Venice also naturally floods all the time, when I was over there the large square next to the cathedral / church flooded.
When it floods, it usually floods several inches on average
There's a good article on it here
https://www.visit-venice-italy.com/acqua-alta-venice-italy.h...
And a few hours later rain stopped, the flooding relented and it was back to normal.
Venice has been fine for hundreds of years; it isn’t all the sudden going to fail.. it just adapts and moves on. By far the biggest danger to Venice is the hoards of tourists that make getting around for a local almost impossible. When I was there in November (to take a Venician Plastet/Marmolino class) — even in the cold rain it was essentially a mob of people seemingly everywhere except the most back streets of back streets. That “hidden Venice” is quite amazing — I am definitely over the crowds and kitsch that pollute the maIn drags. Pro-tip if you want to have a nice visit: explore the streets and canals at night.
You've got it precisely backwards. By far the biggest danger to Venice is the absence of those hoards of tourists. Venice is dependent upon tourism income for its economy to an extent much greater than most other cities. Rome, Florence, Milan, and others have big businesses and use tourism as supplementary income, but it's the main source for Venice.
No. The danger is any point away from the equilibrium - too few/no tourists and there's no income, but too many tourists and the tourists won't spread the word for other potential travelers anymore when they e.g. cannot go to any popular place or getting ripped off hundreds of dollars for pizza.
Tourism-based economies can't fail from becoming too profitable. If prices are high, it's only because people are still willing to pay them. It's market forces in action.
"Real-estate-based economies can't fail from becoming too profitable. If prices and rents are high, it's only because people are still willing to pay them. It's market forces in action."
Or, perhaps, it's rents-extraction, money-laundering, signs of even worse collapse elsewhere, and killing the underlying fundamentals of the local economy.
I suspect there's similar lines of analysis which could be applied to tourist spots. And am wondering what examples of now-failed tourist temples there might be. Say, Niagara Falls, as an example.
The much more worn path is tourism spots failing from lack of visitors. You see that at the older Las Vegas casinos that can't compete with the latest and greatest mega-resorts, for example.
Acapulco, Mexico, is a former tourist mecca that's been transformed, though, as with a few other examples I can think of, largely through violence (here: drugs wars).
Niagra Falls remains a tourist destination, but not of a scope that it once was. There are several other destinations I could think of, also largely East Coast U.S., which once commanded a high volume of traffic but which are no longer premier destinations.
Or: who is vacationing to N.F.? Is it Wall Street bankers, or working-class types from Cleveland?
I'd also strongly suggest not getting too fixated on that one instance. I'm suggesting it as I suspect it might fit, but not because I'm positive of that. Question is if there are any instances along the lines I'd sketched out above.
I'm looking through what tourist destinations (or ventures) have failed. One additional dynamic: if the money's high, then net of financing a fall in the market can be catastrophic due to the loan-service nut that must be covered. It's not viable to drop the price, as that would fail to meet debt obligations. The search here turns up several examples of this.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=failed+tourist+destination&ia=news
Regardless... I still don't see a good example of a tourist destination failing while also seemingly being profitable... Niagara Falls isn't even an example of a failed tourist destination.
(Or Seattle, NYC, Vancouver, London, etc.)
It's not hit a precipitating point, yet ... but if you look at the formation of the tech industry in Los Angeles (aerospace and RAND especially post WWII) and Sunnyvale (1950s, 1960s), a large appeal was space and cost, as compared with East Coast centres, especially NYC and Boston.
edit: totally agree with your reply. I ended up at some point in a small, quiet plaza with cobblestone, old church, pigeons, and a bench under a tree, and I felt like I was in a movie
and those dark back streets, too narrow for GPS signal at times, distant foot steps, no addresses.. wonderful!
As I said in another comments, no, the wall (MOSE, several walls, actually) has not been completed yet and is non-operational.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Republic_of_Ven...
However, it would be interesting to see what the per-tourist expenditure rates have been over the past five years; my hypothesis is that per-tourist spending is down despite total tourist spending being up. Cruise ship passengers are a bulk of visitors and they don’t spend much (since they sleep on the ship.) So that crowds out potential visitors who might spend more money.
As another commenter said: there is a equilibrium between tourists and locals that needs to exist. My opinion is that shoulder-to-shoulder people is actually harming the city. There are actually proposals to limit the numbers of tourists — those proposals from the government wouldn’t exist unless there was some sort of problem.
I am not a Venice expert and have only been there a few weeks, but seeing masses of people buying cheap Chinese-made knockoff Murano glass from vendors who aren’t even Venetian (nor even live in Venice) — it’s hard for me to accept that is “good” for Venice or Venetians.
Just look at... well, all of Europe after WWII. Lots of Warsaw had to be rebuilt from scratch. It takes a lot to actually kill a city for good, though obviously it does happen.
I'm sure there were people in the 1100's saying the exact same thing!
That's a little different from saying the entire city needs to be rebuilt, but it will eventually.
That same generation of Italians embraced fascism, followed Mussolini, allied with Hitler and got their ass kicked in World War II.
That same "greatest generation" of Americans wrongly imprisoned American citizens of Japanese descent during the war, and turned a blind eye to Jewish refugees for an embarrassingly long time before grudgingly entering the war. None of us are perfect.
See? Goes both ways.