02/13/2024

Crowded for Carnival, Venice Attempts to Turn Back the Clock on Over-tourism

COVID-era travel restrictions have ended - for good for bad in this ancient city

Along the banks of the Grand Canal, smartphone-wielding tourists jostled for position, capturing the elegantly masked figures of Carnival. The tourists scrummed with commuters for precious space aboard Vaporetto water buses. "Let me through!," barked one elderly Venetian, claiming a seat amid a sea of foreigners. Nearby, city sanitary workers roamed the streets, toting sawdust and complaining of unpleasant finds.

For Venice, it's a sign of returned times. A COVID-19 pandemic-era reprieve has ended in a city whose residents both love and loathe tourists, who drop $3 billion annually but leave behind 70,000 tons of trash and urine-sprayed streets and take the occasional nighttime joyride in a commandeered gondola.

Beset by devastating floods, Venice erected an engineering marvel of metallic barricades that can rise and lower in its inlets to protect the palazzos, piazzas and churches. Now, responding to residents’ fears that Venice is becoming a glorified water park, this lagoon city that has drawn awestruck visitors since the Middle Ages is seeking to become a laboratory for how to deal with a modern ill: tourists inundating "Instagrammable" destinations from Savannah, Ga., to Hallstatt, Austria.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.