“The idea is to make the city bookable. The world has become richer, even if not uniformly, and more and more people want to travel around, discover. And in Venice everyone finds a little piece of their history” the mayor tells Il Foglio
“An experiment to guarantee a better quality of life in a fragile city”: so the mayor of Venice Luigi Brugnaro explains to the Foglio the rationale for the so-called “ticket”, the entry fee to the lagoon city which should make peak tourist days less crowded. A way to understand how many people will arrive, and, says the mayor, prepare to manage the situation. Making its debut two days ago, with Venice the first city to activate a similar model, the measure was however contested by activists and committees. How did the idea come about and what should you say to those who protest? “The idea,” says Brugnaro, “is that a city can be booked. When I was a child there was already talk of ‘over-tourism’ killing Venice: I have a clip of a news program from 1964 that seems to have been shot today. As mayor I tried to listen to the area, but I never received a concrete proposal. The leitmotif was: the city is depopulating because you can’t live here. But if you look at the migration balance of recent years, you will see that it is more or less stable. But four to five hundred people die every year. The real issue is that of the birth rate decline and it does not concern only Venice, just as the rising seas do not concern only Venice. But in Venice, a sensitive city in terms of structure and architecture, these trends are ‘perceived’ earlier than in other places”.
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