VENICE, Italy -- For years, Venice has faced an almost existential crisis, as the unbridled success of its tourism industry threatened to ruin the things that have drawn visitors for centuries. Now the coronavirus pandemic has dammed off the tide of tourists and hobbled the city's economy.
Residents hope the crisis has also provided an opportunity to reimagine one of the world's most fragile cities, creating a more sustainable tourism industry and attracting more full-time residents.
The pandemic -- following on the heels of a series of exceptional floods in November that dealt a first economic blow -- ground to a halt Italy's most-visited city, stanching the flow of $3.2 billion in annual tourism-related revenue, the vast majority of the city's intake. Promised government assistance has been slow to arrive.
The city that has inspired painters like Canaletto and Turner is now a blank canvas.
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"This allows us to rethink life in the historic center," said Mayor Luigi Brugnaro, speaking in the empty piazza in front of St. Mark's Basilica last week.
The population of the historic center has shrunk to some 53,000, down by one-third from a generation ago. To help repopulate the center, Brugnaro favors a proposal from the city's Ca' Foscari university to rent to students apartments that had been removed from housing stock as tourist rentals. The mayor imagines a dynamic he witnessed in Boston, where those who arrive to study fall in love with the city and stay.
Brugnaro also wants to create a center to study climate change, given the city's vulnerability to flooding, that could attract scientists who would become residents. He imagines triggering a sort of Renaissance that would draw other foreign residents -- creatives -- who for centuries were the city's lifeblood.
He would like to resize the hit-and-run mass tourism on which the economy depends.
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"Venice is a slow city," Brugnaro said. "The slowness of Venice is the beauty of Venice."
Visions for Venice's future include calls to offer tax breaks to draw traditional manufacturing back to the historic center.
Civic groups have suggested incentives to restore traditional ways of Venetian life, like the standing rowboats that have been used for centuries by residents but that struggle to compete with motorized boats.
There is hope that tourist trap shops that disappeared after the shutdown will be replaced with more sustainable businesses.
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Bevilacqua -- the maker of luxury textiles used by fashion houses such as Dior, Valentino and Dolce&Gabbana -- is the only manufacturer in operation on the Grand Canal.
"To relaunch, Venice must return to its past," said Rodolfo Bevilacqua. "You cannot, and I will use a heavy term, profane it daily. That is, people who don't clean up after themselves."
Debates over how to manage tourism have always been heated in Venice and are especially fraught now. Venice's plan to impose a tax on day-trippers has been put aside -- and many object that any such system would give the city even more of a theme park air.
The mayor and tourism officials estimate it will be at least a year until tourists -- who have numbered 30 million a year -- return in any significant numbers. While many residents are reveling in the drop in noise pollution and improved air quality, a year without tourists also means many jobs will be wiped out.
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"It will be a fight for survival," said Claudio Scarpa, the head of the Venetian hotel association.
The docking of cruise ships is halted for this year. Gondoliers aren't being permitted to glide through the canals until June 1, and many are struggling, having received just one payment of about $650 from the government.
Their future even after that date remains uncertain. The gondoliers' position at the rear of the boat allows enough distance to spare them the mask requirement. But Andrea Balbi, the head of the association representing the city's 433 gondoliers, said that the rules so far won't permit them to help tourists on and off the rocky boats. The extended hand is not just a courtesy, Balbi said, but a condition of insurance coverage.
Arrigo Cipriani, the owner of Harry's Bar, said that until health restrictions are relaxed, he is not even thinking about opening the wood-paneled, canal-side bar made famous by Ernest Hemingway. His bar offers some of the best people-watching in Venice over peachy Bellini cocktails -- but it is just 30 feet by 13 feet, which under current rules would allow only a fraction of the usual clientele.
"Hospitality means freedom. It means an absence of imposition," Cipriani said -- and it doesn't happen over a mask.
Nearby, the Hotel Saturnia is spacing out its bar tables to reopen on Monday. "We want to send a positive message," said owner Gianni Serandrei.
Brugnaro, the mayor, is hoping to send a signal of recovery by staging the popular Redeemer's festival in July. The annual event celebrates the end of the plague in 1577 -- one of the most disastrous episodes in Venetian history -- with a regatta and a spectacular fireworks display.
"It will be something out of this world to see," he said, "watching from a boat in St. Mark's Basin."
A Section on 05/17/2020