The Long, Slow Death of Venice
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However, I have been to Venice 3 times in the last 10 years. People here arguing that Venice is "full of people" have not visited the city, but only the cities attractions. It is as simple as that. Even in the peak season when the city center is massively overcrowded by tourists, you (literally) only have to walk 10 minutes from Piazza San Marco to find yourself basically alone on lovely squares in the middle of the day. It is at the same time extremely beautiful and eerie, because you suddenly realize that the square is not only empty because there are no tourists there, but also because most of the apartment windows are blind, with nobody living behind them. Offside the tourist routes, Venice largely feels like a ghost town.
It is indeed sad, but if you stay in the city as a tourist long enough, you get why locals are leaving. The last time, we stayed there for 10 days in a small apartment, and starting with day 2, our hatred for the masses coming off the cruise ships like a biblical locust plague grew exponentially to a point where we completely avoided the city center between 10 in the morning and 9 in the evening.
And it's a problem that is very hard to solve, because a city must, almost by definition, be open; and because curbing tourism- even if it were feasible- means saying no to a huge amount of cash.
The time I went a few years ago it was pretty dead. I'm not a big Venice fan. It's a pretty city that's worth seeing before it sinks away, but I enjoy other cities for repeat visits.
I mentioned in another comment a few weeks ago that if I wanted to visit Venice again I would stay in Rovinj, Croatia and take the local ferry over for the day. When I went to Venice we took the ferry over and stayed in Venice, and after seeing the Venice highlights really just wanted to go back to Crotia.
I know actually living in Venice is a challenge. It's a long walk to run any errand, and if you need something delivered it has to come by boat, on a schedule, and so you have to have your act together.
But, if you mess up? You have to eat out. In Italy. There are worse things in the world.
Really, all I need is wifi, which I hear Venice has, and for my 3 kids to be passable swimmers.
My tips for anyone who wants to visit Venice: please don't support the cruise ships destroying this beautiful city, just use the train. Come for at least 5 days. Try to slowly walk through every quarter of the city (you will need 5-10 days for that). Buy a week ticket for the vaporettos and ride the vaporetto up and down canal grande in the evening. Don't dress like a stereotypical tourist. Please behave. If you are American or Chinese, actively try to lower your voice. Leave your smartphone and/or your camera at your apartment / hotel, everything you will be photographing has been photographed, painted or drawn at least a million times already. And, most importantly: don't ride the gondolas, you will get screwed financially.
One of these things is not like the others! I think better advice to the advisor would be to not judge people for how they are dressed.
I'll also add that the reason that you wouldn't want to dress like a tourist is to mislead locals about what you actually are, which is a tourist. Judging you substantively would mean judging you as one of the tourists that makes them want to leave the town they grew up in.
This would be strange advice, because you clearly would judge someone going to a high-end restaurant in a bathing suit, to a funeral in nothing but underpants or to a wedding wearing a SS uniform. These are ridiculous examples, of course, but they appear so ridiculous because one of the fabrics of any society is that on certain occasions, you should try to tune down your individuality as best as possible and try to blend in with others. In my opinion, visiting a foreign country as a guest is one of these occasions.
Reversing that argument, you'd probably feel that French tourists wearing monokinis (or kids not having a full on bathsuit) on the beach in the US don't respect your culture, even though that's perfectly acceptable back home.
Actually, I'm purely merit based in my judgments. You can wear a leaf on a string and water wings for all I care. Then again, I also don't much care what prejudiced people think of me. I just go about my business feeling sorry for them.
Usually the weird rules we have for ourselves are never visible to us so I’d be somewhat hesitant to make the claim of being open to things.
In fact, if I think about it, you’d probably be stared at and feel like a spectacle and probably unwelcome with a toga, a kilt, or a lungi (even the formal variant). I don’t even think you could wear the top end of some of those clothing varieties and go to many places in SF (generally a downmarket place for clothes).
The other guy put it really well. It will increase the friction you experience.
What does this mean? How do tourists dress? How would it differ from a non-tourist?
What I meant was that: if you are visiting a town in a foreign country, it would at least be polite to research beforehand how locals dress and what is considered rude, inappropriate or simply tasteless.
That said, all of these measures you describe are a bit much. There are a million ways to tell that somebody's a tourist, are you going to pretend you're there to raise VC?
Edit: Parent's editing their comments a lot so mine makes no sense now, but they linked to https://img.budgettravel.com/_facebookShare/tourists-in-spai... as an example of tourist attire.
