Venice to charge day-trippers up to €10 to enter city
Mayor says tax will improve monitoring of tourist arrivals
and help fund clean-up of litter
Angela Giuffrida in Rome
Mon 31 Dec 2018 16.40 GMT Last modified on Mon 31 Dec 2018
19.55 GMT
Venice attracts up to 30 million visitors a year.
Photograph: Stefano Mazzola/Awakening/Getty Images
Day-trippers to Venice will be charged up to €10 (£9) to
enter the famous lagoon city as authorities continue to grapple with the tens
of millions of tourists who visit every year.
The Italian parliament approved the entry tax, which will
range from €2.50 to €10 depending on the time of year, in its budget for 2019,
paving the way for it to be implemented by local authorities. A similar system
has been applied for Elba island, part of the Tuscan archipelago, and the
Aeolian Islands off Sicily.
Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice, said the money
collected would help fund the cleaning up of rubbish that day-trippers leave
behind.
“The arrival tax is now law,” he said. “We will establish a
balanced and shared regulation that protects those who live, study and work in
the territory.”
It is unclear when the tax will be introduced or how it will
be applied. Reports in the Italian press suggest it could be added to the cost
of arriving in the city either by train, bus or cruise ship, with the
respective transport companies passing the proceeds on to Venice authorities.
Each visitor will be charged a minimum fee of €2.50
throughout the year, rising to between €5 and €10 during peak periods. It will
not affect those who have booked hotel rooms. Venice visitors already pay a
tourist tax if they spend at least one night in the city.
Brugnaro said the entrance charge would allow authorities to
better monitor tourist arrivals.
Venice has long struggled to manage a tourism industry that
brings in about 30 million visitors a year, many arriving by cruise ship.
Leaders are also under pressure to better manage the situation ahead of a
decision by Unesco, expected in July 2019, over whether to put Venice on its
list of endangered heritage sites.
Gates were installed at the two entry points to the lagoon
during peak periods this year in an attempt to ease the throng heading towards
St Mark’s Square and the Rialto Bridge. If numbers get too high, the gates are
closed and access is allowed only to those with hotel bookings or holding a
Venezia Unica pass, a card that is mainly used by residents but can be bought
for €40 by anyone who uses a water bus.
Authorities are also trying to encourage people to visit
other, lesser-known areas of the Venetian lagoon or one of its other islands,
such as Murano and Burano.
Those who live in Venice have organised several protests in
recent years against a tourism industry which they argue has eroded their
quality of life, has damaged the environment and is driving residents away:
Venice’s population has fallen from about 175,000 in the post-second world war
years to about 55,000 today.
Occupy Venice: 'We are the alternative to the death of the
city'
Fighting depopulation caused by tourism and high rents,
activists are helping Venetians take over abandoned properties
Giorgio Ghiglione
Thu 13 Sep 2018 11.00 BST Last modified on Thu 13 Sep 2018
16.22 BST
Simonetta Boni, 52, was born and raised in Venice. In May
2016 she and her family lost their home because the landlord suddenly raised
the rent from €800 per month to €1,500. “I went to social services but they
didn’t help me – they said there were many cases like ours,” she says. “That’s
why I decided to occupy an empty house.”
Many Venetians have been forced out of their homes because
of the high cost of living, which has been linked to mass tourism. Ten years
ago there were 60,000 residents in the historic centre; now it’s 53,000.
One of the main problems is landlords renting their
apartments to tourists via Airbnb or turning them into hostels and B&Bs. Every
year Venice is visited by 20million tourists – and loses about 1,000 residents.
Rather than join the exodus, Boni decided to stay in Venice.
She turned to Assemblea Sociale per la Casa (ASC), or Social Assembly for the
House, a grassroots movement fighting the depopulation of the city. With its
help, she and her family occupied an empty apartment in Cannaregio, one of
Venice’s working class neighbourhoods.
