I was there a few year ago with my wife and kids. We stayed in an airbnb on Venice. You can spend the day around the outskirts and avoid most of the cruise ship tourists. At night you have the island to yourself to explore. We also visited Murano which was almost deserted.
I actually enjoyed Venice much more than Florence.
Italy is a big place and there's tons to see. Make Venice just a couple days of your trip and you'll probably enjoy it.
(Aside, to me it's tour groups that are the worst, with bus loads and cruise loads being the most egregious example. I've seen this everywhere I've been a tourist. A destination that can easily handle a stream of individuals or families becomes overwhelmed when 20+ tourists arrive all at once. Venice would definitely be helped by a metering system.)
Skip them both and go to Sicily. Some of the nicest and generous people I have ever met I met there. Outside a few places, there are basically no tourists and rural Sicily is beautiful with no english being spoken. The wines coming from Etna are much more interesting and cheaper than anything from Tuscany or further north also.
I was there around 2000, my wife was back there around 2012. I echo the comments nearby that going out for a walk at night, after the day tourists leave, allows you to imagine the city of the late middle ages that's familiar from novels and history. Venice had strong downsides -- there really were too many tourists, and I was there mainly for the Biennele -- but the visit was worth it for those nighttime walks.
Just be sure to pair it up with somewhere(s) else.
Yet many places around the world are un-visited which 1. you can visit and 2. are very cheap. We think Venice is a big deal because some ass-hat told us it is a big deal.
Carthage is 800 years older than Venice and to some extent it has a more interesting civilization. Tunisia also has significant Roman heritage. It's pretty close to Italy so the climate is quite a match but you can go and check the desert.
Here is another one: Egypt. Enjoy both the pharaoh and the islamic heritage.
Plenty of places to see that are reasonably safe. Bonus point: Probably the whole package will cost less than your daily life in your average developed country.
But what is left of Carthage? A modest number of average-preserved ruins of a later Roman provincial town. There are probably 10 of those in Italy alone, if not more. If I can get that in a non-touristy southern Italian province, why go to Tunisia for it? It ain't gonna be that much cheaper for safe and non-trashy accommodation and transportation.
I was there just last December and there weren't that many tourists. Didn't see a single cruise ship. Walking around Venice during late evenings was pretty nice as very few others were doing it. I'd see another person every 300m or so.
>And now they’re being forced to pay up like tourists too. Many business owners have abandoned the old two-tier pricing system that charged visitors more for food and services, meaning locals now pay the same inflated prices that outsiders do.
That's the problem right there. Such pricing should be enforced by the city plus an entry "visa" style payment...
Or, to stimulate the competition somehow, to drive the price down for everyone.
I think your "visa" sugestion was a joke, but I'm afraid that the sarcastic nature may get lost and the message may be misinterpreted and taken on its face value.
Venice is a very popular destination spot. It should raise the barrier to entry accordingly, to attract fewer, more lucrative, tourists. It should also use the money to protect the residents of the city, and its buildings and monuments.
>A large vessel pays up to 30,000 euros a day to dock in the harbor
In situations of overcrowding, it seems the obvious solution is simply to raise taxes and fees, in order to lower the number of tourists. This would raise more revenue from each tourist while cutting maintenance costs which are driven by volume.
Except that they specifically said "raise more revenue from each tourist" and "while cutting maintenance costs". Both of those seem like they would negate your point.
That's not necessarily true. Like with pricing anything else, the maximum total revenue is at a price that's neither 'too low' or 'too high'. And the residents of Venice seem willing to forego some revenue for less tourists anyways.
Obviously you can't raise the prices to infinity. There is a certain price/quantity where you optimize your global revenue. That price coincides with the city working at full capacity (ie: getting every possible penny).
An alternative could be to simply ban cruise ships, or limit their size, if the problem is that cruise ships themselves compete with the local economy for food, lodging and entertainment.
You missed the point of the piece, which is not about overcrowding at all. How exactly is trying to make even more money from tourism going to halt the problems that this article postulates are from the insane amount of tourist money?
A few years ago I witnessed a cruise ship nearly collide with the parking garage next to the Intrepid museum. It only stopped with four feet to spare. They were scrambling to evacuate everyone from the sub that shares the same berth.
Venice's problem seems obvious to me -- there are no roads. And you can't bike or use a scooter since the alleyways are narrow, zig-zagging, and full of stairs. The only modes of transportation are to walk or to take the ferry to one of it's very few of stops.
It's a casuality of modernity, there is no use for a densely packed city built on a dozen slabs of rock in the middle of the sea.
It takes something like 30 minutes to walk from one end of Venice to the other, so alternate modes of transport are not necessary (handicapped accessibility is an issue, though).
Completely agree. What they really need is to rip out a bunch of those old buildings so they make room for a good interstate highway with a cloverleaf exit near San Marcos. That would really modernize the city.
Old Venice is still the worlds largest car free city. No matter how many tourists the city receives a year, no one drives around in cars in this compact and very pedestrian friendly urban environment. Water filled canals are obviously not a good solution for most cities. Cities planned for private cars, seems like a really bad idea after walking around a few days in Venice.
I loved Venice when I first visited, almost two decades ago. I lived there for a few months. Went back again just for a week a little while later, around 2005. Sounds like tourism has gotten way bigger even just since then. I don't think the giant cruise ships started coming in until later in the 00s. (There were small ships, but I remember reading about some change in that decade that started allowing the gigantic ones. The city later tried to ban them but has not been successful.)
I always wanted to go back, but I wonder if it's worth it or if I should just remember when I was there originally.
It's worth it. Away from San Marco, Rialto and the main drag between them, Venice is not the overtouristed hellscape that it's made out to be by sensationalist media.
It's kind of odd to call it the death of a city when the place is jammed with people, just because they are the wrong type of people. Bit like saying Ibiza is dead in the summer because it's packed with people visiting Ibiza.
Alternatively, it's like calling Disneyworld a city. Lots of people there during the day, lots of people staying overnight, but not many people truly living there.
Why is people living there something we should want though? Lots of people love visiting Venice. Relatively few people actually want to live there (at least, at the price it would cost to balance the number of tourists one permanent resident would have to displace). It seems like Venice generates the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people by acting as a tourist destination; isn't that something we should celebrate?
Surely something is lost too though? Part of what makes Venice an attraction is its unique history, a product of many thousands of residents living there for hundreds of years. The world's cultural heritage is diminished when a place like that ceases to be a living city.
