Virus lockdown gives Venice a shot at reimagining tourism

In Venice, a city famous for being visited by too many and home to too few, children's play now fills neighborhood squares, fishermen sell their catch to home cooks, and water buses convey masked and gloved commuters to businesses preparing to reopen.

At the same time, the famed lacquered black gondolas remain moored to the quay; hotel rooms are empty, museum doors sealed; and St. Mark's Square normally teeming in any season is traversed at any given moment by just a handful of souls after tourists abandoned the city in late February.

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 billion euros ($3.2 billion) in annual tourism-related revenue, the vast majority of the city's intake. Promised government assistance has been predictably slow to arrive.

The city that has inspired painters like Canaletto and Turner is now a blank canvas.

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 this 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 come 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 bring 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.

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 bring traditional manufacturing back to the historic center. Civic groups have suggested incentives to restore traditional ways of Venetian life, like the standing rowboats 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.

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.