When I lived in Europe I visited Venice a few times, and what I learned from various readings is that Venice itself, from a buildings perspective, is less than

When I lived in Europe I visited Venice a few times, and what I learned from various readings is that Venice itself, from a buildings perspective, is less than 50% occupied, and the population is overwhelmingly skewed older. So, there's an economic vitality issue to that... The buildings are empty because if you renovate your building you have to bring it up to contemporary building codes, which is very expensive. So people abandoned the buildings and no one wants to pay to make them habitable by current standards. And so you're left with the tourism conundrum -- things are good enough for the tourism economy but everything behind that is failing. That said, I always enjoyed the beauty, strangeness and pedestrian culture of Venice. It's a lovely place to visit and walk and read.