Venice - Is Venice, the lagoon city of canals and gondolas, in danger of becoming an open-air museum teeming with foreign tourists and devoid of Venetians? The fear may seem exaggerated, but it is true that the number of natives keeps sinking. In October it dipped below 60,000, according to the action group Venessia.com, which tracks the exodus daily on its website. The storybook island city known as La Serenissima ("The Most Serene") is overrun by some 18 million tourists a year, while an average of one Venetian a day packs up and leaves. While the trend is not new, it is increasingly disturbing. Worried locals even staged a mock funeral for Venice earlier this month.
Will the last one to leave please tie up the boats? The situation is not that dire, of course. Some inhabitants will have to stay behind, if only to cater to the hordes of tourists that fill the city's tills. But fabulous and fragile Venice, with its churches and palaces set around St Mark's Square, is gradually ossifying into an aggregation of monuments and canals.
What needs to be done is to make the city -- without destroying it -- more attractive to the locals with money, good sense and flexible policies.
The curse of having to survive with more and more tourists and fewer and fewer inhabitants hardly seems to ruffle Mayor Massimo Cacciari. "What's so new?" he asked. "Certainly not the difference between 60,000 and 59,999."
Venice is faring no differently from Rome or Milan, where many residents have fled to the outskirts of town, wrote the Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera. In Venice, however, the separation between the centre of the city and its outskirts is much more pronounced: The approximately four-kilometre Liberty Bridge across the Venetian Lagoon links the historic centre with the industrial suburb of Mestre on the mainland.
"If truth be told, the lamentations over decline always come precisely when the curtain falls on the fashionable and cultural season," the newspaper said, referring to the Venice Biennale film festival and major exhibitions.
"If nothing's done, Venice will soon die. The city won't sink into the sea, though. It'll simply bleed to death," remarked Petra Reski, a German journalist and author who lives in Venice. "This will occur before the eyes of an indifferent, and perhaps cynical, municipal administration that sees the remaining Venetians as nothing but obstacles to their big, profitable projects."
In an effort to attract giant cruise liners, a lot of dredging has been done around the lagoon city, which is up to its neck in water. An ongoing project aimed at preventing heavy flooding by means of artificial flood barriers and floodgates, costing billions of dollars, has been drawing criticism for years. And on top of all that are always new cultural megaprojects.
The historic centre of Venice had a population of 174,000 in 1951. Twenty years ago, the number had sunk to just 80,000. "Venice is losing Venetians and being populated by hundreds of thousands of tourists who, guidebook in hand, search for traces of the city's soul from sunup to sundown," Victor Gomez Pin, a lecturer in philosophy from Barcelona, wrote in the Spanish newspaper El Pais.
Venice, consequently, could use more Venetian blood, which would probably be attracted best with less red tape, more financial incentives and good infrastructure.
Internet: www.venessia.com.