Since 2012, ASC has helped families under threat of losing
their homes by either attempting to physically block their eviction orhelping
them occupy abandoned houses. Nicola Ussardi, a local salesman who co-founded
ASC, says the first demonstrations attracted a large number of people who had
previously been apolitical – “a sign that housing is a serious problem in
Venice”.
Last month ASC successfully blocked the eviction of a woman
from her home of 50 years. “The owner wanted to kick her out in order to make a
bed and breakfast, despite the fact that he already owned two in the same
building,” says Ussardi. “The evicted resident is the new symbol of this city.
Residents are almost becoming the enemy of the owners, who prefer to rent to
tourists.”
For people who do lose their homes, ASC activists fix up
abandoned, dilapidated houses for occupation. In six years they have taken over
70 apartments, all of them in Cannarego and Giudecca, another working class
neighbourhood; they now host 150 people, including families, singles and young
couples.
The occupations are illegal, but Ussardi is proud of what
ASC does. “We do not steal the house from anyone – we chose apartments that
have been abandoned for years and are full of mould and rats.”
Many of the houses need work before they are fit for
occupation because they have been closed for many years, says Giulio Grillo, an
architect who occupied a vacant house in Giudecca. With other activists, he
co-founded Re-Biennale, an association that uses discarded materials after the
Venice Biennale to fix them up. “We have made an agreement with the curators of
some pavilions – we dismantle them and get to use the materials,” he says.
Biennale materials were used to restore an apartment in
Giudecca currently occupied by Davide de Polo, a 38-year-old stagehand working
in the film industry, and his family. De Polo and his girlfriend decided to
occupy a house a few years ago when they found out Chiara was pregnant.
“I earn €12,000 per year, so how can I cannot afford a rent
of €800 or €900 per month and feed my daughter?” says De Polo. “Leaving the
city isn’t right. We [occupiers] are the alternative to the death of Venice.”
World capital of mass tourism
Other Italian cities, such as Turin, Rome and Milan, have
had movements of occupied houses since the 1970s. But there it’s mostly poor
people who occupy. What sets Venice apart is that the squatters are members of
the impoverished middle class. They could never afford to buy a house – and now
that tourism is causing rent prices to soar, they cannot afford to rent one,
either.
Shaul Bassi, a professor of English literature at the Ca’
Foscari University of Venice, says the housing crisis is just the tip of the
iceberg: the city’s social fabric is crumbling under the weight of mass
tourism. “It’s schizophrenic. On one hand, Venice is incredibly democratic
because everyone walks, and outside the touristy areas Venetians of all social
classes share common spaces. And yet if I need a household item I can walk for
hours and only find bars, restaurants and souvenir shops.”
This year Venice was defined as world capital of mass
tourism in a report by Airbnb, surpassing Barcelona, Bangkok and Amsterdam. On
a daily basis there are 73.8 tourists for each Venetian. Matteo Sechi, who runs
a website about Venice’s depopulation – and even installed a population counter
in a pharmacy in the Rialto district to raise awareness – has noticed the city
changing.
“Venice is getting
older. Young people leave because it is impossible to find a home. I pay €1,000
in rent for a small apartment. If I moved just out of town, I could pay half of
this, and my landlord could earn twice as much if he decided to rent to
tourists instead.”
Authorities have tried to temper tourists’ influence over
the city, installing mobile gates to close some streets at peak times and
divert them to less frequented areas. But ultimately there are just too many of
them. According to recent research by Jan Van de Berg and Paolo Costa, Ca’
Foscari professors, in order to be sustainable, tourism in Venice needs to drop
from 77,000 to 55,000 visitors per day.
But whether ASC has any chance of winning the battle for
residents is hard to tell.
Carlo Spinazzi, a 58-year old shopkeeper, lost both his shop
and his house a few months ago. “My girlfriend and I paid the rent for 14 years
– but then we failed to pay for two months, and [the landlord] immediately
evicted us.” Social services refused to help, so they occupied an apartment in
Cannaregio that had stood empty for three years. “My girlfriend was sick,” says
Spinazzi. “Where else could we go?”
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