1Venice was one of the first cities in Europe to be confined during the Covid-19 pandemic. The historic tide of November 2019 emptied the city of tourists and then the subsequent lockdown forced the tourist economy to grind to a halt. The article proposes to observe this unique moment of “being outside tourism” from the perspective of pharmacology. Pharmacology, in biology, is the study of the interaction between a product and a living organism for therapeutic purposes. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler borrowed the notion of pharmakon from Jacques Derrida, who himself re-worked the term from Plato, and extended its meaning to make it a tool for the analysis of the ambivalence of society. For Stiegler, “the pharmaka are thus remedies as well as poisons, and their level of potential toxicity is proportional to their therapeutic effectiveness” (Stiegler, 2008, p. 124).
2The analogy of tourism as a pharmakon avoids condemning it in advance and allows us to attempt a pharmacological assessment of this particular moment in order to draw-out therapeutic consequences. The cure of detoxification from tourism, imposed upon Venice, offers a particular moment to observe the ambivalence of tourism, at the same time a remedy, poison, drug and also scapegoat, with which the city could learn to live “pharmacologically”. The conclusion broadens the possibilities by questioning the capacity of tourism to divert the attention of other pharmaka. Through this article, I wish to restore from the inside, and as an anthropologist, an undocumented moment of a city that is already the subject of research papers about its history and tourism (Rabbiosi and Wanner, 2020; Bertocchi et al., 2020; Salzberg, 2019; Salerno, 2018; Zannini, 2014; Brilli, 2008; Costa and Martinotti, 2003; De Rita, 1993).
3This pharmacological assessment is based on the first lockdown that the city experienced—a period that began in February and lasted until June 2020? Residing in Venice at that time, I was able to observe in situ the one hundred days of this first lockdown from the cessation of tourism in the middle of Carnival, on February 25, 2020, to the reopening of free movement between the Italian regions on June 3, 2020. The city then went into a devastating economic crisis, which transformed the living environment of the inhabitants confined there. The lockdown made obvious the ambivalence of tourism in Venice, at once a hoped-for remedy, a feared poison and a convenient scapegoat.
4Following a short review of the Venetian context, the first part of this article tells in text and images this movement out of tourism, suspended, through the places, people and stories that the lockdown will (re)make visible: the elderly, nature, the mendicanti (beggars), the pendolari (commuters) and the public space. Then, following the partial reopening of shops and mobility, there is a return of students, the inhabitants of the metropolis and visitors to the region. These one-day visitors had increasingly become the scapegoat of an overtourism. To attract these mordi e fuggi (those who “bite and run”), the pejorative name for mass tourism, companies will try to adapt their rates, services and products to these day-trippers, while others will choose to remain closed while waiting for the tourists to return.
5The second part of the article will address the effects of the disappearance of overtourism by making manifest through the experience of lockdown the actual causes of Venice’s strong dependence on tourism, which hither to were little discussed. The unprecedented situation caused by lockdown will weaken the dominant tourism diagnosis made by the city as an attempt to find a remedy for the effects of overtourism, which had previously been of a city of 50,000 inhabitants besieged each year by 30 million tourists. The dominant narrative of the city justified the adoption of an entry tax in the city, subsequently postponed sine die by the lockdown. The work of observation crossed with the rereading the little data available tells a rather different story. In conclusion, starting from the possible economic alternatives and moving on to tourism that the lockdown will (re)place on the agenda, I question the capacity of tourism to rule itself: there would be no possible alternative, at best a development. It is an invitation to ask ourselves if we should not simply learn to live pharmacologically with tourism, in Venice as elsewhere, or if the challenge is not to understand the hegemonic capacity of tourism in order to be open to other pharmaka, and therefore other possibilities to come?
6The first Venice lockdown lasted one hundred days—from February 25, the date of the beginning of lockdown in the middle of Carnival, to June 3, 2020, the date of the reopening of free movement between Italian regions - a time out of tourism in a city where the phenomenon of overtourism has been widely described (Rabbiosi and Wanner, 2020; Bertocchi et al., 2020; Salzberg, 2019; Salerno, 2018; Zannini, 2014; Brilli, 2008). Residing in Venice at the time, I collected data during daily walks in the form of sounds, images, impressions, observations, and videos, complemented by reading social networks and local and international press, as well as conversations with my network of contacts, acquired after several years as a resident. The observations focused on what had disappeared, what had appeared, and what had become more visible with the cessation of tourism, particularly the people, places, and stories. This made it possible to document situations in Venice that were already known but little studied due to lack of data, such as the importance of the land issue in overtourism and the importance of other visitors in the daily flow. These observations were cross-referenced with the data and information available from institutions and media.
Picture 1. Venice, the Grand Canal and Calatrava bridge
© Prosper Wanner, March 22, 2020
7The term “tourist” comes from the “Grand Tour”, of which Venice was a part since the 16th century along with Naples, Rome and Florence (Brilli, 2008). The old city has the oldest hotel in Italy that is still operating, Venice’s Hotel Cavalletto e Doge Orseolo, which was an inn in 1200. The archives mention, as early as 1335, an organization of innkeepers, then called cameranti. The travellers were then diplomats, merchants, sailors, pilgrims or refugees, like those who founded the ghetto, or San Lorenzo degli armeni (Salzberg, 2019). Venice is one of the first cities in Europe to have developed the tourist industry. The year1850 marked the arrival of the train in Venice and the Austrian administration, which dominated the city from 1815 to 1866, decided to exploit its seaside potential. Subsequently, the stabilimenti balneari (bathing establishments) left the historic centre to settle on the Lido (Levantis, 2007). The tourist period of the novecento veneziano begins with the foundation of the Lido inns in 1906, which would soon become the Italian Company of grand hotels which existed until the Second World War, following which a new phase begins: the era of “mass tourism”, with tourism becoming the predominant economic activity in Venice (Zannini, 2014).
