‘Are we joking?’: Venice residents protest as
city starts charging visitors to enter
Day-trippers will have to pay €5 to visit Italian city
under scheme designed to protect it from excess tourism
Angela
Giuffrida in Venice
Thu 25 Apr
2024 05.00 BST
Authorities
in Venice have been accused of transforming the famous lagoon city into a
“theme park” as a long-mooted entrance fee for day trippers comes into force.
Venice is
the first major city in the world to enact such a scheme. The €5 (£4.30)
charge, which comes into force today, is aimed at protecting the Unesco world
heritage site from the effects of excessive tourism by deterring day trippers
and, according to the mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, making the city “livable” again.
But several
residents’ committees and associations have planned protests for Thursday,
arguing that the fee will do nothing to resolve the issue.
“I can tell
you that almost the entire city is against it,” claimed Matteo Secchi, who
leads Venessia.com, a residents’ activist group. “You can’t impose an entrance
fee to a city; all they’re doing is transforming it into a theme park. This is
a bad image for Venice … I mean, are we joking?”
Once the
heart of a powerful maritime republic, Venice’s main island has lost more than
120,000 residents since the early 1950s, driven away by a number of issues but
predominantly a focus on mass tourism that has caused the population to be
dwarfed by the thousands of visitors who crowd its squares, bridges and narrow
walkways at the busiest times of the year.
The entrance fee, which is required only for access to
Venice’s historic centre, is bookable online and will apply on 29 peak days,
mostly weekends, from Thursday until 14 July as part of its trial phase.
Residents,
commuters, students and children under the age of 14 are exempt, as are
tourists who stay overnight.
Day
trippers, however, will be required to buy their ticket online and will then be
provided with a QR code. Those without one will be able to buy a ticket on
arrival, with the help of local stewards, who will also carry out random checks
at five main arrival points including Santa Lucia train station. Those without
a ticket risk fines of between €50 and €300.
Venice
council said 5,500 people had booked a ticket for 25 April, a national holiday
in Italy, bringing €27,500 to the city’s coffers on its first day. Although
Brugnaro has denied it is a money-making initiative, he has promised to cut
local taxes for residents if the scheme is successful.
Federica
Toninello, who leads ASC, an association for housing, said: “They think this
measure will solve the problem, but they haven’t really understood the
consequences of mass tourism on a city like Venice.
“For a
start, €5 will do nothing to deter people. But day trippers aren’t the issue;
things like the shortage of affordable housing are … What we need are policies
to help residents, for example, making rules to limit things like Airbnb.”
The local
branch of Arci, a cultural and social rights association, said it would
distribute “symbolic passports” to tourists on Thursday as a way of
highlighting the “dubious constitutional legitimacy” of the measure in terms of
restricting free movement. The fee, it added, would be “ineffective in
containing mass tourism” while generating “unequal treatment between different
categories of visitors”.
Others,
however, have embraced the scheme. “It will serve to collect fundamental data
and help regulate tourist flows, which during certain periods of the year
risking damaging a fragile city like Venice,” Tommaso Sichero, the president of
the association for Venice shop owners, told Avvenire newspaper.
Despite the
criticism, the Venice tourism councillor Simone Venturini said the
administration was feeling “very relaxed” about “the “adventure”. “For the
first time since Venice affixed itself to mass tourism, we are trying to do
something,” he said. “This is the most relevant point.”
While some
have raised questions over privacy due to people having to feed their data into
the booking system, Venturini said the tool would be useful in “providing more
precise figures on visitor numbers”.
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