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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