- 1 Data City of Venice, Tourist Directory and Demographic Data
8During the novecento and until after the Second World War, Venice was above all an important industrial port with 150,000 inhabitants and 70,000 jobs directly or indirectly linked to industry. The activities were diverse, related to tobacco, cotton, shipbuilding, pasta, beer, clocks, soap, and also to the cinema industry. In the second part of the 20th century, the industrial activities will decrease or move to the terra ferma, in Porto Maghera. At the end of the 1960s, more than half of the residents of the historic centre lived in houses without bathrooms, without heating and without access to an efficient sewage system (Favero, 2014). Some of the residents then moved to the terra ferma to work and live in modern houses. Since the 1950s, the “historic centre” has lost 70% of its population, which was then 175,000 inhabitants. Paradoxically, the sudden end of tourism reminds some residents of the 1990s, that in-between period between the end of the industrial decline and the boom of the tourist economy. In several conversations with residents who grew up in Venice during this period, they told me that when they were young, they only had a choice of one or two bars to meet up late at night. To get out of this industrial crisis, Venice will take advantage of tourism for the economic, cultural and social revival of the city. In 1987, it will notably obtain its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List. In 1961, the historic city centre (centro storico) had 138,000 residents for 1.7 million tourist visits (overnight stays); in 1991, it had 75,000 residents for 2.6 million tourists (Zannini, 2014; Favero, 2014) and in 2019 it had 52,143 residents for 12.9 million tourist visits.1
9Several studies show that the city is evolving into a “tourist monoculture” (Costa and van der Borg, 1988), leading to a situation where the population is “divided between those who live from tourism and those who see tourism reduce their living space” (De Rita, 1993), which sometimes leads to the qualification of the situation of hypertourism (Salerno, 2018):
from the socio-demographic point of view, there is hypertourism every time that the city users or vacationer visitors exceed the number of residents and therefore the city is defined as a place with a basic tourist vocation [...] similar to a theme park. (Costa et Martinotti, 2003, p. 61)
10As early as 1992, UNESCO warned the city that the “growth of mass tourism”2 is a threat to the city and its environment. The organization gave the city until 2019 to take the necessary measures to avoid being listed as a “site at risk”. That deadline was eventually extended. In 2018, the data on tourism published by the Veneto region counted, in the metropolis of Venice, 9.6 million arrivals and 36 million stays, including all visitors and tourists.3 The supply of tourist accommodation continues to grow: in 2019, there were 32,523 beds, including 967 additional beds, and the extra-hotel structures offer 48,441 beds, including 7,142 additional beds (+17%).4 The constant growth in the number of visitors can be explained, in part, by the increase in access to the city. The number of visitors to Marco Polo International Airport has risen from 4 million in 2000 to over 11 million in 2018, with average passenger growth of more than 7% over the past five years. The low-cost airlines based in Venice play a major role in this increase. Six hundred cruise ships call at Venice every year, with an average of 1.5 million cruise passengers over the last ten years according to the 2019 Passenger Terminal data. Venice has become the symbol of an overtourism whose criticism is widely documented (Urbain, 1991; Lanfant, 2004; Tossot, 2007; Cousin and Réau, 2011; Gravari-Barbas and Jacquot, 2018; Christin, 2018).
11With the lockdown, local shops lost their tourist clientele. The restaurants, bars and hotels, which used to buy bread, fish, fruits and vegetables from the local shops, closed because of lockdown. Several businesses started to supply the inhabitants: fishmongers, booksellers, hardware stores, stationery stores, bakers, convenience stores, and, as always, pizza shops. Before, only the pizzerias offered home delivery, and sometimes newspaper sellers or some producers in the lagoon. In the lagoon city, where deliveries are made on foot or by boat, there are no Uber Eats or Deliveroo deliverymen crisscrossing the city. Only Amazon packages have become visible lately on the boats of the transporters, in the delivery carts and at the delivery points opened in some stores. Home delivery to the elderly was sometimes the business of the badante, home helpers, declared or not, originating in part from Eastern European countries. Some elderly people stayed with their badante during lockdown. Others have lost this precious help in a city where shopping is often done daily to avoid carrying heavy bags. In Venice, there are no elevators and many bridges. At the Rialto market, next to the banner “Rialto no se toca” (don’t touch the Rialto) which warns of the possible closure of the fish market, ads for home delivery appear. Everywhere in the city, volunteers deliver to the elderly and those in quarantine. I sometimes came across these young volunteers with several shopping lists in hand. I also saw the civil protection ringing doorbells to deliver masks, certainly for frail people. I also happened to come across a bookseller friend and elected member of the opposition (lista civica Casson) who carried bags of books in each hand to deliver to his customers. It was certainly the way for him to continue to practice his profession and to play politics in times of lockdown. These shopkeepers, threatened with closure due to overtourism because of the increase in rents and the decrease in the number of local customers, became essential merchants and have started to provide the last mile of delivery. Inhabitants’ delivery, which existed in other cities before the health crisis, has become a necessity in Venice, both for the inhabitants and the shopkeepers, who are once again showing solidarity.
