At Easter there were 140 thousand, on Monday almost a hundred thousand: these are numbers that crushed the historic center of Venice once too many, making the head of the municipal police, Marco Agostini, shout “delirium” on Saturday morning. An unmanageable and chaotic mass that he has imposed in these hours, after the many announcements, a radical change in the tourist reception policy of the city. And while the chronicles record the return of large crowds of tourists in many Italian cities, from Rome to Florence, with day-trippers returning to storm monuments and museums, for the mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, the time is ripe to think seriously, already now, to a quota of arrivals. The booking obligation for those arriving in the lagoon will start within the summer; then from next year we will move on to the ticket.
“It is the right path and today many have understood it”, he says. The mayor’s idea is to arrive within a couple of months at a computer platform that will register the names of anyone intending to enter Venice, including the Venetians.
Initially there are no penalties, but discounts and incentives for those who book. “We will be the first in the world in this difficult experimentation”, says Brugnaro. Residents of the Metropolitan City will be exempt from any contribution. The goal is to always know, in real time, how many people gravitate at the same time between the alleys and fields of the historic center, “A revolution – points out the councilor for tourism Simone Venturini – today happens for museums, but no city does it. . We are starting on an experimental basis, because adjustments and additions will be necessary, we already know this, but it is the only possible way “. The numbers in the hands of the Municipality make it clear how unsustainable the situation is: in the face of less than 40 thousand residents who spent the holidays at home, the intersection of data from the telephone cells testifies that they slept Friday night between the Lido and the historic center 101 thousand people. Not to mention, of course, the commuter tourism, unloaded by buses and trains, which wanders around the city without staying there.
The president of Veneto himself, Luca Zaia, asked that we now move from words to deeds. “With us, tourists are always welcome and are not a problem, but Venice reopens the debate, like every spring, on access management – he observes -. We have been debating for too long and we must intervene, we cannot incur negative effects for the city”. And he adds: “the visit to Venice must be guaranteed to everyone regardless of classification and census, but the reservation must be there”.
Sided with the municipality is Confesercenti. “We share Councilor Simone Venturini’s proposal on starting immediately with reservations as an incentive tool for quality tourism, and not as an obligation – underlines Emiliano Biraku, vice president of Confesecenti Metropolitana Venezia Rovigo and Chairperson of the regional table on Digital Tourism -. We are available to participate in the round table and bring our contribution on the reorganization of the tourist offer “.
On the Easter weekend, meanwhile, the museums of the cities of art have also returned to fill up, starting with the Uffizi which with 75,700 visitors has even exceeded the numbers of Easter 2019 by 6%, when tourism was booming and not not even imagined the arrival of the Covid nightmare. Crowd in Turin, at the Egyptian Museum, where 18,643 tickets were sold from Friday to yesterday, a figure that is close to 21,750 in 2019. Full house in Naples and in the capital, both submerged by tourists, as well as in Ferrara, with 10 thousand visitors entered the places of city culture. In Venice, where the Art Biennale opens to the public on the 23rd, everything is swarming with exhibitions, initiatives and events that promise further crowds. The pandemic seems to have been closed, it is time to rethink the future.
Source: Ansa
I have been working in the news industry for over 10 years now and I have worked for some of the biggest news websites in the world. My focus has always been on entertainment news, but I also cover a range of other topics. I am currently an author at Global happenings and I love writing about all things pop-culture related.
