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If you stay on Venice, you can explore away from the busiest tourist areas during the day, then at night when most of the tourists leave, have the city to yours
by js2 8y ago
If you stay on Venice, you can explore away from the busiest tourist areas during the day, then at night when most of the tourists leave, have the city to yourself to explore.
Obviously a place can be loved or touristed to death. Groups with a large number of people arriving all at once (whether by van or bus or ship) exacerbate it. But everywhere I've traveled, even very popular places, if you can find a way to avoid the large groups and peak times, you have a much more pleasant experience.
My initial impression of Venice when I visited it four years ago was: "this seems like a place Disney would build if it only could." Perhaps Venice should take a page from Disney's playbook: treat itself like a theme park and limit total daily access with time-of-day tickets for the most popular destinations.
- Bayart 8y agoBeing a theme park is existential terror for any historical city.
- buboard 8y agoIt IS a theme park, albeit a sloppy one. If the city did not rely on tourism they would have more efficient boats, perhaps some other transportation system (so that the city is actually livable by working age locals, and not just by pensioners), some squares would have a playground instead of cafes and jewelry shops etc. Tourism sets the whole city to "tourist mode", slow and geared only towards tourism-related businesses. It wouldn't work as a tech city for example (even though i would love to see the innovations they would have to build for it). It has been museum-ified by choice of the Venetians. I love the history of Venice to bits (I live in one of their former conquests) , but nowadays its indeed like a disney construction, you can't trust it to maintain a culture. Even the art students who frequent the various squares look like posers.
- bliblah 8y agoI am very doubtful that Venice has some latent value outside of Tourism. There are many reasons it fell out of power while other cities flourish and thrived during the same period. This isn't a case like Singapore where land is limited because you could just live in the mainland. The buildings are all historical treasures so modernizing the infrastructure is probably out of the question. So business need to thrive in a place that is hard to access, can't grow, and can't modernize itself. Don't get me wrong, I love the place but the only people who live there are Millionaires that use those houses as vacation homes half the year and don't contribute much to the local economy. The local craftspeople are all masters so only the most wealthy could afford their wares so they have been replaced by Chinese souvenir shops. It's definitely a shame but I don't see how a common Italian person is supposed to reap the benefits of less tourism.
- smileysteve 8y agoThe water taxis bothered me because the planing hulls needed trim tabs or to go a bit faster.