Michael Dawson
Right this moment’s guests to Venice are hard-pressed to disregard the locals’ frustration with their presence. In 2025, CNN lamented the impression of overtourism on this in style vacation spot “hollowed out by trip leases.”[1] In 2024, the BBC famous that the town had launched a each day entry charge, a ban on loudspeakers, and a restrict on tour group measurement – all in an effort to counteract tourism’s damaging impression on the area people.[2] Once I visited the town that very same 12 months, the Ponte di Rialto, the Canal Grande, and Piazza San Marco competed for my consideration alongside train-station graffiti urging “Vacationers” to “Go Dwelling” and strategically positioned stickers that includes smiling cartoon excrement proclaiming that “Vacationers Are Killing Venice.” Over the previous decade, Venice has been on the forefront of a backlash towards overtourism in Europe.[3] However the roots of Venice’s love-hate relationship with vacationers return a minimum of so far as the center of the 20 th century.
Anti-tourist graffiti outdoors Venice’s Santa Lucia prepare station. June 2024. Writer’s photograph
Within the Nineteen Forties, Italian officers seen Venice’s tourism attract as a key part of their postwar financial reconstruction plans. However in 1949, a visiting Australian correspondent struggled to understand how this is likely to be the case as he got here head to head with the town’s poverty. “[M]ost of the Venetians,” Douglas Wilkie noticed, “reside in hovels.” Venice resembled different Italian cities, he famous, “the place vintage magnificence, irresponsible wealth, and utter destitution go hand in hand.” On this context, Wilkie remained pessimistic. Pursuing “tourism to alleviate Italy’s financial disaster,” he steered, “appears about as useful as wringing the necks of the pigeons in St. Mark’s Sq. to feed the beggars.”[4]
Anti-tourist sticker. Venice, June 2024. Writer’s photograph
Three years later, a Texan customer equally underscored the divergence between customer and host neighborhood experiences. For vacationers, particularly kids, Edward Harte defined, the Metropolis of Canals was a spot the place “fancy reigns.” Even the existential menace of the archipelago’s “rotting foundations” and “rising high-water marks” added to the expertise. “For vacationers,” Harte steered, “there’s a ‘sundown’ high quality about all of Venice.” For “the previous a part of the town,” the place vacationers concentrated, “is within the twilight of its historical past.” Decline and degradation, from this angle, have been a part of the attract. Nevertheless, for the locals, Harte surmised, “[l]ife in Venice have to be full of frustrations.” The canals, so endearing to guests, have been a supply of infinite frustration and inefficiency for locals. Certainly, Harte concluded, “One can not envy fashionable Venetians, hanging their ragged laundry to dry over quaint however garbage-choked canals, working and dwelling in unimaginable congestion.”[5]
Native Venetians enjoying soccer, c. 1960. Supply: Paolo Monti, CC BY-SA 4.0, through Wikimedia Widespreads.
Regardless of the discrepancy between vacationer and resident expertise, metropolis officers pressed on with their makes an attempt to increase tourism. In 1959, their focus settled on the declining fortunes of Lido seashore. Accessible solely by water, it struggled to draw guests compared to seashores elsewhere alongside the Adriatic. The reply, in keeping with the town’s former chief architect, Eugenio Miozzi, was a 4-mile-long underwater vehicle tunnel. Miozzi’s supporters assured the doubters that the tunnel would facilitate the environment friendly and silent supply of much-needed guests to the seashore. Nevertheless, many Venetians balked on the proposal, suggesting it might threaten the town’s character and price way over the $9 million Miozzi predicted.[6] The challenge was shelved.
Just a few years later, the town’s gondoliers would additionally rally in defence of the town’s character and traditions. By the mid-Nineteen Sixties, roughly 400 gondolas serviced the town. They have been a far cry from the ten,000 or in order that had historically navigated the town’s canals however the gondoliers remained a strong foyer. In 1965, for instance, 54 gondoliers servicing Piazza San Marco withheld their companies to protest the town’s choice to concern 4 docking permits for motorboats – a menace to their livelihood. 4 years later a equally agitated group of gondoliers confronted arrest after taking concern with a metropolis choice to ban their use of a specific canal. In keeping with one report, the gondoliers, “broke up a metropolis council assembly, smashed an 18th Century chandelier and pulled down a waterpipe, flooding the council chambers.”[7]
Venetian Gondoliers, 1960. Supply: My Previous from Norway, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, through Wikimedia Widespread.
By the late Nineteen Sixties, the talk over the town’s financial viability brazenly pitted industrialists towards conservationists. The previous emphasised the necessity to increase the town’s port operations and develop new canals to hyperlink Venice extra successfully with central Europe. The payoff, they emphasised, could be much-needed jobs and a reversal of the town’s declining inhabitants. Some opponents countered that extra dredging would disturb the town’s tides and speed up its descent into the Adriatic. Others doubled down on the town’s reliance on tourism and “suggested turning the town right into a form of historic Disneyland, which might subsist solely on tourism.”[8]
Certainly, past conventional promoting campaigns, the town pursued a variety of idiosyncratic pro-tourism initiatives. In 1973, to “protect the town’s structure and sculpture,” officers endeavoured to dramatically cut back the town’s pigeon inhabitants “by resettling them in different cities and liberating them in wooded areas.”[9] Three years later the town hosted its second annual “Again and Forth Over the Bridges of Venice foot race.” Organized by the Regional Middle for Youth and Social Tourism, the race featured over 11,000 members, together with a turkey named Astacchino. The successful (human) participant accomplished the 7.4-mile, 47-bridge, course in roughly 40 minutes. Astacchino’s time was not recorded.[10]
Pigeons within the Piazza San Marco. Supply: I, Nattfodd, CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Commons; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Piazza_san_marco.jpg.
