Writing on the walls over falling Venice population

ROME • When posters with the number 49,999 appeared on bridges and monuments in Venice, locals were flummoxed as to their meaning.

The figure was rendered in Venetian style, like the street numbers painted on canal-side palazzi and alleyways. Responsibility was vaguely attributed by the Italian press to “an anonymous collective.”

But it can now be revealed that they were created by Venessia.com, a group that raises awareness of the problems facing Venice, from rising sea levels to over-tourism.

The numbers are a protest against the prospect of Venice's population — currently 50,126 — falling below 50,000, which is expected in a month or so and is the latest milestone in a long history of demographic decline.

“Every evening we go around Venice, putting up the flyers, and every morning the police take them down. Then we start all over again,” Matteo Secchi, the head of Venessia.com, said.

The exodus of Venetians in the past few years has been dramatic. At the end of the Second World War, the city's population was around 175,000. Even a decade ago, it stood at 60,000.

Venetians are being pushed out by a lack of council housing and astronomical rents. They opt for cheaper accommodation on the Italian mainland, moving to towns like Mestre, which lie just across the lagoon, and then commute back and forward by train or water bus.

“A lot of people would return tomorrow if they could find somewhere affordable to live,” said Mr Secchi. “There are 2,000 empty houses in Venice which the city council could restore and make available.”

Some Venetians turn their apartments into Airbnb accommodation, inviting accusations of hypocrisy when they complain of a lack of housing.

“I agree there's a degree of hypocrisy. People are attracted by the money they can earn from renting out their homes,” Secchi said.

But many other apartments are owned by foreigners and Italians from outside Venice, with the proliferation of rental properties threatening to turn the city into a cultural Disneyland devoid of local life.

“If nothing is done about housing, the city will be destined to die,” Marco Borghi, a community leader, told the newspaper Il Gazzettino. “We need radical solutions.”

Marco Gasparinetti, an opposition councillor, said there had been “a lack of incentives for Venetians who want to return. We can still learn from the mistakes that were made in the past, before it's too late.”

The flyers pasted around the city are just the latest stunt to be organized by campaigners. In 2009, when the population fell beneath 60,000, they staged a mock funeral for Venice, with a coffin on the Grand Canal in a black gondola. In 2016, they organized an event dubbed “Venexodus” in which locals trundled wheeled suitcases toward the town hall in a symbolic protest against the population dipping below 55,000.