The generational link you mentioned has been broken in pretty much any city or town in the world, for decades at this point. Cheap planes and telecoms let peopl

The generational link you mentioned has been broken in pretty much any city or town in the world, for decades at this point. Cheap planes and telecoms let people shuffle all over the planet, and the ones who will live and die in the same city or town where they were born will forever be fewer and fewer. Paris has its people - the people who choose to live there today. They might not look or talk like Napoleonic Parisians, but so what? Paris as a whole still feels very much alive and inhabited in pretty much every corner. I think the problem is that you have an idea of Paris in your mind and refuse to accept that reality does not match it (and probably never did - literature is never a perfect mirror, since it will reflect an author's view rather than reality). Venice has a different problem. The historic centre is literally dying out: nobody wants to put up with the annoying logistics anymore, and buildings are more profitable when used by tourists; so the "locals" (as in long-time residents; many of them were not born there) choose to live on land instead, in Mestre (which keeps growing). What is left is indeed largely a museum, an open-air tourist trap. This is well-understood and nominally opposed by local politicians, but it's unlikely that these macro-trends can be significantly reversed.