Death of Venice? Tourists pour in as residents head out

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/29/news/venice.php

Death of Venice? Tourists pour in as residents head out
By Elisabetta Povoledo International Herald Tribune
Published: September 29, 2006

VENICE Four months ago Mirella Dalla Pasqua, born and raised in this venerable city improbably built on water, did something she thought she would never do: She bought a house on the mainland.

"I had no choice," said Dalla Pasqua, 31, who described leaving for the "terra firma" side of the lagoon as a trauma.

"I'm proud to be a Venetian," she said, but "house prices are impossibly high in Venice, and then you have to fix them up. Young people just can't afford that."

Dalla Pasqua works in a glove shop near the Rialto Bridge, in the historic heart of Venice, and now commutes every day. She is hardly the first Venetian to leave this sea-locked city. Over the past 50 years, thousands have taken part in a collective disappearing act. From a peak of 171,000 residents in 1951, the population of the historic center of Venice has fallen to fewer than 62,000.

"We've reached the point of collapse, the point where things could fall apart," said Ezio Micelli, an urban planner.

Should the trend continue, newspapers fretted recently, by 2030 authentic Venetians could become extinct and the historic center reduced to a shell subsisting only on tourism. For even as Venetians leave, tourists have been coming. And coming.

According to recent estimates, 15 million to 18 million tourists have come to Venice over the last year. On some days they easily outnumber residents; during the pre-Lenten Carnival there are 150,000 tourists a day.

When the ratio of tourists to residents tips in favor of the former, "it's not meaningful to talk about Venice as a city anymore," said Robert Davis, a professor of Italian history at Ohio State University.

"The city is basically already lost," said Davis, a co-author of "Venice: The Tourist Maze," an entertaining and thoughtful cultural critique of the tourism phenomenon. "The speculation is what will happen to it next."

Venice is now largely dependent on tourism for its economic survival, even as tourists complicate daily life for most Venetians.

"You can't get onto a vaporetto" - the public transport boat that ferries people around the canals - "without finding it packed with tourists and their suitcases," grumbled Gianpietro Meneghetti, a retired bank manager. He launched into a litany of grievances shared by many locals, including high prices for basic foods and the inability to live normally among the foreign interlopers.

Stores catering to daily needs - supermarkets, shoe-repair shops, even cinemas - have been steadily muscled out by shops selling Murano glass and gaudy ceramic masks. Hotels, new bed- and-breakfasts, restaurants and snack bars have added to the pressure on space, driving up the price of real estate, a limited resource by Venice's very nature.

"Things cost too much - if you stay, it's only because you've inherited a house," said Walter Pitteri, who lives in Mestre, the mainland part of greater Venice. Driving a car also has its attractions, he added. "I'd never come back," he said. "I'm not interested in a city like this that's too difficult to live in."

The price of property is exceptionally high in Venice compared with the mainland. A 100-square-meter, or 1,100- square-foot, apartment goes for up to €1 million, or $1.27 million, in the historic center, and more on the Grand Canal, but half or a quarter of that on firm land across the lagoon, depending on location.

Even that is too high for some: The population of greater Venice has also declined since its 1968 peak of 367,832 residents. It is today just shy of 270,000, including those in the old city.

Mayor Massimo Cacciari points out that the depopulation of city centers is a problem in many places. But because Venice is identified as the historic center in its lagoon, and not the mainland suburbs, depopulation is seen as more distressing here, he says.

"People aren't exactly living in the center of Potsdamer Platz" in Berlin, Cacciari said. "In Venice, it's perceived as a bigger problem."

Something must be done to "stop the exodus and protect the resident population," Cacciari asserted during an interview in his office in a palazzo abutting the Grand Canal. While the city has set aside money to help young couples meet the cost of high rents or mortgages, the money allocated "barely covers a small percentage of the needs," Cacciari said.

Through a municipal real estate development agency, the city is building 500 to 600 apartments in three areas of the city that it will rent to middle-class families, the social group at greatest risk of "extinction."

"If you lose the middle class, you end up with polarization between the very rich and the very poor, and the city becomes unglued and falls apart," said Micelli, the urban planner, who also heads the municipal real estate development agency. Similar projects in other areas of Venice have been successful, he said, slowing the exodus to the mainland and "reinforcing the social fabric."

The Venetian authorities also want to lure new residents to the historic center and are looking to develop job opportunities beyond the tourist industry.

"We need new energies from outside," said Mara Rumiz, the Venice council member in charge of housing. The current population, she said, "just isn't a sufficient critical mass to launch the city on a new path."

But stimulating new businesses to set up shop here has not been easy.

"After all, you can't build a factory here," Cacciari said, citing Venice's fragile ecosystem.

So the city is pressing its cultural advantages, increasing research facilities and university programs in the historic center as well as promoting cultural events like the Biennale art exhibition and film festival.

Cacciari is also seeking to make mass tourism help pay for the city. He is trying to impose a tourist tax and to get locals who make money from tourism to compensate the city somehow for the burden they place on local services. Such taxes are not likely to keep tourists away.

"The demand for Venice is inflexible - rising prices won't stop it," said Davis, the author. "People will come anyway."

While some here see the decisions of the next few years as crucial to Venice's future, others take comfort in the past of a city that many times previously has been declared down for the count.

"Venice is a strong city, despite its apparent fragility," said Franca Coin, president of the Venice International Foundation, which raises money for restoration projects.

"You have to believe in the city's future. You have to roll up your sleeves and make an effort, otherwise you won't obtain anything.">