People don't want to do laundry on their vacation. And unless you're rich and have porters lugging around massive luggage with carefully packed fashionable clothes, people are also space-constrained
So, they optimize for comfortable, quick-dry, wrinkle-free clothes so they can maximize exploration and energy.
That's......what you have to do when you are spending your limited vacation time to see the world.
Part of this is definitely a snobby european mindset. Europeans get 5-6 weeks of vacation a year, and burn 4 of those on August so they are used to LOONG consecutive getaways, and structure their lives accordingly.
The rest of the world (And I don't mean America, I mean the entire rest of the non-European world) doesn't have that luxury.
My relatives from Canada are constantly complaining how they have only 10 days of vacation per year yet every year entire family takes road trips that last 5-6 weeks. Every second year they come to visit Europe.
I'm not speaking for myself, I'm speaking for the vast majority of the world.
Do you seriously think that tourists from China, Japan, India, and the US have 5-6 weeks of vacation every year?
To be so blind to your own privilege...befuddling..
Also, this is a nice indicator as well... https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/china/ https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/japan/ https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/india/
compared to this: https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/croatia/
The gist of it is, tourists typically are carrying way more shit than they need and look silly more often than not. It's also nice to just walk around with the same amount of shit as you would if you were walking around your home city.
I’m only kind of kidding. That is to say tourists look like tourists everywhere because they are different. The better advice than “don’t dress like a tourist” is “don’t expect where you are traveling to be the same as where you are from. Take some time to see if you can pick out what they are.”
In Europe at least, nine times out of ten, that tourist is not American. We just aren’t very numerous compared to Europeans in Europe (don’t you know most of us don’t even have passports). Russians on the other hand....
But the more I thought about it, the less comfortable I was with that line of thinking. What IS wrong with taking a picture that isn't 100% original? Is taking a picture of Piazza San Marco just as bad as a landscape photographer getting that "perfect shot" of Antelope Canyon? or Mesa Arch? [1][2]
What if you are an American with very limited vacation time each year? Or you just want an "easy" vacation? Why is one style of travel better than the other? Does a place having a ton of visitors make it worse to visit? Or is there still value to going?
I'm just rambling at this point, but I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts since I'm not sure what to feel.
[1] https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0f/1b/ec/c6/... [2] https://www.johntrotto.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/IMG_27...
Man, they are taking the piss. If they did that to an Italian, there would be fisticuffs.
that seems odd to say the least. it seems highly probable to me that popular tourist attractions are popular because they're desirable to go to. sure, there's some marketing drum up in there but there's something seriously weird about going to less desirable places solely to get away from the crowds. it's almost as if you're signaling you're somehow superior or better by doing something other people aren't doing, even if that thing is objectively worse. value signaling made manifest via tourism or something.
This is why the "traveller" (vs tourist) holy grail is to find places that are genuinely impressive and spacious enough to still be enjoyable.
so yeah, while certainly only limited to a few places, i think there's a class of spots that one cannot necessarily reproduce in a lite version. so especially if one has limited travel opportunities, i think they're worth going to. venice is probably one of those although admittedly i haven't been.
I also drink coffee without milk. I drink matcha with milk. I wear a garish array of brightly-colored button-down shirts. I cross my z's when writing. None of these choices is correct. They are my choices.
No version of tourism is wrong unless it's contributing to a documented problem in which case it's obviously wrong. Tourism is recreation, no matter how eagerly it pretends to be education.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking the same picture other people took. If you liked it, you like it. You’re not harming anyone by taking a damn picture. Obviously as a tourist I try to be respectful and to learn a subset of the language while I’m there.
But hey, if you only have a week off there’s nothing wrong with going to the same place in Antelope Canyon as others went. It’s popular for a reason!
Do whatever makes you happy.
As for the gondolas, that's a hard pass for me. I've been to Venice twice, and was definitely not there for the gondolas. Not even for 'great Italian food' - it's not really that great at my price point, unless I travel 15-20 min away from the usual tourist sights. I'm simply there for Venice. For the canals, for the layout, for the architecture, for the history. Canal-side, I can see all I need to see from the vaporettos.
You're in town for just a few days, specifically to see the scenery, the locals aren't. This is the part where you're best off being more like a tourist.
