8 - Robert C. Davis, Garry Marvin, "Venice, The Tourist Maze" (2005)

Robert C. Davis, Garry Marvin, Venice, the Tourist Maze: a Cultural Critique of the World’s Most Touristed City, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005

Becoming the quintessential romantic city did not come naturally to Venice. Until 1797, when it ceased to exist as the Serenissima Repubblica, this was a city that existed primarily for practical purposes, not touristic—much less romantic—ones. It was built where and how it was simply to provide its residents with a secure place to live their social, political, and commercial lives. In earlier ages, visitors came here mostly for the same reasons that outsiders always come to cities—for profit, politics, or refuge. Those who admired the place usually did so more for its wealth, so brashly displayed on every side, than for its scenic qualities: many visitors were humbled, even intimidated, when they compared Venice’s humming commercial activity, military force, and cosmopolitan crowds to their own, more staid and modest hometowns.

This began to change in the late 1600s, by which time Venice was already well down the slope of its long decline. Visitors from England and France, particularly, began to turn their gimlet eyes on the whole range of products and pomp that had once made the city world famous, and realized that it no longer measured up to what was back home in London or Paris. Yet despite their scorn these foreigners kept coming, right into the 1790s, lured largely by those things that Venice offered that were relatively scarce elsewhere in Europe—a particular sense of style, above all, but also vice: gambling, prostitution, and perversion of whatever sort visitors required. Venice became the continent’s brothel, but also, thanks to its limited scale and unique waterways, Europe’s first theme park. By the time the collapse of the Serenissima Repubblica came in 1797, Venice was already well on its way of living off tourism alone. As such, we might say, it was perhaps the first postmodern city, selling no product other than itself and its multiple images to the tens or even hundreds of thousands of free-spending foreigners who came there annually.

Much of this was a choice of the Venetians themselves, who during the 1800s were exploited and then abandoned by a series of outsider governments—first Paris, then Vienna, then Rome—cut off by changing patterns of trade from their traditional sources of wealth, and left with little to fall back on beyond their own proven ability to hawk themselves and their city to foreigners. A new form of tourism was soon there to buy their product. Packaged tours, built on the modest but persuasive resources of middle-class Germans, French, and British, and taking advantage of new rail links through the Alps, were soon flooding Venice with foreigners. Special trains might dump as many as ten thousand of these visitors a day into the city for special occasions. Before long, Venetians were beginning to tailor their own holidays, often of ancient vintage, just to suit the expectations and desires of these new visitors.

From these earliest packaged tours to the industrial tourism of the present, visitors have come to this lagoon city looking for Romance with a capital R. In the nineteenth century this was above all a literary venture, as tourists sought (or competed) to plant themselves on the same spot that had once inspired Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, or Browning, and then read aloud the appropriate lines. Such interpretive efforts still continue, though now more through the play of image and representation with which Venice is presented to the world by the mass media in films, travelogues, and above all advertising. Today’s Venice is still endlessly created and recreated in a feedback loop of tourist desire and demand, and even if the poetry has by now mostly given way to commercial tropes of gondoliers and Carnival masks, the city still satisfies with remarkable success the needs of those who visit.

The intense affection that Venice arouses in the world public has brought its own price, however. Something like thirteen to fourteen million outsiders currently go there every year, overwhelming a town whose resident population at the start of the twenty-first century was barely sixty-five thousand. Venice is thus a city not just visited but actually inhabited by tourists: on average, there are no fewer than eighty-nine foreigners in the city at any given time for every one hundred Venetians who live there: the highest tourist-to-resident ratio in Europe, and nine times that found in, say, Florence. With visitors coming from every corner of the globe, Venice might claim to be one of the great multiethnic cities of the postmodern world. Of course, all these transients do not really live there, at least not in the sense of residing there or paying taxes; yet in terms of human life and public activity, and certainly from the Venetian point of view, they are permanently there, all over town. Although each tourist may take up Venetian space for only a short while, in the aggregate they are there all the time: their transitory occupation might be called a flow, but for the Venetians themselves it appears as continual, solid mass.

Diverse though they may be and however much each may think he or she is engaging with the city in a personal way, these tourists are still virtually all engaged in the same fundamental act. They are consuming—not so much Venetian culture, but rather the images of that culture, and consuming them, for the most part, as quickly as possible (over 80 percent of visitors stay less than a day). What Venetians tend to see of them is a homogeneous flow: men, women, and children whom they refer to as “the herd,” and who in the aggregate seem as undifferentiated as locusts or starlings. Some Venetians (about 40 percent of the total) do make their living tending this herd, selling it souvenirs, ice creams, places of fritto misto, or corn to give the pigeons. Most residents, however, go on living there in spite of, rather than because of, the massive tourist presence. These unfortunates—pensioners, government workers, school children—can do little but suffer what the papers like to call their “days on Calvary,” the ever more frequent occasions when sixty and sometimes even one hundred thousand outsiders try to cram themselves at once into what is, after all, a fairly small city.

Tourists and Venetians, then, meet and jostle and try to get by in what is still one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The tourists come, many of them, with an ideal and a cliché battling in their heads, and hope that the ideal, their fantasy of Venetian Romance, will somehow win out, in the city where Henry James already was pouting, over a century ago, that “there is nothing left to discover or describe, and originality is completely impossible.” Modern media assure them that this is certainly not so, however, and, if not true love, at least true fantasy (and good shopping) can still be achieved in the World’s Most Romantic City. As one recent travelogue to Venice concluded: “Venice is one of those places that surpasses its own publicity. The canvasses of Canaletto and reels of celluloid can’t sell it short. Being here is better than the dream.”

At the same time, the Venetians, ever older and fewer, keep up their struggle to remain in the city where their ancestors may have been born, but where they themselves are increasingly strangers, superfluous and often unwanted by the tourist monolith that has long since taken over. They write their innumerable litanies of complaint to the papers: about their difficulties in getting around among the crowds, about the pollution and disturbances brought in by the visitors, about the disrespect and ignorance they encounter every day. Those who get by the best seem to have learned simply to look right through the mobs, avoid the “hot” areas of town (although those are increasing in size every year), and live their lives in the early morning and at night.