It's not a city or a town, it's a special organization provided for by Florida law that can "enter into contracts; own both real and personal property; adopt by-laws, rules and regulations and orders; sue and be sued; obtain funds by borrowing; issue bonds; and impose assessments and levy taxes on property within the district."
When I was staying in Venice for a bit, smoking hash in the "staff accomidations" of a hollowed out mansion turned hostel, the optimistic gossip was that Disney was thinking of buying the whole place and making it into a park.
People have been saying that Venice only has a few more years for over 200 years now since the end of the republic, and it is still there, and still breathtakingly beautiful.
However, I have been to Venice 3 times in the last 10 years. People here arguing that Venice is "full of people" have not visited the city, but only the cities attractions. It is as simple as that. Even in the peak season when the city center is massively overcrowded by tourists, you (literally) only have to walk 10 minutes from Piazza San Marco to find yourself basically alone on lovely squares in the middle of the day. It is at the same time extremely beautiful and eerie, because you suddenly realize that the square is not only empty because there are no tourists there, but also because most of the apartment windows are blind, with nobody living behind them. Offside the tourist routes, Venice largely feels like a ghost town.
It is indeed sad, but if you stay in the city as a tourist long enough, you get why locals are leaving. The last time, we stayed there for 10 days in a small apartment, and starting with day 2, our hatred for the masses coming off the cruise ships like a biblical locust plague grew exponentially to a point where we completely avoided the city center between 10 in the morning and 9 in the evening.
Are the cruise ships really the problem compared to tourists trying to stay in the city? The cruise ship visitors will crowd around the main attractions but at the end of the day they will go back on the ship and not compete with locals for housing.
I guess it's still hard to live in a city that has half of its streets flooded by a mass of people and many of its shops and cafes converted into tourist traps. It's a serious problem caused by globalization, higher standards of living and cheaper transport: there are places that are becoming unlivable due to the sheer mass of tourism.
And it's a problem that is very hard to solve, because a city must, almost by definition, be open; and because curbing tourism- even if it were feasible- means saying no to a huge amount of cash.
Amsterdam has taken step to curb the excessive growth of tourist shops in the city center. Tourism is fine, but the city has to remain livable for the locals. They don't want to turn into a tourist amusement park, which I guess Venice has already become.
Plus, the tourist from the ships contribute to the higher prices of everything. And they don't even sleep (and sometimes eat, because the cruise is offering the meals) in the city, so they just use the space.
The time I went a few years ago it was pretty dead. I'm not a big Venice fan. It's a pretty city that's worth seeing before it sinks away, but I enjoy other cities for repeat visits.
I mentioned in another comment a few weeks ago that if I wanted to visit Venice again I would stay in Rovinj, Croatia and take the local ferry over for the day. When I went to Venice we took the ferry over and stayed in Venice, and after seeing the Venice highlights really just wanted to go back to Crotia.
Early morning is gorgeous, we stayed before near Arsenale and I would go on a run every morning around 6am. It is the most beautiful city I ever been in a that time. It is a tourists attraction mainly now but still running alone through it is pretty amazing.
Are the locals leaving or are these rental properties? I know there are a lot of places in the world where the wealthy will buy property and then only go there for vacations.
I was amazed at how packed the tourist areas were, but even more amazed at how tranquil much of the rest of the city was. We found ourselves wandering around more or less alone a lot of the time. It was fantastic, and completely unlike what we had been warned about from people who had stuck to the busy areas.
I visited Venice about ten years ago. Definitely true that some parts are crowded and some parts empty. I visited the Jewish quarter (Venetian ghetto) midday and it was completely deserted. There was a closed Jewish museum, a run-down synagogue in need of repair, also closed, and a Holocaust memorial. But not a single sole in sight! I was completely alone on the square for several minutes.
Same here. I also visited the Jewish quarter and it was absolutely empty. There was also a painting nearby that depicted how it was centuries ago, filled with people, mothers, and children. Astonishing that it is completely deserted now.
I really, really, really want to do a working stint in Venice. Just rent one of those apartments, VPN in to work and code all day.
I know actually living in Venice is a challenge. It's a long walk to run any errand, and if you need something delivered it has to come by boat, on a schedule, and so you have to have your act together.
But, if you mess up? You have to eat out. In Italy. There are worse things in the world.
Really, all I need is wifi, which I hear Venice has, and for my 3 kids to be passable swimmers.
I'm not sure why I'm making this association, but I feel that what's happening to Venice is systematic of larger, "flashy, saccharine surface" societal changes, fed by the internet and social media.
Venice (and Barcelona, also mentioned in the article) is basically the perfect city for the Instagram age. You can come in, spend less than a couple hours there, and pretty much hit all the major "checkboxes" and photo sites: ride in a gondola, take some pictures in St. Mark's Square, etc. All the incredible history about how the city was actually built, it's role in the Middle Ages, etc. are easy to pass over.
This is pretty random, but it reminds me of this video, https://youtu.be/6abePkXncCM , by a well known youtube baker who is lamenting that high-quality baking content for recipes that actually work are getting killed by slickly produced videos that are literal eye and ear candy but are useless and aren't even feasible. It's as if we're all looking out for the shortest, quickest "dopamine bump".
It said the population peaked in 1500s, then again in the 1970s.
This city was mostly a spectacle well before Instagram.
If anything there are way more people no longer living in poverty and capable of being foreign-traveling tourists than ever before + population growth. They need to go somewhere so they hit up the same small group of great places that was there before the wealth and population growth.
I don't think social media is the primary driver, because I had similar thoughts about travel 10 years ago.
I would say a few things are factors for some of what is described:
1. It's relatively cheap and easy to travel. This wasn't as much the case in the past.
2. Population boom of millennials and onwards. I have a boomer mom and a pre-war dad who was born in Europe. They both see international travel as a Major Barrier with a lot of friction. I remember that seeming true in my childhood too. The younger cohorts have grown up with it being relatively cheap and easy.
3. The EU. Go to the touristy part of a touristy town in Europe, I guarantee you will hear the national language and native accent of every EU member state. I can't imagine it being like that several decades ago. It also drives tourism from outside Europe because they can enter in one country and cross over to another without hassle.
It's just the logical evolution of tourism as a business activity. Capitalist companies must grow, and tourism companies grow by delivering more and more tourists.
