"Cruise Ships Could be Shut Out of Venice"

[wisteria1019]

Long live my beloved City Most Serene. Let the day trippers arrive by train to partake in a brief, yet splendid 8 hours or so. I cannot spend less than 4 days at a time with her!

[4774Papa]

I'm not so sure that this is really true. Some tourists have a genuine interest, but probably more of them (especially those on a cruise) never get beyond St. Marks and the Rialto Bridge and a ride in a gondola with a gondolier singing inauthentic songs. They have little understanding of either the history of Venice or the current problems it faces (many of them as a direct result of tourism, as already noted). Quite a few just want to be pointed toward shopping opportunities. Just watch and see how many come back to the ship with Hard Rock Cafe Venice t-shirts. :rolleyes:

 

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I would agree that something needs to be done to limit tourism. It is destroying the city, both physically and culturally. I don't think Venice would suffer inordinately if cruise ships stopped calling there. As of a few years ago, there were many fewer cruise ships sailing the Med (and they were much smaller). Venice still had plenty of visitors every year who arrived in other ways.

 

On the other hand, given how long Italy has been talking about doing things to protect monuments and then failing to follow through, I would doubt that any major changes are going to happen overnight.....

Cynthia, agree. I had been to Venice in 83 and 90 and when I came back in 2010, I was shocked at the amount of graffiti, some on ancient buildings. To Americans, graffiti is a sign of a breakdown of the community, gangs and lack of police presence. Now, I see a lot more graffiti in Europe, even in Ukraine and Russia, than in the USA.

 

I noticed that the sheer number of tourist in Venice in 2010 was a huge increase from 1990. However, I know that Venice did install a sewer system during that time and the MOSE, flood control project is due to be finished soon.

 

Still, we must remember that Venice was built on marshy land and the foundations for buildings are wooden piled driven into the earth. Venice was a haven from barbarian hordes and navy probably saved Europe from Islam, only to be done away by Napoleon.

[tom_uk]

I'm probably happy with the idea of docking on the mainland. I've seen videos of cruise ships sailing by taken from the San Marco area, and frankly I wasn't happy: they looked terribly out of scale with the city. I don't know what the truth is regarding the erosion, but if it could be true then it's worth doing what's necessary to alleviate the problem.

 

As regards the "who invited who" question, I think we have to recognise that the number of people cruising, and the number and size of ships, have both exploded dramatically in recent years. I mainly cruise these days with P&O. You could argue that P&O has always gone to Venice (actually, almost literally: I would think that P&O's first cruise that included Venice would have been over 100 years ago). But 20 or 25 years or so ago it was one ship, Canberra, which was about 48,000 tons, and probably called there just a couple of times a year. Today P&O has a fleet of seven ships of which six are bigger (some much bigger) than Canberra, and between them they will make fifteen calls there next year. Then there the Italian lines (MSC, Costa) who base ships in Venice and which therefore cruise in and out every Saturday and Sunday for about eight months of the year; and finally there are the US lines who both visit Venice on cruises and who also start and finish some cruises there. The increase in numbers of passengers, ship movements, and ship size in the last two decades is huge, and must be having an impact.