POSTCARD FROM VENICE - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 57

“You could organize tourism better and at the same time give other industries a chance
to exist in this town,” said Marco, the tourism expert, who listed a better Internet system,
protection of traditional artisans, emphasis on education and high-end conferences.
Several groups even challenged whether Venice should continue to enjoy the status
as a United Nations World Heritage Site if local and national leaders refuse to protect it.
UNESCO, the U.N. agency that oversees those sites, paid for a full-page advertisement
recently praising the “collective riches” of the city and warning that tourism “could help
send the vulnerable Venice to a watery grave.” UNESCO recommended a combination of
putting a physical ceiling on the number of visitors, diffusing the flow of tourists, coordin-
ating bookings and offering incentives “to make tourists more aware of the challenges.”
There was more. We spent an hour going through the need for subsidized housing for
the working class, new laws to preserve public spaces and services like health care, schools,
sanitation and high-speed Internet. The city had to concentrate on reducing expenses for
the inhabitants, to create “the political will to make things happen outside tourism. Other-
wise, Venice becomes a golden cage.”
We finally rose from the table. I was depressed by the litany of wrongs afflicting this
city, described as the “greatest surviving work of art in the world” by Evelyn Waugh.
I took refuge in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Palladio masterpiece, to re-
mind myself why Venice is known as “Serenissima,” the Most Serene One. One hour at
the church, whose exterior pillars open into the sunlit altar, paintings and sculpture, and I
recovered from the dispiriting conversation with those Venetians who had to live with the
worst of tourism. I met Bill back at our hotel, the Pensione La Calcina. It is informally
known as the Ruskin house because the English art historian John Ruskin stayed there
while researching his influential Stones of Venice, a multivolume examination of the art
and architecture of Venice published in the 1850s. The city was already considered an
open-air museum by then, thanks in part to Lord Byron's verses about the city of canals
as a decadent former beauty. “Venice once was dear/ the pleasant place of all festivity/ the
revel of the earth/ the masque of Italy.” In his classic novel Death in Venice, published on
the eve of World War I, Thomas Mann famously described the city as “half fairy tale and
half tourist trap.”
So while the current crisis was long in the making, it was now being pushed over the
edge by twenty-first-century industrial mass tourism.
The next morning as we sipped coffee looking out across the Giudecca Canal, a cruise
ship sailed right in front of us: then another and another. Bill counted five within the
hour. Passengers were lined up against the deck railings, looking down on us while amp-
lifiers blared out incomprehensible remarks about the city. This time we didn't look at
the ships as a weird oddity but from the viewpoint of the Venetians we had met over the
week—Marco, Flavio, Claudio and Matteo. They were worried about the flood of tour-
ists and the pollution from the diesel engines that are kept running while the ships are