Picture 2. Venice, San Marco square, walker
© Prosper Wanner, May 7, 2020
12Beyond the residents, these shops and public services have continued to function for the pendolari (commuters), many of whom are not from the tourist sector, those employees who come to Venice every day to work in the public administrations, universities, hospitals, prisons, and law firms, or in the restoration sector. With social distancing measures, their presence became particularly visible in Piazzale Roma with the arrival of buses and vaporetti filled with people wearing masks and gloves. They make their journeys between their jobs in Venice and the terra ferma where they live. The newspapers headlined about these workers forced to crowd into vaporetti despite the pandemic. Outside of lockdown, tourists are not aware of this flow of people because they usually walk around after the schoolchildren have gone to school and after the employees, their guides and their goods have arrived, their food has been delivered, the garbage collected and their sheets washed in the industrial laundries in Maghera. This invisibleness of the workers allows us to better understand some tourists’ surprise, before lockdown, when it seemed that the city is inhabited: they began to take pictures of the garbage collectors, children playing on the campos and ambulances on the Grand Canal. Tourism seems to have this capacity to make others invisible and to marvel at their presence. With the epidemic and the distancing measures, the number of non-tourism workers outside of tourism ended up making local headlines and being visible.
13During my outings, I also came across people who were begging for food. The presence in Venice of beggars and places of refuge is ancient, as evidenced by the names of the Church of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli and the Church of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti, located in the Rio dei Mendicanti. Venice has had up to 300 scuole grandi and minori, lay brotherhoods that, under the patronage of a patron saint protector, carried out actions of solidarity and charity towards the weakest and the most destitute. They were at the origin of the construction of hospices and hospitals. But, since April 2008, the philosopher mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari, centre-left, has banned begging in the centre of Venice. “The phenomenon of begging makes the residents and guests of Venice feel uncomfortable,” reads the municipal decree. The ban is intended to prevent the “harassment” of tourists and the degradation of the tourist “jewel”. For the general commander of the municipal police, it was also a question of fighting against a system of organized begging that exploits a hundred or so people.5 However, organized begging did not disappear with the municipal decree of 2008 and, until lockdown, it remained very present. The beggars were mainly young men, African and sometimes Roma refugees. Each one had a very precise location, to the centimetre, where he begged every day: the bridges, the exits of convenience stores or churches and the sottoportegi (covered passages). With lockdown and the disappearance of this organized begging, I was able to observe another type of begging. They are mainly young people, in distress, suffering from addiction, who seem to wander around the city. The first time, I met a young man with a huge backpack and a bottle of alcohol in hand, talking to a small statue of the Virgin Mary embedded in a wall, as there are so many in Venice. Another time, it was a young girl in her early twenties, with a pale complexion, who stopped passers-by at the Rialto market to ask them for money to eat. On my way early to the market, I also met an elderly person with a shopping cart, as there are many in Venice; passing by a public garbage can, she took the time to look if there was anything in it. Actions of solidarity and charity began to be organized to help the weakest and neediest. A Venetian donated sum of money to a collective of residents to help people in difficulty and the city announced the introduction of vouchers for the most deprived. These meetings made me wonder where the mendicanti of before the lockdown went and where the current mendicanti came from. I received some testimonies about the fact that foreign workers had gone back to their countries because of the lack of work or because of the fear of the epidemic that was then strongly present in Venice. Workers in the tourist sector were particularly affected, especially those who were not registered.6
Picture 3. Venice, San Giacomo dall’Orio square, public bench
© Prosper Wanner, May 8, 2020
14With the cessation of tourist flows, the sound of tourism fell silent. From my window I could only hear the sound of birds singing, not the distant airplanes, the siren of the cruise ships and, closer, the station announcements on the arrival and the departure of trains. Several times, I saw a large bird fly by my window, with its elegant flight and white and black plumage with a long black curved beak. It is difficult to say if it is a sacred ibis because there are only about sixty of them in the lagoon. The birds are very present in Venice, even more so since lockdown. The noise of the young cormorant that lives just above my apartment reminds me of this every day. Ducks live in some of the canals and sometimes take their ducklings for a walk. On the deserted Piazzale Roma, a couple of ducks have settled next to the tobacco shop. I met them while I was chatting with the manager, apparently used to their visit. The cormorants have lost their food source, first the outdoor garbage cans in 2019 and now the tourists who regularly overflowed the city’s few public garbage cans. It is not uncommon to see these cormorants chasing pigeons or pizza slices from the hands of passers-by. Other birds are more visible in the city: small black-headed or white gulls, herons, egrets, and small moorhens with bright red eyes that hunt in the canals. According to the Atlante della Laguna (Lagoon Atlas), which has been recording the lagoon’s flora and fauna for more than twenty years, the lagoon is said to have half a million birds, with a population that continues to grow. They would be one hundred thousand more in five years according to the Atlante della Laguna’s last count. The fenicotteri, the pink flamingos, have settled for some years in the northern vale da pesca (fishing valleys). They were almost twenty thousand in 2019, double that of the previous year. There would be around 130 different species of birds. The swallows are the most numerous making up a fifth of the total number of birds. During lockdown, to realise this all you had to do was look out the window or open your window at five in the morning. A collective of ecotourism participants had been promoting slow tourism in the lagoon, to discover its flora and fauna. The sudden cessation of tourism, and especially school outings, defeated this initiative. The cessation of tourism seems to favour the return of other living beings, that were until then invisible, to the public space of humans.
15This return of nature to the city has been noticed, even expected. In March 2020, the video of dolphins swimming in the waters of Venice went viral to the point of being retweeted several hundred thousand times, even making the front page of some media.7 If this video is fake news, the dolphins having been filmed in a Sardinian port, cats, like birds, have also become more visible. Domestic cats have taken advantage of the lockdown to go out on the campi. In the past, cats were very present in the streets of Venice. They were used to protect the cargoes from rodents, as required by insurers and lenders since the thirteenth century. They helped to fight against the invasions of rats and plagues. In 1989, the administration decided to control the presence of stray cats by entrusting the Dingo Association with the management of the island of San Clemente and carrying out sterilization campaigns that reduced the number of cats from 12,000 to 2,000 in the lagoon.8 The cats have become rarer, although have not completely left the city. For example, there is the bookstore’s cat, which sits next to the cash register, the carpenter’s cat that stands guard at the door, the potter’s cat who looks through the window at the passers-by and those cats of the hospital who sleep peacefully in the cloister. There are some parks or streets where you can still see huts where cats sleep peacefully next to bowls still filled with food. It is especially on the islands of the lagoon that you can still see stray cats, sometimes in large numbers. With lockdown, the cats seemed to come out from apartments or their hiding places to reclaim the public space. Residents take them outside their front doors and sometimes take them for a walk. On each of my outings, I meet these cats, next to their owners who are chatting. They sit in the sun, watching the street. With the departure of the tourists, the public space doesn’t seem to be forbidden to them anymore.