That's why travelling gets cheaper: economies of scale (block-booking on planes, etc). That's why VISAs and barriers are removed: because there is yet another industry lobbying to remove friction.
Tourism companies gotta grow like any other company out there. We just notice them more because their production line is literally on our streets.
Venice has had too many tourists for the last fifty years. And fifty years ago the tourists were pretty much as you describe, there for St Marks Square.
The bigger change in recent times is the decline in industry. Globalisation makes a big difference. If you had a factory in Venice needing new plant and machinery, what would you do? You would sell up and move to Croatia or China.
Tourism and an industry can be made to work, for instance London's West End has been the place for television post production for many decades. That is an industry that anchors a wider set of services and then on the periphery of that you get your tourist sites, e.g. Carnaby Street, Regent Street, Oxford Street. There is still this working core that is also served by different cafe's and bars to what the tourists go to, although there is some overlap. Underground trains and buses enable people to commute in and the core industry that is there cannot survive elsewhere. Try opening a post production edit suite in Leeds and see if any broadcasters come your way.
Leeds is actually where Channel 4 are relocating to, but the gravitational pull of London's West End makes that difficult, something like 80% of the staff are leaving rather than moving up North.
Venice is stuck in that the proper industry, e.g. the metal bashing stuff, just does not need to be there. It can't survive there and the transport links in for commuters are not what you get in most cities. The era of city states and mankind being mostly travelling by sea or river are not coming back. Venice can't monopolise silk, fancy things made of glass, lace or anything else that has to be made. They should have built some services fifty years ago to replace these specialisations with new specialisations.
It is a tourist attraction now, that is not going to change. The people able to sell up and move should be lucky there is some AirBnB property tycoon willing to pay top dollar for their property.
> 80% of [Channel4] staff are leaving rather than moving up North.
80% of staff are threatening to leave, they are not resigning en-masse. This is the same stuff that happened to the BBC a few years ago when they relocated a big chunk of activity to Manchester (or rather Salford, to be precise). Lots of people moaned, some people resigned, others started living on commuter trains, others just moved (and found out there are no White Walkers in the North after all), others were just hired here. Now the sector in Manchester is booming.
It could well turn out that Channel 4 made a mistake in choosing Leeds (it's badly connected, much smaller than Manchester, and without a local tradition like the Granada legacy), but it has nothing to do with London being some sort of quintessential centre of all TV activity in the land.
It's less about social media and more about China and India growing their middle class. More and more people now have the disposable income to travel, it's more than likely that they will flock to the most famous sites.
The entire city is most definitely not a tourist trap. There's literally a beaten path, and you can literally walk ~10 min from it and be in a modestly touristy area, akin to most modestly popular non-top-50 tourist destinations. And 10 min away from that you'll find even fewer tourists, and still plenty of Venice to see.
There was an onion tourism article recently about how the ONLY way to experience Chicago like a REAL Chicago native is to get a job there, find an apartment and move there.
There's no "authentic" tourist experience relative to how locals live. You're not going to vote for town council in the week you're there. You don't have well informed opinions about the state of things. You're just eating some cool snacks and visiting pretty/interesting locations.
The data in this article is extremely suspect if not flat out wrong, which makes me question everything else. First the article claims that the city’s population rallied in the 1970s. Later a graph caption states that its population is less than 1/3 of the 1950s. But the graph itself shows that neither of these things are true- the population has been declining nearly monotonically since 1901, with no rise in the 1970s and, at most, a 50% decline since 1950. It just goes to show that modern editors need to be data-conscious in addition to looking at grammar.
You are partially misreading the graph, although with their poor presentation I can understand why.
Each bar on the graph looks to be a certain population count/census, and presumably they were conducted less often in the first part of the century. If you mouse over the bars on the graph they tell you what year they were conducted in.
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The point here, is that in spite of the X-Axis being labeled as 1901-2018 (which would make you think the bars are even time intervals), they are not.
The population peak, while nearly at the left side is actually in 1951 according to the mouseover text. So the 1/3rd of 1950s population claim is accurate.
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> and though it rallied again to near 16th century levels in the 1970s, today there are just one third as many Venetians as 50 years ago.
I suspect this may be typo, as if you flip the 5 and 7 it would be about accurate. "...in the 1950s, today there are just one third as many Venetians as 70 years ago."
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I agree that none of this inspires particular confidence in their editing or fact-checking.
Thanks! On my phone I didn’t think to click on the individual graph bars. The visualization is wildly misleading if you don’t see the text on each individual bar.
Does a city built in a lagoon with canals for streets have a place in the future world of rising seas? Maybe it's a blessing that residents are leaving because there are too many tourists. Better the gradual exodus than thousands dead and the rest being plucked off the top of their house by a helicopter when the next superstorm arrives.
It is sad, but I don't think anyone is taking climate change seriously enough to reverse it... so I don't see any outcome other than the Venice of today becoming the Atlantis of tomorrow.
In the car-free historical center, the wait for a spot on a “vaporetto”—the canal-borne local version of a bus—can be up to 20 minutes, despite the 6 euro ($7) fare.
That's why you don't buy a single-use ticket and go for the day pass instead, which is €20-ish.
My SO works seasonally in Venice, so I visit the city every year and while it's overflowing with tourists, they seem to be concentrated mostly around Rialto - with districts like Cannaregio more or less free from crowds.
When I was going to Venice for the first time one of my co-workers gave me one little advice "when you will go out of train station, go right not left" and it was a fantastic advice. Route to the left is main route to Piazza San Marco, it's almost always overcrowded, with a lot of shady sellers, lots of shops selling cheap, china made souvenirs etc. pretty much all the things that you most likely want to avoid. On top of that advice I am also adding my own: "get lost in Venice", just go in the other direction and I will guarantee you that in 5 minutes you will end up alone in a beautiful place with some small restaurant, seemingly waiting just for you. Venice is still beautiful and worth visiting, just don't spent so much time on visiting places from the guides, get lost and you will find gems that you wouldn't find otherwise.
Absolutely, and if you just wander around without a map, you will get lost very quickly. But you will not regret it.
My tips for anyone who wants to visit Venice: please don't support the cruise ships destroying this beautiful city, just use the train. Come for at least 5 days. Try to slowly walk through every quarter of the city (you will need 5-10 days for that). Buy a week ticket for the vaporettos and ride the vaporetto up and down canal grande in the evening. Don't dress like a stereotypical tourist. Please behave. If you are American or Chinese, actively try to lower your voice. Leave your smartphone and/or your camera at your apartment / hotel, everything you will be photographing has been photographed, painted or drawn at least a million times already. And, most importantly: don't ride the gondolas, you will get screwed financially.
