seabed, and Venice, the city, is constructed on 118 of these islands. People get about 150 channels and canals that course under 400 bridges via water transport, the most picturesque being the historic flat-bottomed gondolas, though, latterly, any manner of fume-belching motorboat. The water aspect of the city has always been paramount. For its first centuries, prior to the fall of the republic in 1797, an annual ritual was the Doge, or local ruler, performing a marriage ceremony of the city and the sea on the day of the feast of the Ascension in May.

From its beginning, twelve hundred years ago, Venice not only thrived but became rich and famous. In AD 828 some cheeky merchants managed to steal what were generally believed to be the remains of the biblical apostle St. Mark from their place of rest in Alexandria, Egypt. These they transported home, where work began on construction of the Basilica San Marco in order to house the relics. Riches grew upon riches. By the end of the tenth century and the disruptions caused by the First Crusade, Venetians set upon a course of taking advantage of any European or Middle Eastern geopolitical turmoil. They managed to turn all four Crusades from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries to their benefit, particularly the fourth. When, during that last escapade Constantinople was plundered, Venetians ended up with most of the booty—substantial items of which got deposited in San Marco, such as statuary for the interior and reliefs worked into the basilica’s outer façade.

San Marco was originally a chapel for the ruler of the city-state, the Doge, whose palace sits next door. Not hereditary, though elected for life, doges were symbolic rulers responsible to an aristocratic council that was representative of commerce as much as anything else. Venice was always about trade: merchants took all the daring risks necessary to amalgamate their prowess and riches. In 1271 it was from Venice that Marco Polo set off for his overland trip to China, returning twenty years later and forever altering the configurations of the world. Venetian power was further consolidated by the defeat of one of its main rivals, the city-state of Genoa, in 1380. Venice was cosmopolitan as well as rich and powerful: Jews and Armenians were given protection and religious freedom. Style, beauty, and a sense of specialness continued as the city’s artisan class focused on the making of such luxury goods as Murano glass.

Such an interesting, beautiful, and accessible city could not remain a secret. Venice grew prestigious in the eyes of tourists through the nineteenth century, when it lived as a destination on the grand tour of the socially prominent along with artistic Europeans. These moneyed and leisured visitors painted and wrote about the sights, and turned the city into a must-see destination. Exotic Venice has been a mecca for writers, travelers, and foreign tourism since Lord Byron took his daily swim in the Canal Grande and swanned about the cafes of the Piazza San Marco. Hugh Honour in his city guidebook describes the visits of the global outsiders one after another: “Ruskin, busy with his water colours.” (Nineteenth-century writer John Ruskin was such an avid traveler that he reputedly refused to consummate his marriage to Effie Gray in 1848 using the argument that should his young wife become pregnant, it would compromise his travel plans.) Honour goes on to list everybody else: Nietzsche contemplating the pigeons; Goethe enthusing over his first view of the sea; Henry James, Baron Corvo, Byron; Dante surveying the Arsenal. Petrarch, Aretino, Galileo. Montaigne, Horace Walpole, and Edward Gibbon all found things to complain about—the water in the canals was often stagnant and stinking. James Boswell took his pleasures with the courtesans and prostitutes, while D.H. Lawrence pronounced Venice “an abhorrent, green, slippery city.” The list of notables who passed time in the city over the centuries goes on and on and on. Giuseppe Verdi, A.E. Housman, Robert Browning, Richard Wagner (who died there in 1883), James Fenimore Cooper, Marcel Proust, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J.M.W. Turner, future czars of Russia and emperors of Austria, William Beckford, the British novelist who later became Lord Mayor of London. And, of course, the author of Death in Venice, Thomas Mann.

That was then. Now: at the apex of the Adriatic it was natural that Venice, latterly, should become one of the major destinations on the Mediterranean cruise ship itineraries when that industry came into its heyday thirty or forty years ago. Starting in the 1980s—when cruise ships became bigger, cruising fleets became more extensive, and the passenger lists became, shall we say, less elite—Venice was one of the first places to feel itself overwhelmed. The ships came in and docked, the day-trippers spilled out, and the city reeled.

A stop in Venice, according to friends of mine who took a Mediterranean and Adriatic cruise a decade ago, went like this: John and Hilda had boarded their Carnival Cruise ship in Rome. Once out of Rome, they sailed to Naples, Dubrovnik, and then Venice. As they arrived in the late afternoon, everybody scrambled to the upper and lido decks to view the city coming slowly into focus. Theirs was a medium-size ship with fourteen decks and about two thousand passengers. Photos saved from the trip are gorgeous, showing Venice on a clear, blue day. But even their medium-size ship still towered ten stories over the city. The photos they’ve kept are almost surreal, in the sense that they might as easily have been taken through the window of a passing airplane. From the other side of things, one can imagine what the looming ship must have looked like from the streets down below as it was bumped by tugboats into its berths.

