Venice votes on its survival: tourism limits or existential decline

Venice is holding municipal elections this weekend, but the ballots are asking something larger than who should run the city. They are asking whether Venice should survive at all, and if so, how. Two electronic counters in the city tell the story with brutal clarity. One, mounted in a pharmacy on the Rialto, displays the resident population: 47,461 as of this week. When it was installed in 2008, the number was 60,704. In 1977, it was 100,000. The second counter, in a bookstore across the bridge, tracks tourist beds: 52,541. There are now more beds for visitors than there are people living in the city.

Andrea Morelli, the third generation to run the pharmacy since 1906—his daughter will be the fourth—remembers the pandemic lockdown, when residents were permitted to leave their homes only within a 300-meter radius to reach essential services. "Nobody came here," he recalls. "There was nobody living within 300 meters." At night, during confinement, every light in the neighborhood went dark. That silence has given way to something else entirely. Tourist arrivals have spiraled from 9 million in 2015 to 34.5 million in 2025. Barcelona, a city ten times larger, received 26 million visitors last year. The exhaustion is visible in small details: Venetians unable to board water buses because they are full; a sign in English at a bar reading, "If you're in a hurry, go to a fast food place."

For eleven years, the city has been governed by Luigi Brugnaro, a right-wing mayor who pursued what many describe as savage exploitation of the city's tourism potential. He leaves office under investigation for corruption and illegal financing, having written a 1,358-page book about his accomplishments before departing. His response to overtourism was a ten-euro entry fee—five euros if purchased in advance—implemented two years ago. It has deterred no one, particularly not the bachelor parties that flood the city, since the fee is only collected until four in the afternoon. The polls suggest his successor, a 38-year-old campaign advisor named Simone Venturini, will lose to Andrea Martella, a 58-year-old senator from the center-left Democratic Party. Martella's central proposal is to implement a reservation system for entry to Venice, similar to booking airline tickets or concert seats, which would guarantee access to transportation, museums, and services. If elected, he will commission a study to determine the maximum sustainable number of daily visitors—some research already suggests 60,000—within three months.

The desperation to change course is palpable. This week, the city's newspaper published an article by Arrigo Cipriani, owner of the legendary Harry's Bar, titled "Tourist Rentals: The Disease Killing Venice's Soul." Writer Antonio Scurati, author of the novel M, recently moved his family back to Venice, where he grew up. He has become a vocal advocate for change, warning that these elections represent a unique opportunity to alter the city's trajectory. "When I was a boy, I walked to school through the city at nine years old," he said. "We played football in the plaza with gondoliers, and the two buildings where we had our goals are now hotels." School enrollment figures released this week show 2,062 fewer registrations across all grades. Some preschools have only eight children. The median age in Venice is fifty-eight. Young people are leaving because housing is unaffordable and quality employment is scarce. The city's schools are being sold off—the historic Diedo school, housed in a thirteenth-century palazzo, faces closure as the property is slated for sale, despite pleas from the bishop to reconsider. Even the Palazzo Labia, a historic seat of Italian public television adorned with frescoes by Tiepolo, was sold. Last year, half the city was rented out for Jeff Bezos's wedding.

Marco Gasparinetti, leader of a grassroots platform called Terra e Acqua supporting Martella, describes the feeling among residents: "We feel like Indians on reservations." A tourist once asked him, "What time does Venice close?" as if the city were a museum or theme park. Gasparinetti is a lawyer, musician, and former European Commission official who returned to Venice in 2002 and became known for exposing corruption. He was the most-voted councilor in the previous election but notes a structural problem: the municipality includes Mestre and Marghera on the mainland, where 180,000 people live and hold the majority. "We are a minority in our own home," he laments. Historically, the water voted left and the land voted right, but the housing crisis has become so severe that the desire for change now transcends that divide. Gasparinetti advocates for no new tourist apartments, a rental guarantee fund, tax elimination for landlords renting to residents, and higher public sector wages. "In Venice, we invented tourism," he says. "We were the first to suffer its excess, and now we must send a signal to the world."

Claudio Vernier, who owns the historic Café Al Todaro facing the Doge's Palace—his family has run it since 1906—entered politics because he believes this is the moment or never. "We cannot rely any longer on parties that have failed for thirty years," he explains. "I have two daughters, five nieces and nephews. My family has always lived here. I want young people to have the same opportunities we had." He describes an "extractive economy" of pure speculation with no rules, creating no value and leaving the city without workers. The number of bars has increased 130 percent in a decade, an economy entirely dependent on tourism while young people flee. The transmission of Venice's traditional crafts—an invaluable immaterial heritage—has been lost. Bangladeshi workers, now numbering around 30,000, form a large community living on the mainland. For the first time, six Bangladeshi candidates appear on the center-left electoral list, though integration remains incomplete and contentious. The far-right League has posted bus advertisements opposing a mosque.

Yet beneath all these debates lies a question that dwarfs electoral cycles: Will Venice exist in a hundred years? Andrea Rinaldo, a prestigious hydraulic engineer who received the 2023 Stockholm Water Prize—the Nobel Prize of water—warns that sea levels could rise one meter by century's end. The Mose flood barrier system, which has protected the city since 2020, would need to close 262 times annually under such conditions. "That means disaster," Rinaldo says. "The lagoon ecosystem ends. The port's maritime activity ends. Venice ends." Activating Mose more than fifty times per year already poses problems; this year it has been deployed thirty times. Rinaldo, president of the Venetian Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts—founded by Napoleon—believes only Martella among the main candidates fully grasps what is at stake. He is proposing an international scientific competition to generate ideas for saving Venice. "It took sixty years to install Mose, and that was simpler than what we face now," he explains. "People didn't greet me on the street during that process. There was great opposition. Now I want to present all proposals and let people decide. We cannot afford to waste more time." Solutions exist—some brutal, like closing and draining the lagoon to create a parking lot, as has been done beneath Amsterdam's airport. But Rinaldo insists that would not save Venice. Instead, researchers are studying inverse subsidence, raising geological strata by injecting water. The city that invented tourism now faces an invention it cannot control, and a rising sea that will not negotiate.