Picture 4. Venice, Castello district, cat shelter
© Prosper Wanner, May 1, 2020
16In addition to the public spaces freed from tourists and souvenir stalls, other places, such as churches, were accessible again. With lockdown, it was possible to enter churches freely without paying or proving residency. They seem to have returned to a certain normality. One Sunday, we were alone in the Basilica of San Marco. The main entrance was kept closed and entry was from the side. Only a part of the church was accessible. At the entrance, we had to wash our hands with hydroalcoholic gel or put on gloves. A sign indicated that the church was open in the morning “for meditation”. A few chairs made it possible to sit in front of the cappella della Madonna Nicopeia. The rest of the church was deserted. The silence reigned among the rich mosaics on the ground and those made of gold covering the walls and ceilings.
Picture 5. Basilica San Marco, cappella della Madonna Nicopeia
©Prosper Wanner, May 17, 2020
17These observations are visible through the many images that have circulated, both locally and internationally. The photos of the clear waters of the Venetian canals and of the deserted squares, especially those normally invaded by tourists, have circulated in the media and social networks. Venice is certainly one of the places in the world whose images are most shared. Residents do not know on how many times their image has been inadvertently captured in a photo. If the Venetians also share photos of their city, they are often photos of big symbolic events for the city, such as the Redentore or the Salute festivals, which show their presence and their attachment to these events. A Facebook group gathers more than 70,000 members, including many Venetians, who share photos of non-touristy places of Venice and its lagoon. The rules of the group specify that photos of the San Marco square, the Rialto and the Punta della Dogana are not accepted. Anyone can post a photo of a little-known place or an archival image. For each new photo posted, the members of the group try to guess the place and the photos receive hundreds of likes. In general, Venetians rarely share photos of tourist places, except to testify of their overcrowding or to denounce the behaviour of visitors that they consider inappropriate. With lockdown, Venetians have started to share frequently their photos of these very touristy places, like San Marco, and common places, like the train station, the canals, and the Strada Nova. These photos show the calm of the water and the emptiness of the city, but also a rediscovered beauty as shown by the comments associated with the photos. These are the places that were previously over-visited by tourists that now seem to fascinate Venetians: San Marco, the Rialto and the Grand Canal. It is as if the residents wanted to engrave the image of these emblematic places abandoned by tourists and tourism due to the epidemic in a durable way.
18With the implementation of lockdown, Venice is out of tourism: without its souvenir stands, tourist guides, tourist transport, restaurants and tourist residences. Only a few extinguished shop windows and large informative panels remain. For the historian Marc Boyer, “no place, no monument has in itself a tourist vocation. It takes the word of men” (Boyer, 1999, p. 97); then the existence of guides, hotels and restaurants on site. Tourist Venice seems to have become mute. No one is there anymore to talk of it or to listen to it. The guides no longer repeat the great story of the Serenissima to groups of visitors equipped with portable headphones. Yet, the city is not empty of people or of stories.
19During the first lockdown, with the partial reopening of shops and mobility on May 11, 2020, visitors will again come to the city, especially students and campagnoli, the inhabitants of the metropolis and the region. These visitors were, however, classified as mordi fuggi, the local pejorative term for mass tourism. This denomination includes both the visitors of cruises or group trips, and those coming from the big seaside resorts or the Veneto region. These mordi fuggi had become the scapegoat of an overtourism to be fought. With the return of the campagnoli, some companies will adapt their prices, services and businesses for these daily visitors, as well as for the inhabitants and the pendolari. The city will then rely on its 270,000 residents, including campagnoli, and its 20,000 students to keep its economy afloat. An association of individual hosts will establish a partnership with the university to welcome students in their unoccupied accommodation. In May 2020, the city will enter into an agreement with the 250 taxi boats to offer special fares to residents for one month.9 The proposed fare was 20 euros for a cab from Piazzale Roma to Rialto. The agreement was signed by the municipality to compensate for the 70% drop in public transport by vaporetto. This decision follows newspaper articles reporting the difficulties encountered by residents who have to go to the hospital regularly. With the absence of tourists, the public transport authority ACTV has greatly reduced its runs. In 2020, it forecast a loss of 100 million euros and the prefect announced that the public company was at risk of closing. Thanks to tourism, Venice has a vaporetto system that operates 24 hours a day. You can return from an island in the north of the lagoon at four in the morning for 1.40 euros. This quality of public service is made possible because tourists pay 7.50 euros for a trip, five times more than residents. The monthly resident pass is 35 euros, including bus and tram, cheaper than a three-day tourist ticket. Thanks to this fare policy, tourism finances continuous public transport in Venice. The downside is that some lines are overcrowded. Some terminals have a priority entrance for residents to avoid missing their vaporetto, especially if they live in the islands of the northern lagoon. Outside of these terminals, it is not uncommon to miss a vaporetto, or even two, especially in summer. Walking is the best way to get around, even with a baby carriage or a shopping cart. Another public service strongly impacted was that of waste collection. Prior to Covid-19, tourism was accused of driving up waste treatment costs, to which businesses contribute via a tax linked to their volume of waste, as do the inhabitants. The mayor used this argument to justify the introduction of a landing fee so that tourists would also contribute. With the crisis, collections have fallen by two thirds and the lack of tourism is ultimately putting the public company in difficulty, whose financial resources have fallen by a quarter. Reducing the number of waste boats and closing public toilets until tourists return are among the measures taken to limit losses. The residents and the pendolari do not seem to be perceived as potential users of this public service.
