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Venice: I watch a couple of beautiful people on the Grand Canal arrive on elegant boats for a party in one of the palazzos near the Rialto Bridge.
The Venice Biennale is about to begin, and events are going on all over the city for serious followers of modern art. But I’m looking for a group of urban rebels.
In the canal from the party, I find Federica Toninello and her friends in an empty space at the Rialto fish market, where they are setting up microphones and speakers for a meeting about housing shortages. It is 6pm and the market stalls are empty; in their place are rows of seats for residents worried about their city.
“We know that the city’s economy depends on tourism,” Toninello tells me before the crowd arrives. “The problem is that tourism is the only economy in this city.”
He has lived in Venice for almost 12 years and is struggling to pay for his own apartment. So, he and others are looking for crumbling buildings that have been foreclosed on by the local government. And they enter.
“One of the problems is social housing,” he says. “On the island alone, there are more or less 1000 houses that are closed, they are behind the gate, so you can’t go inside, and they are not assigned to people. The reason given by the authorities is that they don’t have the money to restore the houses, for maintenance.”
That’s why Toninello is a member of Community Parliament for Parliamentor ASC, a group that meets at the fish market. It believes that some abandoned houses have been closed for 30 or 40 years. Its members move and renovate in the hope that they can live without renting, at least temporarily.
The idea that houses stand empty in Venice seems quite strange. I have come to this meeting after catching the Line 1 vaporetto – the public water bus – down the Grand Canal from near St Mark’s Square, which is choked with crowds. Guests spend so much money here that you’d expect every spare room to be filled with extra-large closets to come with rollaway beds.
But the numbers tell the story. The city’s population has declined from 175,000 in the 1930s to less than 50,000 today. according to the international data platform Statista. As people leave or die, buildings in quiet areas become empty – including public housing. Not every house is a palazzo on the canal.
Meanwhile, the tourists keep coming. At least 5.9 million stayed in 2024, according to the Tourism Department of the City of Venice. Population growth has doubled since the turn of the century, and this figure undercounts crowds because it does not include day-trippers who arrive by car, bus, train or cruise ship. In the argument about over-tourism, Venice is the main show.
The genteel ruin of a quiet Venetian farm may look strange on a postcard, but it can also be a sign of open housing in a city that is losing its people.
“We go into houses that are closed and cannot be given to people because they need major repairs,” Toninello says. “We add, we restore. It’s a very low-cost operation. But it’s not easy to live this way because you never know what can happen. There is a lot of crime by people who own it, but they have no other solution because public housing is closed and because the rent in the private market is very high.”
The local community still exists, despite the pressure from tourism. Sitting in a cafe in the Giardini district one morning, I listened to Italian women greet their neighbors as they walked their dogs along the street. Their voices were like music. I couldn’t help but wonder about the sad future of Venice, where its people leave and the only customers in the restaurant are tourists.
Today, Venice only works thanks to a growing temporary workforce. Queuing at the Rialto pier at 11.30 one night, I watched migrant workers fill the Line 1 vaporetto to standing room only. Most of them were men in their twenties from the Indian subcontinent, they finished the day at restaurants and looked at their phones without looking at the view. They came from Piazzale Roma, where you can transfer by car or bus to the cities outside the lake. This is the life of a kitchen man or waiter: the workers cannot afford to live in the city they help.
Locals worry about Venice turning into a kind of Disneyland. It may be like this in St Mark’s Square, which is full of tourist groups, but the square is not about the shops. The Basilica and the Doge’s Palace are beautiful homes for history and art, and no one should wish for a world that cannot be seen. I couldn’t afford coffee in the grounds the last time I visited, in 1996, so I decided to have coffee this time. I stopped at Caffe Lavena and listened to a piano quartet play Italian classics. An espresso was €12 – about $19. I didn’t regret it.
The big event in Venice last year, the wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, showed off the vast wealth of its elite guests – and Toninello was one of those who objected to the display. The city has an interesting way of separating visitors from their money, but the cost is one way to reduce the number of tourists. It’s hard to see any other way working. The “Venice Access Fee” for tourists is currently €5, but that’s just a fraction of the coffee. It has to rise.
Everywhere you look, the views are amazing. But if Venice is the future of tourism, it is not a good view.
We all know that travel is a tricky business: we change the places we love because we love them too much. What is evident in Venice is how society is shrinking as the tourist trade expands. So who will protect against extreme tourism? The best mechanism is a voting public that can give us leaders who care more about tourist dollars than local services. But what if voters have to leave? As more people are priced out of the city, Disneyland’s peril looms.
It’s hard to know what visitors should do to protect Venice, even if they enjoy it. So I ask Toninello.
“Try to find more local stuff,” he says. Spend money at local shops, for example. One of the concerns is that essential services, such as pharmacies, are closed because they are sold by stores that sell to tourists, or large chains. This is how neighborhoods lose their services and their character.
“Also, try to stay in the city, pretending to be in the city,” he adds.
It’s about respecting the place, slowing down, and not making things difficult for those who live there. After all, it is the locals who make Venice a living city. And that is a lesson for tourism around the world.
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David Crowe is the Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect through X or email address.
