Digital nomads aim to make Venice a working city again

When he is on a video call with clients, Rodrigo Perez Gonzalez likes to lift his laptop to show them where he is working these days. ‘‘I do it when there is a gondola passing outside the window. so they can see I am in Venice,’’ says the IT salesman, who has swapped his Madrid office for a canalside workspace in the Italian city for three months.

The 44-year-old Argentinian is part of the advance guard in a scheme to lure pandemichardened workers who are happy away from the office to Venice, in a move that could reverse its plunging population.

‘‘The aim is to change Venice from a city of tourism to a city of work,’’ said Massimo Warglien, an academic at the local Ca’ Foscari University, who is heading the scheme, known as Venywhere. It will start in earnest in September, and has registered 2200 potential arrivals already.

Warglien is being helped by Italy’s new ‘‘digital nomad’’ law, which hands yearlong visas to remote workers from outside the European Union.

The number of residents in Venice’s historic city centre has fallen to 50,000 from 170,000 in the 1950s. It is a trend that Warglien believes can be reversed, and most of the remote workers arriving this year will be aged under 40.

‘‘That perfectly fits a frightening hole in the demographics in this city, where there are almost more over-85s than under-30s,’’ he said.

Venywhere helps with visas, health insurance and finding flats if new arrivals expect to stay for about six months to a year.

No-one is expected to work from their kitchen. ‘‘ We will set up work locations in museums, gardens, on lagoon islands – the city is your office,’’ Warglien said.

Perez Gonzalez is one of 16 Spanish, French and Greek employees of American IT company Cisco who have moved to Venice in a pilot project run by it and Ca’ Foscari. Every day, he picks a place to work from four locations offered by Cisco, including a 15th-century palazzo.

Perez Gonzalez shares his building with one elderly lady. ‘‘That’s the challenge facing Venice,’’ he said. ‘‘I feel the difference with Madrid, which buzzes with young people.’’

In his spare time, he checks out the small bars in the Canareggio neighbourhood. In a sign that he is turning into a true Venetian, he said he fled the city at weekends to visit places such as Lake Garda, explaining that there were ‘‘too many tourists in Venice’’.