20In addition to the high price of the vaporetto ticket, tourists are largely financially burdened. The tourist tax is 4 euros per tourist, crossing the Grand Canal in traghetto is 2 euros for tourists against 0.70 euros for a resident, the entrance to a church is 2 euros per tourist and free for a resident, and the price of the disembarkation ticket has been set between 3 and 10 euros per tourist. The private sector also applies this double pricing. The price will not be the same in many shops in Venice if you are a resident, or even if you speak the Venetian dialect, or not. The mayor, re-elected in the first round in 2020, said, “if you come to Venice, you have to know that you are in Venice and spend something”. This was his answer to three Asian tourists who had complained to him about having paid 526.50 euros for a fish meal in a Venetian restaurant.10 More and more tourists, mainly Asian, shared on social networks the photos of the bills of Venetian restaurants and cafés, because they seemed to be overpriced. These high tariffs finance both public services and the entire tourism industry, well beyond the visible part. One confectioner told me that he feared that middlemen would take advantage of the situation to strengthen their position vis-à-vis the cruise ships. Their passengers sometimes arrive at his store when they are not taken care of by the many existing middlemen. His fear is that, if their point of arrival is no longer in Venice, they will be picked up by middlemen in shuttles, by bus or by boat, and guided only to certain shops, against commission, a common practice in Venice. The Fontego dei Tedeschi, at the foot of the Rialto, transformed into a huge luxury supermarket, has its own direct arrival for cabs. Murano glass factories also have their own private pontoons to let cabs or boat-buses loaded with tourists disembark. This prevents them from passing through the shopping streets. In exchange, the intermediary, whether he is a cab, a guide, a travel agency or a hotel porter, gets a commission, sometimes significant. Some stores have developed their own network of intermediaries. The scandal came to light in 2018 following a tax audit of a dozen Murano glass factories. The auditors uncovered a vast system of tax evasion and slush funds: le sistema Murano. These funds were used to pay intermediaries, and this amounted sometimes in the tens of thousands of euros. The financial auditors discovered an agreement involving millions of euros between Murano glassmakers and an international travel agency. The capture of the flow of travellers begins as soon as they arrive at the Tronchetto parking lots. At the Pullman arrival parking lot, the “Tronchetto Mafia” regularly makes the headlines. Tourists are encouraged by more or less official “welcome agents” to use private transport boats rather than public transport. The practice has been tolerated for years and is said to support several families. No mayor has ever put an end to this system, even though it has been denounced many times.
Picture 6. Venice, San Marco district, shopping street
© Prosper Wanner, June 2, 2020
21In addition to these intermediaries, the health crisis has highlighted the importance of the role of owners in the tourism economy. According to friends who are restaurateurs, cabs, real estate agents and shopkeepers, the reopening of activities will largely depend on the attitude of the owners. Negotiations were already underway since the great acqua alta (high tide) of November 2019. Even if Venice has never recovered its level of commercial activity before the 2008 crisis, the level of rent remains high, whether for housing or running a business. Some owners have taken the lead ahead of time. Others simply grant payment delays or turn a blind eye. The logic has been, until the crisis, to significantly increase rents as soon as possible. Two years ago, the manager of a café in Piazza San Marco did not renew the lease on part of his premises, which his family had occupied for 67 years. His landlord doubled the rent to 40,000 euros per month. For the past few years, this type of story has regularly made the headlines. The so-called historical shops close when their lease is renewed: paper shops, shoe stores, butchers, bookshops. The level of rent asked by the owners increases so much that it is no longer tenable for a non-tourist activity. This also happens when a craftsman seeks to sell his business which, although profitable, does not allow him to pay a large rent. In order to pay such rents, it is necessary to generate margins that only luxury and low-cost products make possible. Only these products, with high margins, seem to be able to pay a high rent: on the one hand luxury with its restaurants and shops, on the other hand, low cost with take-away sales and low-end souvenirs. A real estate agent explained to me that, for a major brand, Venice was a luxury showcase with millions of visitors. What does it matter if the store makes losses because of high rent? The return on image is beyond measure. The masks and glass made on site are still competitive at times. For low-end souvenirs, traders buy from wholesalers outside Venice, from whom it is possible to find cheap masks, glass, souvenirs or imitations of Venetian paintings. The manager of a Chinese semi-wholesaler in Padua told a newspaper that he worked more with the so-called “historical” shops.11 The Cipriani family will not reopen the Harry Bar, closed for the first time in 89 years.12 According to this millionaire Venetian family exiled in tax havens, the fault lies with the lack of public support and the sanitary constraints.
Picture 7. Venice, San Polo district
“Venice reborn if … defends itself against speculators”
© Prosper Wanner, June 2, 2020
22Residential rents are also driven up by tourist speculation. In the real estate agencies, apartments are presented as financial products with their rate of return. In 2018, the program “Envoyé special” was able to film a demonstration of Venetians against the eviction of a 70-year-old pensioner who had been paying his rent regularly for 52 years. The owner, questioned, and visibly exasperated, said he was at home and had the law on his side. Last year, a similar protest succeeded in stopping a landlord who was again trying to evict an elderly citizen. When a lease is renewed, when a shopkeeper or craftsman retires or when an apartment becomes available, the rent charged is such that it often only allows for a tourist activity. The citizen group “25 aprile” has published a glossary on “living in Venice”. It states in the introduction that “looking for a house in Venice is now as easy as finding a gold nugget on the banks of the Sile, except for the rich”. Without international tourism, it seems difficult to maintain the current level of rents.
