Venice has been a draw for travellers for hundreds of years. But recently, it’s been caught up in . From Spain to Greece, local demonstrators have been chanting "Tourists go home", blaming mass tourism for driving up the cost of living and chronic housing shortages.
Venice’s historic centre now has fewer than 50,000 residents, and that number keeps dropping. In any one year, six million tourists visit the city, and of those, the majority only stay for one day. Hoping to encourage tourists to pick less busy times, the city became the first in the world to charge visitors a 5-euro entry fee.
So I headed off to the tiny water-bound city in the height of the European summer to see what impact this might have, how the residents were feeling, and what it was like to be a visitor amid the growing anti-tourism movement. Source: SBS / Dateline For 50 years, Andrea Vio, a third-generation fishmonger, has woken up at 3am and walked through the empty streets to set up his stall at the beating heart of Venice, the Rialto Markets. "Only at that moment can you experience and admire it in the silence, in the stillness, in the peace.
Venice is extraordinary," he told me. It used to be a good income but now, sales are down. The fish and produce market that used to feed a city is overrun with tourists.
But they're only there for the photos. For the paying customers, getting to the front of Andrea’s stall is a struggle and they have to push their way past tourists holding cameras and selfi.