Once docked, the gangplank was lowered and two thousand American, Canadians, Brits, and Germans galloped off to join the already-thronged piazza. It was late season, October, but all the ports on their itinerary were still busy, Venice among them. The passengers were all back on the ship for dinner and in their berths for the night, but then all two thousand had the next day on their own in the city, wandering, shopping, and undertaking the must-do gondola ride. It was beautiful to be there, Hilda and John reminisce. And they and their fellow travelers certainly felt they got their money’s worth, especially with such an easy transition from ship to shore that could be achieved by simply walking off their boat and into the very center of the city.

However, from the other side, Venetians were coming to the point of not entirely liking this. In 2021, after a couple of decades of assorted stress and pressure, the city pushed back. In a dramatic act, the Italian government announced on July 12 of that year that all cruise ships, except small, boutique shops and river vessels, were to be banned from central Venice and the existing cruise port. Some alternative, not yet quite identified, would be set up, but for the time being the hordes would be diverted away to give Venetians and the overstressed sites of their city breathing room. Cruise ships, following this edict, were to enter through the narrow channel past the Lido, head round the island of Venice, and then travel up the waterway to either the industrial port at Marghera or to other locations on the mainland. The government claims its long-term goal is to create a new artificial harbor and cruise port on the Adriatic at some unstated (and probably imaginary) time in the future. It is questionable whether the initiative actually lowers the number of tourists since, after docking at the alternative ports, tourists, just as in the past, still make their way back to and into Venice for their day-visits. San Marco will still get its throngs; the intimate laneways will still have strangers pushing up and down through them. But on some level, the gesture made a difference: No longer will there be the unsettling specter of fourteen-story ships—or even more immense ones—parked at the docks and towering over the architecture of the city.

One of the ironies about Venice, of course, is that posed by writer Mary McCarthy in her classic Venice Observed way back in 1956 in which she described Venice as a “Folding picture post-card of itself.” “There is no use pretending,” she wrote, “that the tourist Venice is not the real Venice. … The tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Harry’s Bar, Torcello, Murano, Burano, the pigeons… it has been part museum, part amusement park, living off the entrance fees of tourists ever since the early eighteenth century when its former sources of revenue ran dry.” Is it, in fact, anything other than a tourist mecca? The locals might argue otherwise, but the counterpoint remains compelling.

The tourist urge to visit Venice remains close to insatiable. In 2019, the last reliable year of numbers before the COVID pandemic, more than five and a half million tourists arrived—a 5.1 increase over the year before. This was an average of 15,132 visitors per day, and about 30 percent of the resident population. Numbers on weekends and in summer months were considerably higher. Not all, of course, came via cruise ships. But they did come, with the preponderance being foreign visitors rather than other Italians. According to the Venice Yearbook of Tourism, foreigners of late represent 86.5 percent of tourist arrivals, as opposed to 13.5 percent being made up of Italians. Of the totals, 15 percent were Americans; 8 percent from the UK; 10 percent from Asia; and 13 percent from other European countries such as Germany, France, and Spain.

All these visitors push up against the thing that catches in one’s throat about Venice: its fragility. Venice, more than many places on the planet, impresses as a truly delicate entity. There is, certainly, the fragile beauty of its artworks and the delicacy of its buildings. But, more so, there is the fragility of its very physical existence. Venice, as alluded earlier, barely holds its own battle with the surrounding waters. The city, for one thing, is slowly sinking under its own weight (almost 3 inches over the past thousand years but 9.4 inches in just the last century). But you have to couple this sinking of the wonderful buildings of the city into their foundations with the fact that the Adriatic is simultaneously rising. In slow motion the world is watching Venice sink and the sea surrounding it rise.

As long as there has been a Venice, water has been not only its blessing but its challenge, the channels through the lagoon regularly stilting up and needing to be dredged. At the best of times, the Adriatic tides will wash them out, but any that became landlocked quickly turned stagnant and the citizens would need to deal with malarial-level swamps. The clever Venetians built engineering works to continually divert the rivers through wide channels to enter the sea at various points from out of the lagoon. These worked with the incoming tides to keep everything fluid—a natural sanitation that carried refuse away and rendered Venice one of the cleanest cities in Europe.

Not long ago, however, when the rising sea became something Venetians could no longer ignore, they set about to install their biggest engineering project ever—massive floodgates for the mouth of the harbor. This project, designed to protect the city, would, in fact, serve to fix the lagoon in place. Begun at the turn of the millennium, the Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (MOSE) consists of seventy-eight barrier gates that, though not yet completely finished, faced their first test in October 2020 when their closing managed to at least partially protect the city from a 4.6-foot tide surge. The year previous, a state of emergency was declared when Venice experienced its worst flood in fifty years, when six feet of water briefly inundated even St. Mark’s.

It is in the context of such myriad pressures on the city’s existential health that the Venetian city managers made the decision about cruise ships. The longer or even middle-term effects are still to be measured. Will the moves tend to discourage tourists in the long run? Will that satisfy any disgruntled locals? Does the decision ultimately signal a trade-off between tourism revenue and heritage conservation? Are other jurisdictions going to be influenced by Venice to try similar control measures where they live?