Too big to sail?
ROME— Away from the throngs of disembarked day-trippers marching under selfie-stick bayonets along the Grand Canal in Venice, the headquarters of the No Big Ships Committee has long displayed posters and T-shirts depicting giant cruise ships as sharks threatening to devour gondoliers, fishermen and the city itself.
This week, officials in Rome voted to keep the sharks a little farther at bay.
A group of local, provincial and national officials approved, after years of debate, a plan to divert large cruise ships weighing more than 96,000 tons farther from St. Mark’s Square, the Grand Canal, the Ducal Palace and other Venetian treasures.
Instead of cruising down the Giudecca Canal, the large ships will be required to take a more roundabout path, through a nearby canal and up to a passenger port to be built in Marghera, an industrial area of the Venetian mainland.
“We have found a real solution,” Graziano Delrio, the transport and infrastructure minister, said in a statement after the meeting in Rome. “No more big ships.” Venice has faced an onslaught of tourism that has challenged the city’s character, clogged its narrow waterways and chased its local population away. There emerged no clearer symbol for the invasion of tourists than the cruise ships drifting, lunar-like, through the lagoon.
The local authorities are hailing the new rules as a feat of compromise. They say they have addressed the concerns of residents, the requirements of shops and restaurants and answered the alarms raised by conservation groups fearful for the city’s already fragile and damaged lagoon.
Government officials have given themselves four years to map a new route and build the port, but some remain skeptical.
“They have decided nothing,” Tommaso Cacciari, a spokesperson for the No Big Ships Committee, said. “And, in the meantime, the ships will keep passing in front of San Marco.”