It's not about being recognized as a tourist. It's about judging people by their actions, instead of how they look. All the other things mentioned are actions that could be considered rude or abrasive. Someone should not have to dress like you for you to treat them well, for that is the fault of the prejudiced.
Might be more pragmatic to not dress like a tourist rather than to convert the entire population to your philosophy about not ever judging by appearance.
I'll also add that the reason that you wouldn't want to dress like a tourist is to mislead locals about what you actually are, which is a tourist. Judging you substantively would mean judging you as one of the tourists that makes them want to leave the town they grew up in.
> I think better advice to the advisor would be to not judge people for how they are dressed.
This would be strange advice, because you clearly would judge someone going to a high-end restaurant in a bathing suit, to a funeral in nothing but underpants or to a wedding wearing a SS uniform. These are ridiculous examples, of course, but they appear so ridiculous because one of the fabrics of any society is that on certain occasions, you should try to tune down your individuality as best as possible and try to blend in with others. In my opinion, visiting a foreign country as a guest is one of these occasions.
The issue is that pickpockets and others looking to target more "naive" tourists will be less likely to target you if you're dressed less like a tourist.
IDK, I feel like it's a lack of respect for the culture you're going to to not try to respect the dress code of the place you are in. In France, Americans are usually the worst offenders, wearing sweatpants and pool shorts in public.
Reversing that argument, you'd probably feel that French tourists wearing monokinis (or kids not having a full on bathsuit) on the beach in the US don't respect your culture, even though that's perfectly acceptable back home.
Actually, I'm purely merit based in my judgments. You can wear a leaf on a string and water wings for all I care. Then again, I also don't much care what prejudiced people think of me. I just go about my business feeling sorry for them.
I feel like one of the nice things about the US, at least the urban areas, is you can present yourself however you'd like. There is no dress code. This may be why Americans sometimes fail to present themselves properly in other countries - we can get away with virtually anything here. Though I may be biased to the West Coast.
Well, it’s sort of conservative, right? You can present any way you like so long as you’re not topless, for instance.
Usually the weird rules we have for ourselves are never visible to us so I’d be somewhat hesitant to make the claim of being open to things.
In fact, if I think about it, you’d probably be stared at and feel like a spectacle and probably unwelcome with a toga, a kilt, or a lungi (even the formal variant). I don’t even think you could wear the top end of some of those clothing varieties and go to many places in SF (generally a downmarket place for clothes).
If someone wears a kilt or a toga, people here might say to their friend "hey, that person is wearing a kilt/toga". That's about the extent of it. I see people wearing such things semi-frequently and think very little of it. Same with burkas, bathing suits, pretty much everything except "nudity", but even that is acceptable at large events in SF.
This is one of those things you've got to do to experience, mate. I don't know what to tell you. I live in SF and have lived in a few places in the world.
The other guy put it really well. It will increase the friction you experience.
The gamut might be wider but "however you'd like" is a bit of a stretch. Wearing traditional Arabian dress -- for men or women -- would almost certainly increase the amount of friction you experience in a day. Also, a frivolous example; women are pretty rarely topless on mainstream beaches even in CA.
I changed that to "stereotypical" tourist above, but I agree that this is still a bit harsh.
What I meant was that: if you are visiting a town in a foreign country, it would at least be polite to research beforehand how locals dress and what is considered rude, inappropriate or simply tasteless.
Not what I was expecting at all, I wish people dressed that well on vacation. I thought you were going to link to someting more like https://goo.gl/maps/AnzFYfXAuCDt2rDD8
That said, all of these measures you describe are a bit much. There are a million ways to tell that somebody's a tourist, are you going to pretend you're there to raise VC?
People don't want to do laundry on their vacation. And unless you're rich and have porters lugging around massive luggage with carefully packed fashionable clothes, people are also space-constrained
So, they optimize for comfortable, quick-dry, wrinkle-free clothes so they can maximize exploration and energy.
That's......what you have to do when you are spending your limited vacation time to see the world.
Part of this is definitely a snobby european mindset. Europeans get 5-6 weeks of vacation a year, and burn 4 of those on August so they are used to LOONG consecutive getaways, and structure their lives accordingly.
The rest of the world (And I don't mean America, I mean the entire rest of the non-European world) doesn't have that luxury.
Maybe it is just you who doesn't have long vacations.
My relatives from Canada are constantly complaining how they have only 10 days of vacation per year yet every year entire family takes road trips that last 5-6 weeks.
Every second year they come to visit Europe.
If they take unpaid leave that means they are compensated well enough so they can afford to take unpaid leave. What is the difference between having paid vacation days or having a salary so high that you can afford unpaid leave?
I don't see why research is necessary for most destinations. The key factor is just wearing pants. Unless you're actually near a beach. That seems really hard for a lot of tourists, but I think just wearing jeans instead of cargo shorts or board shorts resolves most of the problem with tourist garb.
Fanny pack, ugly shirt, shorts with too many pockets, shoes (which look silly with shorts). Can spot the typical American tourist from a mile away. Euro tourists look a bit different, but still almost always dress the same as each other.
The gist of it is, tourists typically are carrying way more shit than they need and look silly more often than not. It's also nice to just walk around with the same amount of shit as you would if you were walking around your home city.
You can always spot German tourists when traveling abroad. They are the ones with the extremely technical hiking clothing wandering around the museum.
I’m only kind of kidding. That is to say tourists look like tourists everywhere because they are different. The better advice than “don’t dress like a tourist” is “don’t expect where you are traveling to be the same as where you are from. Take some time to see if you can pick out what they are.”
Fanny packs aren’t really an American thing. Actually, you’ve basically described Australian tourists in Bali in my experience.
In Europe at least, nine times out of ten, that tourist is not American. We just aren’t very numerous compared to Europeans in Europe (don’t you know most of us don’t even have passports). Russians on the other hand....
I love Venice and I love taking photos of things. It isn't about the thing. It's about capturing the feeling. One photo I have brings to mind a rainy day where I got lost there, soaked through my jacket, and my umbrella inverted. I can still remember the wind whipping through my hair before the storm, and the feeling of pleasant dryness when I got home. And all I need for that is a half-assed non-horizontal-horizon photo.
