From a hidden control room in Venice, officials are tracking every resident, shopkeeper, gondolier and, above all, tourist squeezing into St Mark’s Square.
Steeped in centuries of history, the city is looking to the future as it wrestles with a present in which “overtourism” threatens its very survival.
With visitors absent during the pandemic, Venetians were able to venture out of their houses without fear of being crushed, and to marvel at canals turned crystal clear by the absence of motorboats churning up mud. Dolphins have frolicked off St Mark’s Square.
Now, as the tourists return, the goal is to avoid sliding back into the recent past.
From today, massive cruise ships have been banned from the Venice in a move that will change the appearance of the ancient city’s principal waterways.
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But more far-reaching change is already under way in the shadows.
Visitors arriving by train, bus and smaller boats are now under extraordinary levels of surveillance thanks to a network of 400 CCTV cameras, optical sensors that trace movement and a phone-tracking system that monitors every mobile phone Sim card in the city.
The results are collated on giant screens in the control room, opened last year in a disused cargo warehouse at the edge of Venice.
On a single day this week a total of 95,000 Sim cards were present in the city. The system can also tell in which country the cards were registered: another screen showed 29,000 were likely to belong to tourists — with about a quarter from Germany.
“An integrated system like this doesn’t exist anywhere in the world,” said Marco Bettini, co-director general of Venis, the tech company that built the system.
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Using a mouse to zoom in on St Mark’s Square, he noted that it contained 492 mobile-phone owners, of whom 259 were non-Italians.
“If we know where tourist crowds are forming, we can send officers to divert people to other parts of the city,” said Venice’s deputy police chief, Maria Teresa Maniero, who was studying the screens.
In response to the crowd alerts, access to certain streets can be restricted temporarily and turnstiles on bottleneck bridges can be closed — a scheme already tested before the pandemic.
What seems to be a radical departure for the ancient city actually has a strong historical resonance.
During the Renaissance, the republic’s rulers developed a sophisticated intelligence network that played a vital role in bolstering the Venetian empire. Housed in the Doge’s Palace on St Mark’s Square, it spied on residents and gathered information from across Europe, the Middle East and north Africa.
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In her 2019 book Venice’s Secret Service, the historian Ioanna Iordanou made the case that it was “the world’s earliest centrally organised state-intelligence service.”
Five centuries on, officials promise their new system does not identify phone owners but it does allow them for the first time to count the day trippers arriving in Venice and follow their progress around its streets and canals.
That, they say, is crucial because daily visitors remain far more perilous to the city’s future than the giant cruise ships that towered over its fragile palazzos before today.
Campaigners claimed a victory for sustainable tourism when the ban was announced. Yet while the behemoth ships, some up to 290 metres long, may have blocked out the light and shaken the foundations of the city, they only disgorged about 450,000 tourists a year into Venice, 1.5 per cent of the 30 million visitors who swarm down alleys and bivouac by canals every year.
“It’s not us, we’re not the cause — blame it on the day trippers who come with a sandwich by bus or train,” said Galliano Di Marco, the head of port manager Venezia Terminal Passeggeri.
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And those visitors are slowly returning. This week, with EU borders open, Venice was filling up again, although the absence of Asian visitors kept the crowds down. “It would be great if it stayed like this — busy but manageable, meaning you can actually get on the water buses,” said British novelist Philip Gwynne Jones, who has lived in Venice for nine years.
Assuming the mobs return, mayor Luigi Brugnaro is plotting the launch next year of a scheme he first announced before the pandemic: advance online payment of up to €10 by every visitor before they can enter Venice.
“It will reduce numbers and it means we will know how many people are coming,” said tourism chief Simone Venturini, who said that the turnstile scheme to divert crowds over less crowded bridges would also continue. For those who do cough up, the control room will keep a close eye on them once they arrive.
But if herding visitors around Venice using Truman Show technology can ease the pain of mass tourism, the city’s real challenge is encouraging people to live there again. The population dropped from 170,000 last century to about 50,000 today.
Record flooding caused by the city’s perennial acqua alta (high tide) drove out thousands in 1966, and while the Mose flood barrier is now working after years of delays, rising rents threaten to push out the remainder.
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That has prompted Carlo Bagnoli, an academic at the city’s Ca’ Foscari university, to hatch a plan to woo start-ups to the city. In September, seven applicants will be given four months of industry-funded rent and living support to relocate, and another three will get €20,000.
“That will bring international residents, who we hope will attract more,” Bagnoli said. “We aim to make Venice the oldest city of the future.”
Jerome Halbout, an investment manager from France, needed no incentive to move to Venice when Covid-19 struck. “On March 10, 2020, I sent my team home from our office in Paris, got in my car and drove to Venice, and I have been here ever since,” he said.
“These days when you work from home you are no longer the black sheep in the meeting, and here there is no traffic, the fibre internet and services are great, there’s an international airport across the lagoon and I have a small boat for getting out to the beaches at the Lido,” said Halbout, 62.
“I’m living in a 500-year-old palazzo and the rents are much cheaper than Paris — so, no, I will not be getting the team back into the office,” he added.
A grassroots fightback against depopulation is under way in the area east of St Mark’s Square, tucked away near the Arsenale shipyard, where residents have resisted the arrival of Airbnb and where the hairdresser, fruit-and-veg shop and a café serving €12, two-course lunches to builders still survive.
Artists are now moving in after taking over the long-abandoned San Lorenzo church and filling it with video installations. To live locally they plan to rent a secluded house close by with a garden — a rarity in Venice — which has hitherto been entrusted to Airbnb.
In a nearby back street, an abandoned blacksmith’s workshop full of rusting machinery is to be converted into a exhibition space and biodiversity research centre.
“When people talk about Venice, they talk about tourism, but if we can attract students, artists, scientists and entrepreneurs, we can change that,” said Hélène Molinari, the head of the Sumus foundation behind the project.
“In Venice you walk and you connect amid modernity and tradition — it’s the ideal city for the future.”
A hundred yards away, by the Comenda bridge, Venice-born Daniela Lombardo, 27, was organising the display at Patience, the clothes shop she opened during the pandemic.
Like so many young Venetians, she left when she could and worked in New Zealand but returned when Covid hit to find the city had rediscovered its soul without tourists.
“I never thought I would return, but I opened my shop in September and did OK thanks to word of mouth among residents,” said Lombardo.
But she warned too that Venetians who returned as she did during the pandemic might be on their way again.
“Rents, which dropped during Covid are inching up,” she said. “I’ll be watching to see if tourism returns to unliveable levels again.”https://global.oup.com/academic/product/venices-secret-service-9780198791317?cc=gb&lang=en&#
