“Venice is not a museum”: a group of activists puts a site online that generates free codes to bypass the entrance ticket

Once the law was made, the deception was found. While the experimentation of the 5 euro access ticket in Venice has reached its tenth day, the offensive of those who want to boycott the tax has started via the web. Since a Venetian can invite acquaintances and friends to visit them, the website www.nocda.com was born which offers […]

Once the law was made, the deception was found. While she reached the tenth day there experimentation of the ticket access from 5 euros in Venice, the offensive of those who want to boycott the tax. Since a Venetian can invite acquaintances and friends to visit them, the site was born www.nocda.com which makes available “codes friends”, i.e. an invitation to someone you don’t know personally, but to whom you offer the justification to avoid paying the ticket. A genius? A cunning one? Or even a illicit, with tax avoidance? The questions are intertwined, but for the moment there is a tough stance town of Venice, which in the first nine days of testing (a total of 29 days expected in 2024) accounted for more than 160 thousand paid admissions, grossing over 800 thousand euros. If a Venetian invites a friend, he generates a “friend code” with which the guest registers on the municipal site, obtaining the pass for free entry on the day. The site invented by a group of dissident Venetians makes available the codes for free.

The acronym already indicates the purpose: no to the access ticket. “Venice, an open city. – it is written in the header – Venice is not a museum. You don’t have to pay to enter a city. Become a friend of a Venetian and visits the city without paying any ticket”. It’s like hitchhiking online and finding a inhabitant of the historic center that stops (in a gondola, instead of in a car) and gives you a lift. On the night of Friday 3 May there were “209 codes available, with which you could invite 2071 friends”. The organizers explain: “Everything is totally free. Both generation and request of codes. Our gain is to continue to live in a city and not in a museum”. Behind the facade, they assure, there is none Association or match. Furthermore: “Unlike the access ticket, no data is saved and analyzed here. There is not no cookies or tracking of any kind. The only data that is saved in a databases are the loaded codes”. In any case, anyone who uses the code must then register on the site municipaland then provide your personal details.

The page is divided into two parts. Clicking on the left opens “donate a code”, to make the invitation available to the unknown tourist. Clicking on the right opens “request a code”, which provides a “cowardly” followed by identifying letters, which must be copied and used for registration on the Municipality website of Venice, from where the voucher Of access. The site Venessia.com gave up Facebook the happy announcement: “New friendships (interested hahaha) are born”. Then he copied thehomepage of the ticket-skipping site. Dozens of comments immediately poured in, ranging from serious to serious facetious. The mechanism was set in motion and the codes generated in a few hours were numerous, capable of inviting hundreds of people to Venice. Matteo Dried, spokesperson for Venessia.com, however clarified. “It wasn’t us, I’m sorry, even if we are convinced that charge it is not the solution to the problems of mass tourism. We received an email indicating this site and we simply spread the word.” From the Common we would like to inform you that, since it is a tributeirregular payment avoidance must be reported and those who have violated the rules must be brought to book prosecuted.