23A couple managing about fifteen tourist flats for landlord accounts, with whom I have regular exchanges within the framework of my thesis, quickly found themselves in great difficulty. They had to renegotiate their contracts due to lack of tourists. They offer owners to pay them a rent higher than the long-term rental or to share tourist rental income. In the first case, they were able to return the apartments to the owners and stop paying rent. In the second case, they offered the apartments to students to keep a minimum income. The health crisis has highlighted the importance of the land issue, which seems to be one of the keys to Venice’s future. Just before the crisis, a group of residents created an observatory of housing and residence in Venice, called OCIO (Osservatorio CIvicO sulla casa e la residenza).
24With the lockdown, it is not only tourists who have deserted the city and its public spaces. Souvenirs have almost disappeared from Venice and, with them, many souvenir stores. Some essential shops also seem to have closed down due to a lack of souvenirs to sell. This is because one of the ways to limit the invasion of tourist shops in Venice is to reserve some commercial premises for local activities such as food or the sale of newspapers. Some shopkeepers sometimes circumvent these rules in favour of a tourist activity. Thus, many newsstands have been transformed into souvenir shops and it is difficult to see the newspapers under the countless masks, bags and souvenirs that hang all around. The rules, as the few newspaper articles on this subject remind us, say that they must offer a minimum 55% of newspapers in full view and 45% of souvenirs. Today, souvenirs have almost disappeared from the kiosks that remained open and the newspapers have become visible again. Many of the fruit and vegetable stands in the Rialto market have closed: these are the ones that sold, along with some fruits and vegetables, many herbs and dried products for Italian cooking.
25Some mini-markets have also closed their doors. Beside daily products, they offered convenience products, such as sandwiches, individual drinks and food souvenirs in large quantities. Most of these shops were run by Asians, either Bengali or Chinese. During the lockdown, these convenience stores could have remained open - but apparently not without tourists. The sudden cessation of the flow of tourists has revealed the extent to which life’s basic necessities depend primarily on tourism.
26These observations lead us to gain perspective on the sole responsibility of tourists, alone or in organized groups, for the crisis in Venice. They reveal other causes of Venice’s heavy dependence on tourism, which have been little discussed until now, including an unfair land market, price discrimination, poor public transport, misguided regulations, abuse of dominant position, illegality and inadequate services for residents. The success of tourism allows rents, public transport fares, waste taxes or the price of a gourmet menu to be increased. The public, private and illegal actors have become highly dependent on this economy and the ‘tourist’ has become a convenient scapegoat. The containment has paradoxically highlighted the ambivalence of the tourist economy: the situation has reached a point where with the presence of tourists, both public services and tourist activities are reaching saturation, but without tourists, there are no more public services or economy. This crisis makes the ambiguity visible, whether intentional or not, which consists in only tackling the effects of overtourism, i.e. the mordi fuggi, rather than its causes. For the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, a pharmakon can also play the role of scapegoat:
- 13 Definition of Phamarkon on the website of Ars Industrialis, the international association for an in (...)
Poison and remedy, the pharmakon can also become the scapegoat of negligence, which does not know how to use it to cure and lets it poison the lives of the incurious, that is, those who do not know how to live pharmacologically. Its toxicity can also lead to the designation of scapegoats for the calamitous effects to which it can lead in situations of negligence.13
Picture 8. Venice, Grand Canal
© Prosper Wanner, March 10, 2020
27The landing tax that should have been in place by July 2020 has not been implemented by the city. This so-called “landing tax” was adopted by the city of Venice on November 22, 2018 and postponed several times due to the complexity of its implementation. By asking the first post-crisis visitors to pay 10 euros each, as was planned for the summer period, the city would certainly have slowed the timid economic recovery. This decision re-examines the narrative commonly shared by the inhabitants, the media and the institutions: that of a city of 50,000 inhabitants besieged each year by 30 million tourists. At the opening of the Carnival on February 8, 2020, the peak tourist day, 100,000 visitors came, including 25,000 in Piazza San Marco, i.e. one downtown resident for every two visitors. We are far from the media story of one resident for every 600 tourists. The city of Venice has 270,000 residents, 55,000 of whom live in the historic city centre located in the heart of the Lagoon. It is the capital of the Veneto region, which has 5 million inhabitants. The 30 million visitors are roughly divided into 10 million tourist visitors who stay an average of 2.5 nights and pay their tourist tax, 10 million day-trippers, who visit the city during the day and are mainly from the region or nearby tourist resorts and 10 million non-vacationers, who come to study, work, attend to administration or see friends (Wanner, 2019). In 2018, the University Ca’Foscari proposed to set a threshold of 19 million visitors per year as a sustainable model, or 52,000 presences per day in the city centre. That is, one inhabitant for one visitor. If we listen to the city’s arguments, the problem is that a day-tripper—the visitor for a day—has a much lower average spending basket than a tourist who stays at least one night. One of the few surveys on tourist consumption, carried out in 2012 by the University of Ca’Foscari, reveals that residential tourists spend an average of 169 euros per person per day in Venice, compared to 40 euros for those staying in hotels in the area—the so-called “improper excursionists”—and 25 euros for the so-called “traditional excursionists”, i.e. six times less (Van Der Borg, 2013). This is despite the fact that the number of excursionists is growing much more dynamically. With a ratio of 20% residential tourists to 80% day-trippers, the situation is far from the 50/50 ratio that the university advocated (Bertocchi et al., 2020). With lockdown, the city has had to postpone the implementation of its tax that was supposed to reverse the ratio between residents, tourists and the mordi fuggi for the fourth time. Its objective, to favour spending visitors over others, i.e. ultimately international tourists, has been made impossible.