Nevertheless, an anti-tourism backlash was gaining momentum. Within the mid-Eighties Venice tourism official Augusto Salvadori launched a legislation imposing fines on guests who slept open air in Piazza San Marco. Eager to encourage vacationers to pay for lodging and never antagonize locals, politicians in different Italian cities embraced related measures in what grew to become referred to as a “warfare” on the “sleeping-bag individuals.” Impressed by Salvadori’s initiative, for instance, the Communist mayor of Riccione declared it unlawful for vacationers “to take a seat, sprawl or picnic on the pavement or in gardens and public parks, to sleep in parked vehicles or activate [a] sound-producing equipment with home windows and doorways left open.”[11] In 1987, Venetian authorities referred to as an “emergency assembly” to cope with unsustainable crowds. That spring over 100,000 vacationers descended upon the town on three consecutive weekends, greater than doubling the town’s inhabitants every time. This prompted officers to shut a key bridge and introduce “one-way pedestrian programs.”[12] By the tip of the last decade, inflated actual property costs had priced many Venetians out of their metropolis. Town’s inhabitants had dropped by 70% for the reason that late Nineteen Sixties. And plenty of younger Venetians now gravitated to Mestre on the mainland for leisure and social interplay. “We’re at risk of turning into a stage with out actors,” one Venetian lamented.[13]
Crowds at Venice. Supply: https://www.publicdomainpictures.internet/en/view-image.php?picture=215327&image=crowds-at-venice; Public Area.
And but the lure of overseas forex and worldwide status proved too tempting to withstand. In 1989, Venetian authorities agreed to host a Pink Floyd live performance in Piazza San Marco. Native opposition was fierce. Augusto Salvadori pointedly steered that the Piazza was an inappropriate place for a rock live performance. In response to considerations concerning the impression of music vibrations on the town’s structure, the band agreed to decrease its decibel stage by 40% and carry out on a stage floating within the lagoon roughly 200 yards from the Piazza. In the long run, it was the guests, themselves, that did probably the most harm. Officers estimated that they “left behind 300 tons of rubbish and 500 cubic meters of empty cans and bottles.” And with a dearth of obtainable bogs, “concertgoers relieved themselves on the monuments and partitions.” Public outrage – “[Y]ou’ve turned Venice into a bathroom” – compelled the resignation of the mayor and metropolis council.[14] Maybe that’s the place native activists received the thought for his or her scatologically-themed anti-tourism stickers.
Michael Dawson is Professor of Historical past at St. Thomas College the place he teaches programs on Canadian historical past, the worldwide historical past of sport and tourism, Disney and World Historical past, and the comparative historical past of nationwide identification and in style tradition in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
[1] Julia Buckley, et al, “Rising waters and overtourism are killing Venice. Now the combat is on to save lots of its soul.” CNN, Might 12, 2025, cnn.com.
[2] Adam Durbin, “Venice bans giant vacationer teams and loudspeakers,” BBC, June 1, 2024, bbc.com.
[3] For a high-quality survey of latest overtourism and its opposition, see Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Enterprise of Journey and Tourism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
[4] Douglas Wilkie, “Hope Vacationer Commerce Will Beat Poverty,” Courier-Mail [Brisbane], February 19, 1949,
[5] Edward H. Harte, “Venice Nonetheless Paradise For Vacationers However Not For Dwelling,” San Angelo Commonplace-Occasions, November 12, 1952, 1B.
[6] Eugene Levin, “Canal Metropolis Eyes Tunnel For Autos,” The Herald-Palladium [Benton Harbor, MI], April 23, 1959, Sec. 2, 14.
[7] “Support Requested by Gondoliers,” Pensacola Information Journal [Pensacola, FL], March 6, 1965, 2A; “That Does It For Gondoliers,” Evansville Press [Evansville, IN], April 30, 1965, 4; “9 Additional Gondoliers Charged,” Kitsap Solar [Bremerton, WA], August 12, 1969, 3.
[8] Dennis Redmont, “Venice Dilemma: Invading Waters,” The State [Columbia, SC], July 7, 1968, 6F.
[9] “De-Pigeoning Venice,” Solar Put up Information [San Clemente, CA], October 17, 1973, 12.
[10] “Defending Champ Holds Crown,” Rushville Republican [Rushville, IN], March 15, 1976, 2.
[11] Uli Schmetzer, “Italy says arrivederci to sleeping-bag individuals,” Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1985, Sec.4, 12.
[12] “Venice seeks methods to gradual tourism,” The Palm Seashore Put up [Palm Beach, FL], Might 4, 1987, 8A.
[13] Robert Fox, “Unhealthy information from the Rialto,” The Every day Telegraph [London, UK], March 18, 1988, 23.
[14] Dave Lifton, “35 Years In the past: Pink Floyd Brings Down Venice’s Authorities,” UltimateClassicRock.com, up to date July 15, 2019, https://ultimateclassicrock.com/pink-floyd-venice-1989/
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