The No Space for Bezos movement: 'One man rents a city for three days? '

Any given random person from a long time ago tends to have either no living descendants now or a whole lot of them. The sacking of Constantinople was long enough ago that probably most now people in Europe are descended from people who were involved.

When I took on of the boats around Venice I had a European couple going on about it. They kept calling it a city of thieves, shrug.

More that for a city where important pieces of the historical artifacts and art was stolen by betrayal it’s a bit ironic to complain about modern wealthy people.

As in “how dare rich opportunistic Bezos rent this city where he can see beautiful Byzantine treasures stolen by rich opportunistic Doge Enrico Don-solo.”

Then again maybe it is an intentional backdrop for the story.

Of course there is. For a minor amount of extra effort, for most things, you can get them at a local store, order them directly from the manufacturer's website, go to eBay, etc.

The idea that people are so overworked now that they can't do these things is ludicrous, historically speaking. What's happened is that people have prioritized convenience and often view even slight reductions of convenience as disastrous. But it's not, really.

Amusingly the internet brought us both the scourge of ultra large distant foreign corporations and easy access to local supply chains because it made discovering suppliers close to you easy.

Where you do your shopping is actually extremely significant and meaningful. You can support your community and its prosperity very easily with your wallet this way. I think a significant part of why this is not put forwards more is actually because of how impactful it is and how contrary to the interest of the few it goes.

Tourism brings a whole bunch of problems, and the more tourists there are, the worse those problems get. The locals often (barely) tolerate tourism because it also bring economic benefits. But if those benefits don't filter down adequately to the locals (at least adequately enough to compensate for the losses), then tourism just becomes something that makes everything worse for them.