I find the tourist snobbery amusing. If you’re a tourist, what are you going to dress like apart from like a tourist? As to your smart phone, are you saying that the locals don’t have their nose buried in a smart phone, like everyone else? Are the different quarters of Venice sufficiently different from each other (and from other european cities) to be worth visiting? As to gondolas—if you don’t ride one, what’s the point of going to Venice? You can get great Italian food and ride a ferry through filthy water in New York—if you’re taking the trouble to go to Venice, you’re there for the gondolas.
I used to think like lqet, and my travel habits reflected that, traveling to obscure places (at least for an American) to "get away from the crowds."
But the more I thought about it, the less comfortable I was with that line of thinking. What IS wrong with taking a picture that isn't 100% original? Is taking a picture of Piazza San Marco just as bad as a landscape photographer getting that "perfect shot" of Antelope Canyon? or Mesa Arch? [1][2]
What if you are an American with very limited vacation time each year? Or you just want an "easy" vacation? Why is one style of travel better than the other? Does a place having a ton of visitors make it worse to visit? Or is there still value to going?
I'm just rambling at this point, but I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts since I'm not sure what to feel.
Agree and scientifically we remember by remembering. A photo on my phone is enough to remember the feeling of being there. Even if it was over crowded and i ended up paying 14 euro for a espresso.
> I used to think like lqet, and my travel habits reflected that, traveling to obscure places (at least for an American) to "get away from the crowds."
that seems odd to say the least. it seems highly probable to me that popular tourist attractions are popular because they're desirable to go to. sure, there's some marketing drum up in there but there's something seriously weird about going to less desirable places solely to get away from the crowds. it's almost as if you're signaling you're somehow superior or better by doing something other people aren't doing, even if that thing is objectively worse. value signaling made manifest via tourism or something.
Famous/extremely popular sights are often less rewarding because they are so famous/popular: for example, it's highly unlikely you'll be genuinely astonished by the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, because a) you've already seen it a million times and b) there's a jostling mob of other tourists five rows deep around it, so you can barely see the damned thing.
This is why the "traveller" (vs tourist) holy grail is to find places that are genuinely impressive and spacious enough to still be enjoyable.
that's fair, but i'm thinking more things like machu picchu which, while uber popular, are probably pretty hard to find in less amazing versions.
so yeah, while certainly only limited to a few places, i think there's a class of spots that one cannot necessarily reproduce in a lite version. so especially if one has limited travel opportunities, i think they're worth going to. venice is probably one of those although admittedly i haven't been.
There are plenty of good things that haven’t been made attractions and put on the tourist map. See this a fair bit where places in Australia will have big car parks with tourist busses coming in and out all day, setup with foreign language signs. But then have similar places nearby with none of that.
I don't really think I understand the question. I usually make an effort on trips to avoid crowds. Why? Because I want to. It's not better. I don't like crowds.
I also drink coffee without milk. I drink matcha with milk. I wear a garish array of brightly-colored button-down shirts. I cross my z's when writing. None of these choices is correct. They are my choices.
No version of tourism is wrong unless it's contributing to a documented problem in which case it's obviously wrong. Tourism is recreation, no matter how eagerly it pretends to be education.
Well, since you asked... My thoughts are, feel what you feel. Nothing wrong with any feelings. It’s what you do with them that counts.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking the same picture other people took. If you liked it, you like it. You’re not harming anyone by taking a damn picture. Obviously as a tourist I try to be respectful and to learn a subset of the language while I’m there.
But hey, if you only have a week off there’s nothing wrong with going to the same place in Antelope Canyon as others went. It’s popular for a reason!
Definitely agree on the snobbery - it is amusing that some tourists think they'll fool someone into thinking they're a local by dressing less comfortably. You're not fooling anyone. Just be yourself and dress 'politely' and comfortably.
As for the gondolas, that's a hard pass for me. I've been to Venice twice, and was definitely not there for the gondolas. Not even for 'great Italian food' - it's not really that great at my price point, unless I travel 15-20 min away from the usual tourist sights. I'm simply there for Venice. For the canals, for the layout, for the architecture, for the history. Canal-side, I can see all I need to see from the vaporettos.
> As to your smart phone, are you saying that the locals don’t have their nose buried in a smart phone, like everyone else?
You're in town for just a few days, specifically to see the scenery, the locals aren't. This is the part where you're best off being more like a tourist.
Gondolas seemed like a tourist trap to me. Super expensive and you end up with bored drivers that are mostly just sitting and their phone and chatting to each other.
Yeah, it's strange. People think that tourists from cruise ships are destroying the city because they visit for several hours, but then they recommend that tourists should stay in the city for several days?
What's always funny to me is that tourists who are part of the derided "masses" always seem to have a lot more common with locals than the "elite traveler" types who preoccupy themselves with finding an "authentic local experience." It's hard to truly connect with the common people when you look down on the common people in your own culture.
There is actually a public gondola that you can take across the canal grande for just a few euros, which is a cool way to at least say you've been in one without getting screwed.
I am living in a fairly touristic European town and have visited plenty of the main tourist towns across Europe over the last decade. Without any intention to be judgmental, I can safely say that in general, Americans and middle-aged Chinese tourist don't keep their voice down intuitively. This is not their fault, of course. For example, both inner cities and living quarters are much more spacious in the US than in Europe, simply because the population density is much higher (117 per km² in the EU compared to 34 per km² in the US). In a typical European living quarter, if you are too loud on your porch or balcony, you are disturbing dozens of people or waking up babies. In the US, the next house may be so far away the neighbors won't even hear you. Add to this that around 77% of people in the US live in houses [0], compared to ~42% of Europeans who live in flats [1] (in countries like Switzerland or Germany, more than 60% of the population lives in flats, in Italy it's still over 50% [2]). In a flat, if you are too loud or if you don't walk quietly (especially in pre-WWII buildings), you are disturbing your neighbors. For that reason, in Europe (and I am sure in other parts of the world with similar population densities) children are reminded from an extremely early age that they have to keep their voice down and walk quietly when in a flat.
Again, I am not saying this applies to every American or Chinese, and of course there are German / British / French / Italian / Indian / Arabic / [...] tourists who do this.
I certainly try to teach my kids to keep their voice down, but I'm having little success so far.
But from what I understand, Dutch tourists also have a reputation for being loud and/or rude. Maybe more rude than loud, but I tend to see them as going together.