What's always funny to me is that tourists who are part of the derided "masses" always seem to have a lot more common with locals than the "elite traveler" types who preoccupy themselves with finding an "authentic local experience." It's hard to truly connect with the common people when you look down on the common people in your own culture.
Only American and Chinese? If you're Dutch, you can still talk as loudly as you want to?
Again, I am not saying this applies to every American or Chinese, and of course there are German / British / French / Italian / Indian / Arabic / [...] tourists who do this.
[0] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-American-popula...
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
But from what I understand, Dutch tourists also have a reputation for being loud and/or rude. Maybe more rude than loud, but I tend to see them as going together.
Curious, as an American who lived in Lausanne (kind of touristic town) for a couple of years and China for ten, I rarely encountered American tourists at all. I’m sure they exist, but they don’t travel in huge groups like Chinese do, so are pretty impossible to pick out.
This is good advice and it applies to any touristy destination.
Venice (and Barcelona, also mentioned in the article) is basically the perfect city for the Instagram age. You can come in, spend less than a couple hours there, and pretty much hit all the major "checkboxes" and photo sites: ride in a gondola, take some pictures in St. Mark's Square, etc. All the incredible history about how the city was actually built, it's role in the Middle Ages, etc. are easy to pass over.
This is pretty random, but it reminds me of this video, https://youtu.be/6abePkXncCM , by a well known youtube baker who is lamenting that high-quality baking content for recipes that actually work are getting killed by slickly produced videos that are literal eye and ear candy but are useless and aren't even feasible. It's as if we're all looking out for the shortest, quickest "dopamine bump".
It's just really sad to me.
This city was mostly a spectacle well before Instagram.
If anything there are way more people no longer living in poverty and capable of being foreign-traveling tourists than ever before + population growth. They need to go somewhere so they hit up the same small group of great places that was there before the wealth and population growth.
I would say a few things are factors for some of what is described:
1. It's relatively cheap and easy to travel. This wasn't as much the case in the past.
2. Population boom of millennials and onwards. I have a boomer mom and a pre-war dad who was born in Europe. They both see international travel as a Major Barrier with a lot of friction. I remember that seeming true in my childhood too. The younger cohorts have grown up with it being relatively cheap and easy.
3. The EU. Go to the touristy part of a touristy town in Europe, I guarantee you will hear the national language and native accent of every EU member state. I can't imagine it being like that several decades ago. It also drives tourism from outside Europe because they can enter in one country and cross over to another without hassle.
That's why travelling gets cheaper: economies of scale (block-booking on planes, etc). That's why VISAs and barriers are removed: because there is yet another industry lobbying to remove friction.
Tourism companies gotta grow like any other company out there. We just notice them more because their production line is literally on our streets.
The bigger change in recent times is the decline in industry. Globalisation makes a big difference. If you had a factory in Venice needing new plant and machinery, what would you do? You would sell up and move to Croatia or China.
Tourism and an industry can be made to work, for instance London's West End has been the place for television post production for many decades. That is an industry that anchors a wider set of services and then on the periphery of that you get your tourist sites, e.g. Carnaby Street, Regent Street, Oxford Street. There is still this working core that is also served by different cafe's and bars to what the tourists go to, although there is some overlap. Underground trains and buses enable people to commute in and the core industry that is there cannot survive elsewhere. Try opening a post production edit suite in Leeds and see if any broadcasters come your way.
Leeds is actually where Channel 4 are relocating to, but the gravitational pull of London's West End makes that difficult, something like 80% of the staff are leaving rather than moving up North.
Venice is stuck in that the proper industry, e.g. the metal bashing stuff, just does not need to be there. It can't survive there and the transport links in for commuters are not what you get in most cities. The era of city states and mankind being mostly travelling by sea or river are not coming back. Venice can't monopolise silk, fancy things made of glass, lace or anything else that has to be made. They should have built some services fifty years ago to replace these specialisations with new specialisations.
It is a tourist attraction now, that is not going to change. The people able to sell up and move should be lucky there is some AirBnB property tycoon willing to pay top dollar for their property.
> 80% of [Channel4] staff are leaving rather than moving up North.
80% of staff are threatening to leave, they are not resigning en-masse. This is the same stuff that happened to the BBC a few years ago when they relocated a big chunk of activity to Manchester (or rather Salford, to be precise). Lots of people moaned, some people resigned, others started living on commuter trains, others just moved (and found out there are no White Walkers in the North after all), others were just hired here. Now the sector in Manchester is booming.