Picture 9. Venice, San Giacomo dell’Orio square, souvenir shop
© Prosper Wanner, April 30, 2020
- 14 Association Faro Venezia, article on the heritage walk on non-tourism hospitality in Venice (in Ita (...)
28The “other” visitors, the non-tourists, were, according to the protocol for the tax application, to be subject to a control of their reason for visiting in order to know whether or not they had to pay the landing tax. Some would have benefited from the 20 or so exemptions, such as students, residents or football fans. All the others would have had to pay, starting in July. This is particularly the case for clients or partners of the professions, friends of residents, trainees of Venetian music schools, sports clubs and other non-tourism related activities, some of which have already announced that they will move to the mainland to continue their activities. The alternative for impecunious travellers would have been to come during the low season when tickets were at their minimum, at 3 euros. While hotel construction continues, despite the health crisis, “other” travellers have fewer than 3,000 beds available to them in Venice, aside from their possible relatives. For comparison, at the end of 2019, the independent citizen’s observatory of housing and residence, OCIO, counted 76,273 tourist beds in the entire municipality. In December 2019, I organized, with the Faro Venezia association, a heritage walk on non-tourist hospitality in Venice.14 With the association, we identified 24 non-touristy hospitality places in the historic city, half of them dedicated to students. The other places welcome artists, researchers, hospital staff, believers, seminar participants, or people in difficulty such as women and isolated minors, the homeless and refugees. The Foresteria Canal al Pianto, which accommodates hospital staff, medical students and caregivers, has a total of 43 beds. It is fully booked all year round, without advertising, and refuses many requests.
29Some argue that the landing tax project has become unnecessary since the region’s president has succeeded in making all residents of the region free of charge in 2019 and that a reduction has been obtained for tourists who already pay their tax elsewhere in the region. The risk would be to create a costly administrative machinery for few cases. Residents’ groups are calling for a cap on the number of visitors, whether they pay or not, or to limit the control to tourist groups arriving by bus, cruise ship or boat. Other cities, such as Barcelona, have chosen to prioritise the right to the city. This logic of optimizing the average expenditure basket in tourism is called revenue management. It involves creating physical or contractual tariff barriers to optimize the profitability of tourism. Revenue management was invented by the airline industry, then by tourism in the 1980s; it is a dynamic pricing system based on supply and demand. Nowadays, some systems are automated and go so far as to take into account the weather, wave height and the ability to pay off their customers to set prices. Whatever the reason for hospitality, it is the “market” that sets the price. This logic has led to hotel rates growing at twice the rate of the rest of the market. Venice has become, by this logic, the most expensive tourist city in Italy. This is what partly explains the success of the arrival of Airbnb, which has been able to offer flats that are “cheaper than hotels” with a kitchen, thus avoiding restaurants, in order to monopolise the offer before applying the revenue management and increasing its rates. Intermediation, legal or illegal, is at the heart of the tourism system, whether local or international. Hotel porters, digital platforms, tour operators, local and international travel agencies all operate on a commission basis. Each intermediary defends its position by limiting direct contact between people. Bruno Latour and Michel Callon wrote in the introduction to the book the Sociology of Market Arrangements that, in order to move to a capitalist regime, all that was needed was to make two small changes: “to treat one’s relatives as perfect strangers with whom one will be even, and to treat distant strangers as intimates with whom one will never be even”. In tourism, travellers seem to have more durable and intimate ties with the intermediaries who manage their travel—platforms, agencies, guides—than with the inhabitants of the places they visit.
30Tourism seems to have revealed itself, in this non-tourism period, as a pharmakon, i.e. “at the same time” a remedy, a poison and a scapegoat for a city in a deadlock. For Bernard Stiegler, “there is no simple pharmakon” (Stiegler, 2007, p. 27). If it is thanks to tourism that Venice has emerged from the crisis and it is because of it that it has become the symbol of overtourism, the sudden end of tourism has made clear the city’s inability to live with tourism. It is not a question of judging tourism, which is both a remedy and a poison, and whose addiction may sometimes prove necessary, but rather to learn to live with it pharmacologically, acting so that the remedy is superior to the poison. Neglect can exist when society focuses on the effects of addiction alone, without taking into account its causes. In the case of Venice, as the effects of overtourism have disappeared, its causes have become more visible and, ultimately, they have made it possible to better name the public and private failings, as well as the scapegoats.
31With the lockdown, anti-tourists hope that the city will appreciate this break from tourists and imagine a new future. The pro-tourists hope that everyone will realize the economic importance of tourism to stimulate a rapid recovery. The question is whether lockdown will contribute to shifting from strongly contradictory and disjointed positions towards more convergence in order to learn to live pharmacologically with tourism. On social networks, residents are wondering which tourism to start again. In the international press and on social networks, articles tell of the hope for a new narrative of a Venice converted to sustainable tourism. The number of tourists would be limited and the city would favour long stays for people sensitive to its “unique” character. In Il Manifesto, the Venetian writer Roberto Ferrucci wrote during this first lockdown: la colpa è di noi veneziani (it is the fault of us Venetians). It translates a feeling more and more shared and stated. Venice would have become, with tourism, a “slot machine” always winning. A purchased or inherited building or flat quickly becomes a good financial investment. Many friends, who used to be architects, have now become real estate agents and manage several tourist apartments. Since the beginning of the century, Venetian hospitality has become essentially tourist. Its standards, pricing and intermediation system are aimed only at the “tourist” traveller, to the detriment of “other travellers” who also visit a city to work there, to live there more or less temporarily, attend or study there (Rabbiosi and Wanner, 2020). Beyond the emblematic case of Venice, tourism is an activity of welcoming travellers. In France, more than a third of the population does not go on tourist trips. The World Tourism Organization has adopted a definition of “tourist” that has remained unchanged for almost a century. It distinguishes, among travellers, those who come to consume locally from those who come to work, study or seek refuge. In order to obtain a tourist visa to France, one must have “sufficient financial resources”. The current crisis seems to show, in Venice, the limits of regulating the supply of hospitality on the sole criterion of the average expenditure budget. Most importantly, the example of Venice also shows that the definition of a specific category of travellers, at the statistical, regulatory and fiscal levels—as “tourists”—seems to act performatively on places, and in turn creates a category for those who do not fit into the definition, such as seasonal workers, students, migrants and a range of other mobile identities (Rabbiosi and Wanner, 2020). By moving towards a reconsideration of both landscapes, stories and people, freed by lockdown from the monocultural lens of mass tourism, other pharmaka emerges as a possibility.