Eh, it really depends who is hard of hearing or not. Those younger Americans who travel are likely not living in detached homes, while maybe the older ones are.
Curious, as an American who lived in Lausanne (kind of touristic town) for a couple of years and China for ten, I rarely encountered American tourists at all. I’m sure they exist, but they don’t travel in huge groups like Chinese do, so are pretty impossible to pick out.
If you do get lost in Venice, you will discover that Google maps often can't tell you exactly where you are because the streets are too narrow and the walls too thick. Funny enough Apple maps on my iPhone does a better job navigating in Venice. It's easy to get lost in Venice when walking through the dark alleys that you find everywhere.
Everyone talks about the tourists, because they're what's visible, but it seems that the actual reason for the city being abandoned has nothing to do with the tourists, and everything to do with local law prohibiting people from living in available residential property:
> He is also a member of ASC, or “assemblea sociale per la casa”, an association of local residents that seeks to give empty or abandoned houses back to people and families. While this is illegal, because the houses belong to a public group which manages them, it has also helped bring some abandoned areas in the city back to life.
What other option is there? Venice is not a livable city except perhaps for the retired. The tourist bubble wont last forever either, and i cant think what will follow. Its a very expensive museum. Perhaps they might sell some palaces to the megayacht crowd in the future. Its just difficult to start an economy inside a museum where you cant even bike.
My wife is from Venezia, and I've been there dozens of times in the last few years (despite we live in San Francisco).
On the topic "number of residents", two interesting things:
1) "Comune di Venezia" is the municipality, not the set of islands commonly referred to as Venice, or historical Venice. The number of inhabitants there is higher.
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[ 22.2 ms ] story [ 1880 ms ] threadI actually enjoyed Venice much more than Florence.
Italy is a big place and there's tons to see. Make Venice just a couple days of your trip and you'll probably enjoy it.
(Aside, to me it's tour groups that are the worst, with bus loads and cruise loads being the most egregious example. I've seen this everywhere I've been a tourist. A destination that can easily handle a stream of individuals or families becomes overwhelmed when 20+ tourists arrive all at once. Venice would definitely be helped by a metering system.)
Just be sure to pair it up with somewhere(s) else.
Carthage is 800 years older than Venice and to some extent it has a more interesting civilization. Tunisia also has significant Roman heritage. It's pretty close to Italy so the climate is quite a match but you can go and check the desert.
Here is another one: Egypt. Enjoy both the pharaoh and the islamic heritage.
Plenty of places to see that are reasonably safe. Bonus point: Probably the whole package will cost less than your daily life in your average developed country.
The pyramids are just outside of Cairo, one of the largest cities in the world (metro population above 20m - I believe no European city surpass it).
Carthage is just outside Tunis - the capital & largest city of Tunisia (not to mention 10x the population of Venice).
My point was that there is interesting sites to see beyond the popular ones. Either in Europe or elsewhere.
That's the problem right there. Such pricing should be enforced by the city plus an entry "visa" style payment...
I think your "visa" sugestion was a joke, but I'm afraid that the sarcastic nature may get lost and the message may be misinterpreted and taken on its face value.
Venice is a very popular destination spot. It should raise the barrier to entry accordingly, to attract fewer, more lucrative, tourists. It should also use the money to protect the residents of the city, and its buildings and monuments.
In situations of overcrowding, it seems the obvious solution is simply to raise taxes and fees, in order to lower the number of tourists. This would raise more revenue from each tourist while cutting maintenance costs which are driven by volume.
Is there some non-obvious reason this isn't done?
They may be able to, say, raise prices 50% and drop traffic only 20%.
It's a casuality of modernity, there is no use for a densely packed city built on a dozen slabs of rock in the middle of the sea.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/aug/30/why-tourism-i...
I always wanted to go back, but I wonder if it's worth it or if I should just remember when I was there originally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida
wow, how is that constitutional?
However, I have been to Venice 3 times in the last 10 years. People here arguing that Venice is "full of people" have not visited the city, but only the cities attractions. It is as simple as that. Even in the peak season when the city center is massively overcrowded by tourists, you (literally) only have to walk 10 minutes from Piazza San Marco to find yourself basically alone on lovely squares in the middle of the day. It is at the same time extremely beautiful and eerie, because you suddenly realize that the square is not only empty because there are no tourists there, but also because most of the apartment windows are blind, with nobody living behind them. Offside the tourist routes, Venice largely feels like a ghost town.
It is indeed sad, but if you stay in the city as a tourist long enough, you get why locals are leaving. The last time, we stayed there for 10 days in a small apartment, and starting with day 2, our hatred for the masses coming off the cruise ships like a biblical locust plague grew exponentially to a point where we completely avoided the city center between 10 in the morning and 9 in the evening.
And it's a problem that is very hard to solve, because a city must, almost by definition, be open; and because curbing tourism- even if it were feasible- means saying no to a huge amount of cash.
The time I went a few years ago it was pretty dead. I'm not a big Venice fan. It's a pretty city that's worth seeing before it sinks away, but I enjoy other cities for repeat visits.
I mentioned in another comment a few weeks ago that if I wanted to visit Venice again I would stay in Rovinj, Croatia and take the local ferry over for the day. When I went to Venice we took the ferry over and stayed in Venice, and after seeing the Venice highlights really just wanted to go back to Crotia.
I know actually living in Venice is a challenge. It's a long walk to run any errand, and if you need something delivered it has to come by boat, on a schedule, and so you have to have your act together.
But, if you mess up? You have to eat out. In Italy. There are worse things in the world.
Really, all I need is wifi, which I hear Venice has, and for my 3 kids to be passable swimmers.
Venice (and Barcelona, also mentioned in the article) is basically the perfect city for the Instagram age. You can come in, spend less than a couple hours there, and pretty much hit all the major "checkboxes" and photo sites: ride in a gondola, take some pictures in St. Mark's Square, etc. All the incredible history about how the city was actually built, it's role in the Middle Ages, etc. are easy to pass over.
This is pretty random, but it reminds me of this video, https://youtu.be/6abePkXncCM , by a well known youtube baker who is lamenting that high-quality baking content for recipes that actually work are getting killed by slickly produced videos that are literal eye and ear candy but are useless and aren't even feasible. It's as if we're all looking out for the shortest, quickest "dopamine bump".
It's just really sad to me.
This city was mostly a spectacle well before Instagram.
