Editor’s Note: A new episode of “The Whole Story: “Saving Venice,” a city threatened by rising sea levels and the millions of tourists desperate to visit while they still can, airs Sunday, May 11th at 8pm ET/PT on CNN.
CNN
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Gondolas, canals and all those bridges. For many tourists, Venice is all that and only that: the floating city born for Instagram.
For others it’s a symbol of the excesses of the modern world: a city turned into a theme park, trampled by overtourism and hollowed out by vacation rentals. The statistics are stark. Around 30 million tourists visit Venice every year, dwarfing the local population, which has now dwindled to less than 50,000.
Venetians wanting to remain in their city face a lack of housing stock — since homes have been converted into vacation rentals — a lack of shops for day-to-day life, and a lack of jobs for anyone not involved in the tourist industry.
In the meantime, the visitors keep coming, and keep posting those delectable canal shots on Instagram. Around 90% of them are thought to be day-trippers — so although they don’t take up that ever-dwindling housing stock, they use city resources but leave virtually no money behind in the local economy.
No wonder some people call Venice the “dying city” and the “sinking city,” Simone Venturini, the city councilor for tourism, tells CNN in documentary “The Whole Story: Saving Venice.”
But while the city authorities’ actions — like the 5 euro (roughly $5) daytripper fee trialed in 2024 and set to be repeated in 2025, and the Smart Control Room, which monitors the movements of visitors to the city — have met a mixed response, plenty of other Venetians are taking their own steps to preserve life in the city as they know it.
What’s more, many of them are working with visitors, hoping to allay the damage caused by mass tourism with more sustainable projects.
In 2018, Emanuele Dal Carlo launched Fairbnb — a platform for vacation rentals owned strictly by local residents.
One of the major reasons for the exodus of Venetians to the mainland in recent years is the dearth of housing stock in the city. There are currently 8,322 Airbnb listings in Venice according to Inside Airbnb, 77% of which are entire properties. Two thirds of hosts have multiple listings –— meaning they’re not just renting out their spare room, or their late nonna’s apartment.
“We have nothing against private property, but if you rent 20 houses only to tourists, then you become a problem for your community,” says Dal Carlo, who is one of the tens of thousands of Venetians who have left the city for the mainland, a 10-minute train ride (plus ferry ride to the city center) away.
Fairbnb is a similar platform — but all its rentals are owned by local residents, and owners are capped on the number of properties they can advertise.
What’s more, 50% of the platform fees are channeled into an on-the-ground project in the destination they are visiting.
Tourists may feel that they’re not doing much harm by renting a regular apartment for a few days, but with a rapidly depleting housing stock for locals, Dal Carlo warns that there’s a tipping point.
“There’s not going to be another Venice,” he says. “Once you have helped change this place forever, it’s not coming back.”
Keeping ancient traditions alive
Other residents fight decline by keeping traditions going. Elena Almansi practices voga alla veneta, the stand-up rowing technique used by Venetians to navigate the lagoon for centuries. A competitor in Venice’s regular regattas, she’s one of a group of women offering rowing lessons with Row Venice, a sustainable tourism initiative which takes visitors on trips through the canals of the city, seeing its buildings the way they were meant to be seen: from the water.
Then there’s Matteo Silverio, whose startup, Rehub, takes waste materials from the famous glassblowing process on Murano, and upcyles it, using a 3D printer to turn it into artistic creations, including crockery.
Another person taking up the baton is Michela Bortolozzi, a designer who had lived abroad but returned to her native city during the pandemic. Realizing she wanted to stay and buffer the community, she opened a shop, now called Relight Venice, where she makes products that look like souvenirs but give you pause for thought.
Her signature products are candles and soaps taking the form of the architectural flourishes of the Venetian gothic architecture. She started off by making lollipops using the pattern of the Doge’s Palace’s famous colonnade.
“That was the question: you want to consume it or keep it?” she asks.
“My point is that Venice is as beautiful as my product — much more so. Don’t consume Venice because we cannot rebuild or re-buy it.”
She hopes that other young people will open similar businesses. “If we can fight, we can stay,” she says.
The clock is ticking
Is it not already too late to save Venice? Not according to Fabio Carrera, whose Venice Project Center at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts has been studying the city’s problems since 1988. Born in Venice, he splits his time between Italy and the US.
“I think enough people realize that the [tourism] card has been overplayed now and there’s going to be some sort of retrenching,” he says, mentioning the recent protests in destinations like Mallorca and the Canary Islands as examples of local communities pushing back.
“I’m oddly optimistic,” he says.
Carrera’s team studies ways to improve the liveability of the city, from introducing boat routes for deliveries in order to cut down on moto ondoso (the waves produced by boats which slap against and weaken the city foundations) to looking at the potential for a microalgae farm in the lagoon.
The lagoon is of course Venice’s blessing and curse. It was the water that allowed the city to become one of the most formidable maritime powers of the medieval and renaissance periods, and found the Republic of Venice — still to this day the world’s longest-lasting republic.
But new canals cut through the lagoon during the industrial age, increasing maritime traffic and rising water levels due to climate change all mean that the city is flooding easier and more frequently than ever before.
In 2020, Venice saw the debut of the MOSE flood barriers, which had been in the works since 1988. But already the barriers — which were designed to be raised a handful of times each year — are in frequent use, especially during the fall and winter. In its first 14 months, the system was used 33 times.
Not only does this have sweeping cost implications — the barriers cost around 200,000 euros ($206,000) to raise every time — but there are knock-on effects for the lagoon, which is “designed” by nature to flush itself out twice a day. Closing the barriers also means closing off access to the port, which is one of the most important in Italy.
But while scientists are studying how to handle the lagoon, Carrera is looking at more practical issues to combat Venice’s major social problem: the lack of residents. For starters, he thinks a better transport system would help attract people to live in Venice.
“It could make a big difference if we had, say, a subway system which was talked about for a while,” he says. ”You could live in Venice and work on the mainland and get there real quick. On the mainland around Venice, there are plenty of jobs, hi tech jobs — all the stuff we’re talking about bring here already, is there.”
Dal Carlo agrees that attracting people who have nothing to do with tourism to live in Venice is key. “I think it’s important that we are trying to attract people, or to maintain here people that are clever, entrepreneurial because that is in the genes of the city,” he says, adding that Venice was never “a city of shop owners and renters. That’s what it’s become.”
Bortolozzi believes that responsible tourism can help. “I think it is important that if people from abroad meet a local person to get to know the culture, get to know the tradition, get to know our problem and our happiness… he can maybe enjoy Venice in a nice way and maybe help us to preserve it,” she says.
Cesare Perris, who owns Squero San Isepo, one of the last boatyards in the city, fears it might be too late to help Venice — but adds that, if it isn’t, it could be huge. He quotes a friend, who likes to say that saving Venice is the same as saving the world from mass tourism:
“If you find a way to have tourists in Venice that don’t kill the city, we maybe find the method to save all the cities of the world.”