Population decline set to turn Venice into Italy's
Disneyland
John Hooper in
Rome
The
Guardian
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
yesterday.
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
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