The ANNOTICO Report
Venice is on course to become a city
virtually without residents within the next 30 years, turning it into a sort of
Disneyland - teeming with holidaymakers but
devoid of inhabitants.
The 1966 flood led to the
ground floors of some 16,000 houses being abandoned and the growth of mass
tourism, combined with rising water levels, has made living in Venice increasingly challenging. especially, since It looks like Italy's
new government will suspend work on the Moses Project to build a flood barrier.
While the volume of
tourists, already 50,000 a day, is climbing inexorably. House prices have
meanwhile soared beyond the reach of all but the richest Venetians.
Population decline set to turn
Venice into Italy's Disneyland
London Guardian.uk
John Hooper in Rome
Friday August 25, 2006
Venice is on course to become a city
virtually without residents within the next 30 years, turning it into a sort of
Disneyland - teeming with holidaymakers
but devoid of inhabitants.
Depopulation is getting to
the point of no return, the Venice
council housing chief, Mara Rumiz, said following the
publication this week of the latest figures. "Beyond then, Venice will never again
be a normal city, but will become a mere tourist destination and lose its charm
- even for the tourists themselves," she was quoted as telling the daily
La Repubblica today.
The register of residents,
tallied every 10 years, shows that the population of Venice proper has almost halved - from
121,000 to 62,000 - since the great flood of 1966. A city that once ruled an
empire now has a smaller population than Herne Bay
and, if it continues to lose full-time inhabitants at the same rate, it will be
"empty" by around 2046.
Although the pace of
decline has been slower in the past 10 years than in previous decades, it is
now speeding up and threatens to strip Venice
of its full-time residents even sooner. Since 1996 the register of residents
has shrunk by 800 a year. But in 2005, 1,918 more people moved out of the city
or died than moved in or were born there.
Today, 25% of the
population is over the age of 64. The latest council estimate is that the rate
of decline will increase to between 2,000 and 2,500 a year. That does not mean
the city will be without inhabitants because foreigners and Italians are
continuing to buy second homes in Venice,
but it does mean the native Venetian is an endangered species. Venice may then become a living museum-city -
a place to which, as La Repubblica remarked, it would be "normal to charge entry". The 1966
flood led to the ground floors of some 16,000 houses being abandoned and the
growth of mass tourism, combined with rising water levels, has made living in Venice increasingly
challenging.
Yet it looks like Italy's new government will suspend work on the Moses
Project to build a flood barrier. And the volume of tourists, already 50,000 a
day, is climbing inexorably.
House prices have meanwhile
soared beyond the reach of all but the richest Venetians.