If anything there are way more people no longer living in poverty and capable of being foreign-traveling tourists than ever before + population growth. They need to go somewhere so they hit up the same small group of great places that was there before the wealth and population growth.
I would say a few things are factors for some of what is described:
1. It's relatively cheap and easy to travel. This wasn't as much the case in the past.
2. Population boom of millennials and onwards. I have a boomer mom and a pre-war dad who was born in Europe. They both see international travel as a Major Barrier with a lot of friction. I remember that seeming true in my childhood too. The younger cohorts have grown up with it being relatively cheap and easy.
3. The EU. Go to the touristy part of a touristy town in Europe, I guarantee you will hear the national language and native accent of every EU member state. I can't imagine it being like that several decades ago. It also drives tourism from outside Europe because they can enter in one country and cross over to another without hassle.
That's why travelling gets cheaper: economies of scale (block-booking on planes, etc). That's why VISAs and barriers are removed: because there is yet another industry lobbying to remove friction.
Tourism companies gotta grow like any other company out there. We just notice them more because their production line is literally on our streets.
The bigger change in recent times is the decline in industry. Globalisation makes a big difference. If you had a factory in Venice needing new plant and machinery, what would you do? You would sell up and move to Croatia or China.
Tourism and an industry can be made to work, for instance London's West End has been the place for television post production for many decades. That is an industry that anchors a wider set of services and then on the periphery of that you get your tourist sites, e.g. Carnaby Street, Regent Street, Oxford Street. There is still this working core that is also served by different cafe's and bars to what the tourists go to, although there is some overlap. Underground trains and buses enable people to commute in and the core industry that is there cannot survive elsewhere. Try opening a post production edit suite in Leeds and see if any broadcasters come your way.
Leeds is actually where Channel 4 are relocating to, but the gravitational pull of London's West End makes that difficult, something like 80% of the staff are leaving rather than moving up North.
Venice is stuck in that the proper industry, e.g. the metal bashing stuff, just does not need to be there. It can't survive there and the transport links in for commuters are not what you get in most cities. The era of city states and mankind being mostly travelling by sea or river are not coming back. Venice can't monopolise silk, fancy things made of glass, lace or anything else that has to be made. They should have built some services fifty years ago to replace these specialisations with new specialisations.
It is a tourist attraction now, that is not going to change. The people able to sell up and move should be lucky there is some AirBnB property tycoon willing to pay top dollar for their property.
> 80% of [Channel4] staff are leaving rather than moving up North.
80% of staff are threatening to leave, they are not resigning en-masse. This is the same stuff that happened to the BBC a few years ago when they relocated a big chunk of activity to Manchester (or rather Salford, to be precise). Lots of people moaned, some people resigned, others started living on commuter trains, others just moved (and found out there are no White Walkers in the North after all), others were just hired here. Now the sector in Manchester is booming.
It could well turn out that Channel 4 made a mistake in choosing Leeds (it's badly connected, much smaller than Manchester, and without a local tradition like the Granada legacy), but it has nothing to do with London being some sort of quintessential centre of all TV activity in the land.
There's no "authentic" tourist experience relative to how locals live. You're not going to vote for town council in the week you're there. You don't have well informed opinions about the state of things. You're just eating some cool snacks and visiting pretty/interesting locations.
Each bar on the graph looks to be a certain population count/census, and presumably they were conducted less often in the first part of the century. If you mouse over the bars on the graph they tell you what year they were conducted in.
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The point here, is that in spite of the X-Axis being labeled as 1901-2018 (which would make you think the bars are even time intervals), they are not.
The population peak, while nearly at the left side is actually in 1951 according to the mouseover text. So the 1/3rd of 1950s population claim is accurate.
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> and though it rallied again to near 16th century levels in the 1970s, today there are just one third as many Venetians as 50 years ago.
I suspect this may be typo, as if you flip the 5 and 7 it would be about accurate. "...in the 1950s, today there are just one third as many Venetians as 70 years ago."
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I agree that none of this inspires particular confidence in their editing or fact-checking.
It is sad, but I don't think anyone is taking climate change seriously enough to reverse it... so I don't see any outcome other than the Venice of today becoming the Atlantis of tomorrow.
That's why you don't buy a single-use ticket and go for the day pass instead, which is €20-ish.
My SO works seasonally in Venice, so I visit the city every year and while it's overflowing with tourists, they seem to be concentrated mostly around Rialto - with districts like Cannaregio more or less free from crowds.
My tips for anyone who wants to visit Venice: please don't support the cruise ships destroying this beautiful city, just use the train. Come for at least 5 days. Try to slowly walk through every quarter of the city (you will need 5-10 days for that). Buy a week ticket for the vaporettos and ride the vaporetto up and down canal grande in the evening. Don't dress like a stereotypical tourist. Please behave. If you are American or Chinese, actively try to lower your voice. Leave your smartphone and/or your camera at your apartment / hotel, everything you will be photographing has been photographed, painted or drawn at least a million times already. And, most importantly: don't ride the gondolas, you will get screwed financially.
One of these things is not like the others! I think better advice to the advisor would be to not judge people for how they are dressed.
I'll also add that the reason that you wouldn't want to dress like a tourist is to mislead locals about what you actually are, which is a tourist. Judging you substantively would mean judging you as one of the tourists that makes them want to leave the town they grew up in.
This would be strange advice, because you clearly would judge someone going to a high-end restaurant in a bathing suit, to a funeral in nothing but underpants or to a wedding wearing a SS uniform. These are ridiculous examples, of course, but they appear so ridiculous because one of the fabrics of any society is that on certain occasions, you should try to tune down your individuality as best as possible and try to blend in with others. In my opinion, visiting a foreign country as a guest is one of these occasions.
Reversing that argument, you'd probably feel that French tourists wearing monokinis (or kids not having a full on bathsuit) on the beach in the US don't respect your culture, even though that's perfectly acceptable back home.
Actually, I'm purely merit based in my judgments. You can wear a leaf on a string and water wings for all I care. Then again, I also don't much care what prejudiced people think of me. I just go about my business feeling sorry for them.
Usually the weird rules we have for ourselves are never visible to us so I’d be somewhat hesitant to make the claim of being open to things.
In fact, if I think about it, you’d probably be stared at and feel like a spectacle and probably unwelcome with a toga, a kilt, or a lungi (even the formal variant). I don’t even think you could wear the top end of some of those clothing varieties and go to many places in SF (generally a downmarket place for clothes).
