Virus lockdown gives Venice a shot at reimagining tourism
VENICE, Italy — In Venice, a city famous for being visited by too many and home to too few, children’s play now fills neighborhood squares, fishermen sell their catch to home cooks, and water buses convey masked and gloved commuters to businesses preparing to reopen.
At the same time, the famed lacquered black gondolas remain moored to the quay; hotel rooms are empty, museum doors sealed; and St. Mark’s Square — normally teeming in any season — is traversed at any given moment by just a handful of souls after tourists abandoned the city in late February.
For years, Venice has faced an almost existential crisis, as the unbridled success of its tourism industry threatened to ruin the things that have drawn visitors for centuries. Now the coronavirus pandemic has dammed off the tide of tourists and hobbled the city’s economy.
Residents hope the crisis has also provided an opportunity to reimagine one of the world’s most fragile cities, creating a more sustainable tourism industry and attracting more full-time residents.
The pandemic — following on the heels of a series of exceptional floods in November that dealt a first economic blow — ground to a halt Italy’s most-visited city, stanching the flow of 3 billion euros ($3.2 billion) in annual tourism-related revenue, the vast majority of the city’s intake. Promised government assistance has been predictably slow to arrive.
The city that has inspired painters like Canaletto and Turner is now a blank canvas.
“This allows us to rethink life in the historic center,” said Mayor Luigi Brugnaro, speaking in the empty piazza in front of St. Mark’s Basilica this week.
The population of the historic center has shrunk to some 53,000, down by onethird from a generation ago. To help repopulate the center, Brugnaro favors a proposal from the city’s Ca’ Foscari university to rent to students apartments that had been removed from housing stock as tourist rentals. The mayor imagines a dynamic he witnessed in Boston, where those who come to study fall in love
A woman works at the Bevilacqua textiles in Venice, Italy. with the city and stay.
Brugnaro also wants to create a center to study climate change, given the city’s vulnerability to flooding, that could attract scientists who would become residents. He imagines triggering a sort of Renaissance that would bring other foreign residents — creatives — who for centuries were the city’s lifeblood.
He would like to resize the hit-and-run mass tourism on which the economy depends.
“Venice is a slow city,” Brugnaro said. “The slowness of Venice is the beauty of Venice.”
Visions for Venice’s future include calls to offer tax breaks to bring traditional manufacturing back to the historic center. Civic groups have suggested incentives to restore traditional ways of Venetian life, like the standing rowboats used for centuries by residents but that struggle to compete with motorized boats. There is hope that tourist trap shops that disappeared after the shutdown will be replaced with more sustainable businesses.
Bevilacqua — the maker of luxury textiles used by fashion houses such as Dior, Valentino and Dolce&Gabbana — is the only manufacturer in operation on the Grand Canal.
“To relaunch, Venice must return to its past,” said Rodolfo Bevilacqua. “You cannot, and I will use a heavy term, profane it daily. That is, people who don’t clean up after themselves.”
While the pandemic has offered a glimpse at a cleaner, slower Venice, already there
are signs of how hard it will be to maintain that, let alone implement grander plans. Jane da Mosto, executive director of the NGO We Are Here Venice, notes that bars that have begun to reopen are serving with disposable plates and cutlery — not more sustainable alternatives.
Debates over how to manage tourism have always been heated in Venice and are especially fraught now. Venice’s controversial plan to impose a tax on day-trippers has been put aside — and many object that any such system would give the city even more of a theme park air.
The mayor and tourism officials estimate it will be at least a year until tourists — who have numbered 30 million a year — return in any significant numbers. While many are reveling in the drop in noise pollution and improved air quality, a year without tourists also means many jobs will be wiped out.
“It will be a fight for survival,” said Claudio Scarpa, the head of the Venetian hotel association.
The docking of cruise ships is halted for this year. Gondoliers aren’t being permitted to glide through the canals until June 1, and many are struggling, having received just one payment of 600 euros from the government.
Their future even after that date remains uncertain. The gondolier’s position at the rear of the boat allows enough distance to spare them the mask requirement. But Andrea Balbi, the head of the association representing the city’s 433 gondoliers, said that the rules so far won’t permit them to help tourists on and off the rocky boats. The extended hand is not just a courtesy, Balbi said, but a condition of insurance coverage.
LOS ANGELES — With ample coronavirus tests and not enough sick people seeking them, the mayor of Los Angeles recently did something on a scale no other major U.S. city had done — allow anyone with or without symptoms to be tested as often as they want.
A website to book a test was quickly swamped by residents in the nation’s second-largest city and the surrounding county who couldn’t get tested under more stringent guidelines and were concerned they were infected or could be asymptomatic carriers unwittingly exposing others.
But despite overbooking to compensate for a third of the people who didn’t show up, the city still has thousands of tests that aren’t being used each week, according to figures provided to The Associated Press by the mayor’s office.
“Wasted tests at a time when we still have insufficient testing is really unfortunate,” said Dr. Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a San Diego-based medical research partnership. “I applaud what they’re doing. The more people tested the better.”
Mayor Eric Garcetti’s vow to not let a test go to waste was the result of a partnership with a start-up company that developed an easy-to-administer test that doesn’t rely on scarce supplies. But it was a significant departure from stricter state criteria and guidelines set by the health department the city shares with the county to limit tests to those who need them most.
It comes at a time when expanded testing is a cornerstone of the state’s plan to ease its stay-at-home order and as Los Angeles County has become the epicenter of the virus outbreak and lags progress the rest of the state has shown.
While the virus was initially worse in Northern California, LA County, home to a quarter of the state’s nearly 40 million residents, now accounts for more than half the state’s deaths and a case count growing more rapidly than other major state counties. A large nursing home population, accounting for about half the county’s deaths, and densely housed poor people are two main reasons.
When Garcetti opened up testing April 30, the county at large had relaxed some guidelines on who could get a test, with priorities going to the sickest and most vulnerable. It allowed testing some people without symptoms, including health care workers and emergency personnel most at risk of exposure.
From a public health perspective, wider testing could help determine the disease prevalence, though that would require random sampling, not people seeking to be tested, said Karin Michels, an epidemiology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. And testing asymptomatic people comes at the expense of those who can’t get a test.
“In a perfect world, you want to test the whole state, you want to test the whole country,” Michels said. “We don’t have enough test kits for everybody right now.”
“Venice is a slow city. The slowness of Venice is the beauty of Venice.” – MAYOR LUIGI BRUGNARO