Venice: coping with culture vultures - Safeguarding Heritage - Venice, Italy

Inundated with visitors, Venice is now trying to scare some of them off. But there are better ways of rescuing the city from tourism

Beauty bears its burdens, and in tourism no place illustrates this more clearly than Venice. So popular a destination has it become that tourism has created a crisis of economic, social, demographic, but perhaps above all, cultural proportions. However, it need not be so.

For years now, Venice has in many ways failed to live up to its romantic image. The centre is so crowded one can hardly move, shops offer low quality at high prices, and street vendors add an extra decimal place to the price for a Korean tourist searching for a made-in-Korea carnival mask.

Things are not much better for the local population. As services from schools to hospitals are forced out of the city to make way for more cost-efficient operations like fast food restaurants and souvenir shops, Venice is less and less able to hold on to its citizens. The city's population has now sunk to about 68,000, only slightly more than a third of what it was in 1951. This is understandable when one considers the disadvantages of living in Venice. Restaurant meals are very expensive. The purchase of a necessity like spectacles can involve an hour's journey to neighbouring towns. If one happens to crave French cheese, the excursion could stretch to two hours.

Venice is thus a very good case of unsustainable tourism. What's under threat in Venice, which 250 years ago was one of the most powerful and most populated cities in Europe, is culture in the broadest sense.Yes, the issue is heritage preservation. But in addition, both citizens and visitors presumably want the city to remain a living entity, and not be transformed into an empty stage, where the sterile representation of an act of consumption - tourism - is performed.

One approach is to scare off some of the tourists, namely, the day-trippers who, numbering some seven million per year, pass a few hours in the city, contribute to congestion at the main tourist attractions, add to transportation, sanitation and other problems and spend only a minimal amount of money in the city. To this end, Venice recently hired Oliviero Toscani, the photographer behind Italian clothes-maker Benetton's controversial advertisements, to produce a negative publicity campaign featuring images of garbage and dead pigeons.

Smart cards to attract high spenders

Hopefully, by reducing the number of day-trippers, the city will not only cut down on associated costs, but also hold greater allure for tourists prepared to stay a few days - and thus put real money into the local economy. However, rather than shooing tourists away, a more durable solution is to improve the supply side of the tourism industry equation by creating a cultural tourism system.

This approach is based on the recognition that Venice's cultural offering is so vast that it can satisfy the demands of a public with quite different preferences. However, greater efforts need to be made to publicize this offering. Perhaps the most expedient method is to set up an information technology infrastructure allowing visitors to access details about city sites as well as events, and to make advance bookings.

This strategy could include the issuance of a multi-service "Venice Card" offering tourists opportunities not available to those who do not book: for example, the right to jump queues; discounts on museum entry and transport fares, at restaurants and in shops; and information about special events. The card could be delivered, at no charge, to the overnight-stay tourists when they book a hotel.

In this way, serious cultural tourists get a better deal because they can more easily discover what is on offer, and then arrange their itineraries expediently and benefit from discounts. Meanwhile, the city is better off because it attracts relatively high-spending tourists who add to its profits from tourism.

Diversifying the economy

Information systems such as these will be given a test run during the Jubilee 2000 celebrations, when Italy expects an enormous inflow of tourists. The ALATA partnership of northeastern Italian cities will use an information system designed to manage and distribute visitor flow by telling pilgrims how heavily booked cities are. If a city's hotels are full, the system will redirect tourists to other localities for accommodation. This is an emergency measure aimed at coping with celebrations rather than providing incentives for certain types of cultural tourism. But it is a first attempt to use modern telecommunications technology to full advantage.

At the moment, within the Venice city administration, the idea of "soft controls" seems to be gaining support. Pilot projects are underway for the creation of a network connecting cultural institutions. Much more needs to be done.

But Venice needs not only to manage its tourism better, but also to diversify its economy. In a review of sustainable development options for Venice, scholars Enzo Rullani and Stefano Micelli suggest that Venice could become the capital of a metropolitan area specializing in producer services, from data processing to software design and finance; cultural industries such as musical and theatrical productions; and other activities from research to providing convention services. This requires a system of fast transport to reconnect Venice, an island that is relatively difficult to get to and from, to the rest of the region.

Another vision is that of Venice as the capital of hi-tech and data processing, overcoming its physical isolation through electronic accessibility. Whatever approach is used, it is now recognized that if the culture of Venice is to remain a living entity the city needs to be refashioned into a place that exists for more than tourism.

Antonio Paolo Russo, Researcher in town planning at Erasmus University, Rotterdam (Netherlands) and a specialist on Venice

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