It could well turn out that Channel 4 made a mistake in choosing Leeds (it's badly connected, much smaller than Manchester, and without a local tradition like the Granada legacy), but it has nothing to do with London being some sort of quintessential centre of all TV activity in the land.
In situations of overcrowding, it seems the obvious solution is simply to raise taxes and fees, in order to lower the number of tourists. This would raise more revenue from each tourist while cutting maintenance costs which are driven by volume.
Is there some non-obvious reason this isn't done?
They may be able to, say, raise prices 50% and drop traffic only 20%.
> He is also a member of ASC, or “assemblea sociale per la casa”, an association of local residents that seeks to give empty or abandoned houses back to people and families. While this is illegal, because the houses belong to a public group which manages them, it has also helped bring some abandoned areas in the city back to life.
wow, how is that constitutional?
Each bar on the graph looks to be a certain population count/census, and presumably they were conducted less often in the first part of the century. If you mouse over the bars on the graph they tell you what year they were conducted in.
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The point here, is that in spite of the X-Axis being labeled as 1901-2018 (which would make you think the bars are even time intervals), they are not.
The population peak, while nearly at the left side is actually in 1951 according to the mouseover text. So the 1/3rd of 1950s population claim is accurate.
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> and though it rallied again to near 16th century levels in the 1970s, today there are just one third as many Venetians as 50 years ago.
I suspect this may be typo, as if you flip the 5 and 7 it would be about accurate. "...in the 1950s, today there are just one third as many Venetians as 70 years ago."
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I agree that none of this inspires particular confidence in their editing or fact-checking.
There's no "authentic" tourist experience relative to how locals live. You're not going to vote for town council in the week you're there. You don't have well informed opinions about the state of things. You're just eating some cool snacks and visiting pretty/interesting locations.
I always wanted to go back, but I wonder if it's worth it or if I should just remember when I was there originally.
It is sad, but I don't think anyone is taking climate change seriously enough to reverse it... so I don't see any outcome other than the Venice of today becoming the Atlantis of tomorrow.
That's why you don't buy a single-use ticket and go for the day pass instead, which is €20-ish.
My SO works seasonally in Venice, so I visit the city every year and while it's overflowing with tourists, they seem to be concentrated mostly around Rialto - with districts like Cannaregio more or less free from crowds.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/aug/30/why-tourism-i...
On the topic "number of residents", two interesting things:
1) "Comune di Venezia" is the municipality, not the set of islands commonly referred to as Venice, or historical Venice. The number of inhabitants there is higher.
2) There's a pharmacy nearby the Rialto bridge with a display showing how many residents in Venezia: http://www.veneziatoday.it/cronaca/contatore-veneziani.html
I actually enjoyed Venice much more than Florence.
Italy is a big place and there's tons to see. Make Venice just a couple days of your trip and you'll probably enjoy it.
(Aside, to me it's tour groups that are the worst, with bus loads and cruise loads being the most egregious example. I've seen this everywhere I've been a tourist. A destination that can easily handle a stream of individuals or families becomes overwhelmed when 20+ tourists arrive all at once. Venice would definitely be helped by a metering system.)
Just be sure to pair it up with somewhere(s) else.
Carthage is 800 years older than Venice and to some extent it has a more interesting civilization. Tunisia also has significant Roman heritage. It's pretty close to Italy so the climate is quite a match but you can go and check the desert.
Here is another one: Egypt. Enjoy both the pharaoh and the islamic heritage.
Plenty of places to see that are reasonably safe. Bonus point: Probably the whole package will cost less than your daily life in your average developed country.
The pyramids are just outside of Cairo, one of the largest cities in the world (metro population above 20m - I believe no European city surpass it).
Carthage is just outside Tunis - the capital & largest city of Tunisia (not to mention 10x the population of Venice).
My point was that there is interesting sites to see beyond the popular ones. Either in Europe or elsewhere.
That's the problem right there. Such pricing should be enforced by the city plus an entry "visa" style payment...
I think your "visa" sugestion was a joke, but I'm afraid that the sarcastic nature may get lost and the message may be misinterpreted and taken on its face value.
Venice is a very popular destination spot. It should raise the barrier to entry accordingly, to attract fewer, more lucrative, tourists. It should also use the money to protect the residents of the city, and its buildings and monuments.
It's a casuality of modernity, there is no use for a densely packed city built on a dozen slabs of rock in the middle of the sea.