The other guy put it really well. It will increase the friction you experience.
What does this mean? How do tourists dress? How would it differ from a non-tourist?
What I meant was that: if you are visiting a town in a foreign country, it would at least be polite to research beforehand how locals dress and what is considered rude, inappropriate or simply tasteless.
That said, all of these measures you describe are a bit much. There are a million ways to tell that somebody's a tourist, are you going to pretend you're there to raise VC?
Edit: Parent's editing their comments a lot so mine makes no sense now, but they linked to https://img.budgettravel.com/_facebookShare/tourists-in-spai... as an example of tourist attire.
People don't want to do laundry on their vacation. And unless you're rich and have porters lugging around massive luggage with carefully packed fashionable clothes, people are also space-constrained
So, they optimize for comfortable, quick-dry, wrinkle-free clothes so they can maximize exploration and energy.
That's......what you have to do when you are spending your limited vacation time to see the world.
Part of this is definitely a snobby european mindset. Europeans get 5-6 weeks of vacation a year, and burn 4 of those on August so they are used to LOONG consecutive getaways, and structure their lives accordingly.
The rest of the world (And I don't mean America, I mean the entire rest of the non-European world) doesn't have that luxury.
My relatives from Canada are constantly complaining how they have only 10 days of vacation per year yet every year entire family takes road trips that last 5-6 weeks. Every second year they come to visit Europe.
I'm not speaking for myself, I'm speaking for the vast majority of the world.
Do you seriously think that tourists from China, Japan, India, and the US have 5-6 weeks of vacation every year?
To be so blind to your own privilege...befuddling..
Also, this is a nice indicator as well... https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/china/ https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/japan/ https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/india/
compared to this: https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/croatia/
The gist of it is, tourists typically are carrying way more shit than they need and look silly more often than not. It's also nice to just walk around with the same amount of shit as you would if you were walking around your home city.
I’m only kind of kidding. That is to say tourists look like tourists everywhere because they are different. The better advice than “don’t dress like a tourist” is “don’t expect where you are traveling to be the same as where you are from. Take some time to see if you can pick out what they are.”
In Europe at least, nine times out of ten, that tourist is not American. We just aren’t very numerous compared to Europeans in Europe (don’t you know most of us don’t even have passports). Russians on the other hand....
But the more I thought about it, the less comfortable I was with that line of thinking. What IS wrong with taking a picture that isn't 100% original? Is taking a picture of Piazza San Marco just as bad as a landscape photographer getting that "perfect shot" of Antelope Canyon? or Mesa Arch? [1][2]
What if you are an American with very limited vacation time each year? Or you just want an "easy" vacation? Why is one style of travel better than the other? Does a place having a ton of visitors make it worse to visit? Or is there still value to going?
I'm just rambling at this point, but I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts since I'm not sure what to feel.
[1] https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0f/1b/ec/c6/... [2] https://www.johntrotto.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/IMG_27...
Man, they are taking the piss. If they did that to an Italian, there would be fisticuffs.
that seems odd to say the least. it seems highly probable to me that popular tourist attractions are popular because they're desirable to go to. sure, there's some marketing drum up in there but there's something seriously weird about going to less desirable places solely to get away from the crowds. it's almost as if you're signaling you're somehow superior or better by doing something other people aren't doing, even if that thing is objectively worse. value signaling made manifest via tourism or something.
This is why the "traveller" (vs tourist) holy grail is to find places that are genuinely impressive and spacious enough to still be enjoyable.
so yeah, while certainly only limited to a few places, i think there's a class of spots that one cannot necessarily reproduce in a lite version. so especially if one has limited travel opportunities, i think they're worth going to. venice is probably one of those although admittedly i haven't been.
I also drink coffee without milk. I drink matcha with milk. I wear a garish array of brightly-colored button-down shirts. I cross my z's when writing. None of these choices is correct. They are my choices.
No version of tourism is wrong unless it's contributing to a documented problem in which case it's obviously wrong. Tourism is recreation, no matter how eagerly it pretends to be education.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking the same picture other people took. If you liked it, you like it. You’re not harming anyone by taking a damn picture. Obviously as a tourist I try to be respectful and to learn a subset of the language while I’m there.
But hey, if you only have a week off there’s nothing wrong with going to the same place in Antelope Canyon as others went. It’s popular for a reason!
Do whatever makes you happy.
As for the gondolas, that's a hard pass for me. I've been to Venice twice, and was definitely not there for the gondolas. Not even for 'great Italian food' - it's not really that great at my price point, unless I travel 15-20 min away from the usual tourist sights. I'm simply there for Venice. For the canals, for the layout, for the architecture, for the history. Canal-side, I can see all I need to see from the vaporettos.
You're in town for just a few days, specifically to see the scenery, the locals aren't. This is the part where you're best off being more like a tourist.
What's always funny to me is that tourists who are part of the derided "masses" always seem to have a lot more common with locals than the "elite traveler" types who preoccupy themselves with finding an "authentic local experience." It's hard to truly connect with the common people when you look down on the common people in your own culture.
deal with it noodle boy, people visiting is the only thing keeping river town afloat
Only American and Chinese? If you're Dutch, you can still talk as loudly as you want to?
Again, I am not saying this applies to every American or Chinese, and of course there are German / British / French / Italian / Indian / Arabic / [...] tourists who do this.
[0] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-American-popula...
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Europe
But from what I understand, Dutch tourists also have a reputation for being loud and/or rude. Maybe more rude than loud, but I tend to see them as going together.
Curious, as an American who lived in Lausanne (kind of touristic town) for a couple of years and China for ten, I rarely encountered American tourists at all. I’m sure they exist, but they don’t travel in huge groups like Chinese do, so are pretty impossible to pick out.
This is good advice and it applies to any touristy destination.
https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/01/08/pellestrina/
> He is also a member of ASC, or “assemblea sociale per la casa”, an association of local residents that seeks to give empty or abandoned houses back to people and families. While this is illegal, because the houses belong to a public group which manages them, it has also helped bring some abandoned areas in the city back to life.
On the topic "number of residents", two interesting things:
1) "Comune di Venezia" is the municipality, not the set of islands commonly referred to as Venice, or historical Venice. The number of inhabitants there is higher.
2) There's a pharmacy nearby the Rialto bridge with a display showing how many residents in Venezia: http://www.veneziatoday.it/cronaca/contatore-veneziani.html