Picture 10. Venice, Dorsoduro district, farmers’ market
© Prosper Wanner, May 3, 2020
32Lockdown has not only made visible the causes of overtourism, which had previously not been adequately taken into account, it has also contributed to the emergence of other imaginary possibilities. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the city’s proposals focused essentially on the fight against the effects of tourism. The crisis obliges it to open the debate on the causes which brought it towards this tragic situation, in particular tourism intermediation and the free land market. Today, both the private and public sectors are measuring their de facto dependence on the tourism economy, just as they seem to be rediscovering the other “invisible” passengers. These least expected passengers can potentially be the first to turn the local economy around: the inhabitants, workers, students, apprentices. This is accompanied by a change in the pricing of hospitality services, which are no longer based solely on the seasonality of tourism. Residential and commercial rents are renegotiated for the months and years to come. In Venice, solidarity has (re)emerged in the tourism sector itself by offering hospitality to quarantined people. Prices are no longer set solely by the law of the market alone, but by virtue of a solidarity with others, sometimes free of charge. Hospitality seems to have become hospitality again.
- 15 Article on the process at the Arsenal on the website of the association Faro Venezia: “L’Arsenale, (...)
- 16 The MOSE system, MOdulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (Electromechanical Experimental Module), is t (...)
33The future of hospitality practices in Venice is difficult to predict. This period coined as “out-of-tourism” has also made other stories, landscapes and travellers visible. It remains to be seen whether this will contribute to the evolution of the imagination of the inhabitants and institutions and influence the way they will think about their future. Until the health crisis, the tourism narrative dominated all other possible narratives, both economically and culturally. The example of the future of the Venice Arsenal is telling in this respect.15 In 2014, a hundred or so Venetians, representatives of associations, companies and residents’ groups, were brought together by the city of Venice to think about the future of the arsenal, a large part of which the city had just recovered. This participatory workshop day, organized by the Arsenal office with which I collaborated, had the sole instruction of imagining together what could be an arsenal that would become a “piece of city without tourism”. At the end of the day, the main idea proposed was to make it an open museum around the reconstruction of the Buncintoro, a Venetian ship burned by Napoleon. The collective reflection led to the proposal of a new museum, in a city that already has twenty or so, based on the story of the Serenissima, already widely told from the Carnival to the Doge’s Palace. The Arsenal office was thus faced with a collective imagination dominated by the economic and historical narrative of tourism: there seems to be no economic alternative to the tourism of a Serenissima Venice. This was despite the fact that the day took place in the heart of the arsenal, in a landscape of predominantly industrial architecture, where submarines, the first Italian seaplanes and iron ships were built, as witnessed by the Armstrong crane. A dockyard where, in 2014, 500 people were still working in ship repair, in public and military research, in the pavilions of the Biennale, in public and private companies linked to the construction of the MOSE16 system and in the dockyard sports facilities. Thus, a whole range of activities that may or may not be linked to the tourist economy. These places, stories and people, which open up other imaginaries and possible futures for the city, do not seem to have been taken into account.
34It is difficult to determine the impact of these sometimes ancient, landscapes, characters and narratives that have (re)emerged with the lockdown, on the inhabitants and institutions and their ability to think about their future. Will they turn out to be “arrows of futurity”, to use the words of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur?
The past, in fact, is not only what has passed, what has taken place and can no longer be changed; it is alive in the memory of the past thanks to the arrows of futurity whose trajectory has been interrupted. The unfulfilled future of the past is perhaps the richest part of a tradition. The release of this unfulfilled future of the past is the major benefit that can be expected from the crossing of memories and the exchange of narratives. It is mainly the founding events of a historical community that should be subjected to this critical reading, so as to free the charge of hope that it carried and that the course of history has betrayed. The past is a graveyard of unfulfilled promises that must be resurrected like the bones of the Valley of Josapha in the prophecy of Ezekiel. (Ricoeur, 1992)
35Will the Covid-19 crisis release “unfulfilled futures”, which could prove to be opportunities to open up to new imaginaries that will allow us to go beyond the impasse in which Venice seems to find itself? To take up the concept of pharmakon by Bernard Stiegler, this cessation of tourism could be the opportunity for the city of Venice and its inhabitants to learn to live pharmacologically from the new imaginaries that the pandemic has (re)put on the agenda, by not limiting itself to the search for a more sustainable tourism, which would be pharmacologically “well dosed”, but by opening up to the other pharmaka that tourism has made invisible. And, following the invitation of the writer Salvatore Settis (2014), to “elaborare una poetica del riuso che non si limiti alla monocoltura del turismo di massa” [elaborate a poetics of reuse that is not limited to the monoculture of mass tourism]. This capacity of tourism to impose itself on our imaginations is certainly not unique to Venice. It would, in my view, benefit from being documented in other contexts to help break the deadlock in which many tourist destinations seem to find themselves due to the strong pharmacological dimension of tourism, which is at once an addictive poison, a unique remedy and a convenient scapegoat.