UK Edition
Venetians deliver blunt message to tourists: 'You are ruining our city'
An anonymous group of Venetians has delivered a blunt message to the millions of tourists who descend on the Italian lagoon city each year – get lost.
A number of posters appeared in the World Heritage-listed city this week bearing, in English, the words: “Tourists Go Away!!! You Are Destroying This Area.”
They were pasted onto walls in the Castello district of Venice, which encompasses the old Arsenal ship-building area and is popular with visitors.
The flyers sparked a debate online about whether Venice can continue to deal with the huge numbers of people who visit each year.
While many Venetians, from shop-owners to hoteliers to gondoliers, make their living from tourism, others have become increasingly exasperated with the negative effects of mass tourism on “La Serenissima” as the Venetian republic was once known.
Around 22 million tourists visit Venice each year, annoying the dwindling number of locals by crowding narrow alleyways, barging onto crowded vaporetto water buses with backpacks and wandering around during the summer in bikini tops and shorts.
The number of visitors each day – 60,000 – now exceeds the number of Venetians. On Wednesday, a Venetian woman berated a group of young foreign tourists who were about to jump into a canal for a swim. They had stripped down to their underwear and were about to jump in the water.
A video of the encounter posted on Facebook has been watched more than 150,000 times in two days.
Roberta Chiarotto told the young visitors, in English and then German, that it was illegal to swim in the canals. “It is forbidden to dive into the Grand Canal. It is not possible. This is not Disneyland; it is a city,” she said.
In an interview with a local newspaper, she said afterwards: “I acted on impulse. Did they not understand that they could be hit by a propeller? “Unfortunately, I think the message has got out that in Italy, you can do what you like.”
Also on Wednesday, two tourists were caught swimming across the Grand Canal after vaporetto drivers sounded the alarm to the authorities.
Concerns about unruly and uncouth behaviour by visitors were highlighted a few days ago when a New Zealand tourist, who was allegedly drunk, jumped off the Rialto bridge just before midnight. Instead of hitting the water, he smashed into a water taxi that was passing underneath the bridge, injuring himself and the driver.
The United Nations warned last month that Venice could be placed on the list of endangered World Heritage sites unless it bans giant cruise ships from entering the lagoon by next year. Unesco urged Venetian authorities to take measures to prohibit “the largest ships and tankers” by February.
While the cruise industry argues that it creates jobs and brings money to Venice, many locals feel that the ships are intimidatingly large and that they disgorge too many visitors at a time, none of whom need to pay for accommodation because they sleep on board.
A fact-finding mission to Venice by Unesco officials last autumn found that “the capacity of the city, the number of its inhabitants and the number of tourists is out of balance and causing significant damage”.