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Venice is dying, but Bezos is merely another symptom. [1]

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Date: 2025-06-28

I last visited Venice nearly 30 years ago and stayed with a university friend's family over Christmas.

It was beautiful and quiet. Most of the hotels were closed for the winter, and there were not too many tourists.

The canals didn’t stink.

So, what is killing Venice?

Rising waters and overtourism are killing Venice. Now the fight is on to save its soul -CNN

Gondolas, canals and all those bridges. For many tourists, Venice is all that and only that: the floating city born for Instagram. For others it’s a symbol of the excesses of the modern world: a city turned into a theme park, trampled by overtourism and hollowed out by vacation rentals. The statistics are stark. Around 30 million tourists visit Venice every year, dwarfing the local population, which has now dwindled to less than 50,000. Venetians wanting to remain in their city face a lack of housing stock — since homes have been converted into vacation rentals — a lack of shops for day-to-day life, and a lack of jobs for anyone not involved in the tourist industry.

Venice and Florence demand a curb on Airbnb -CNN

Tourists sprawled over sidewalks, garbage piled up in the streets, and thousands-strong lines to enter museums. Overtourism feels a long time ago now, but the after effects are still being felt in Italian cities, where locals have been squeezed out by Airbnbs, businesses have been drowned out by souvenir shops, and whole economies have been hijacked by tourism, and then hung out to dry. But while destinations flex their marketing budgets for post-pandemic trips, and countries and continents start to put together vaccine passport plans, two of Europe’s cities that were hardest hit by overtourism have put together a manifesto for the tourism of the future

Of course, there is the stench of corruption

Venice rocked by corruption allegations involving city’s mayor and council over sale of land and two palazzos — The Art Newspaper

Operation Swamp: that is what the Italian Guardia di Finanza (financial police) and the Venetian judiciary are calling the ongoing investigation shaking the Venice Town Council, many of the companies connected with it, and Luigi Brugnaro, mayor of the city since 2015, who is under investigation for corruption, while one of his councillors, Renato Boraso, is actually under arrest. Brugnaro insists that he is innocent but calls for his resignation are mounting. The alleged facts date back eight years but have only exploded recently after a detailed exposé by the RAI TV programme, Report, leading to detailed scrutiny of the matter, a flurry of arrests and formal warnings that personal investigations were ongoing.

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