Analysis
If tourism is ‘Italy’s oil’ then we need a sustainable solution
Unlike other countries – first and foremost Spain – Italy stands out for its lack of large-scale demonstrations as well as a lack of local and national measures.
Overtourism is the big issue of the summer throughout Europe, but in Italy both municipalities and the government seem unconcerned. As tourism has blown up again after the forced pause due to COVID, “too much tourism” has both environmental and social consequences: polluting airplanes and cruise ships, overcrowded and cementified cities, and a shortage of housing turned over to the short-term rental market.
All these issues are very salient for Italy, the fifth most visited country in the world and third for the number of overnight stays, with tourism generating 5 percent of GDP and 6 percent of employment, according to the Bank of Italy.
Each place has a particular tourism handling capacity, beyond which one begins to speak of overtourism. In Italy, this threshold has been exceeded in the historic centers of many cities, with serious effects and inadequate solutions. In Venice, which sees over 30 million visitors a year, the number of tourist beds has exceeded the number of residents and the only businesses left are almost exclusively bars, restaurants and souvenir shops. The island has become unlivable due to overcrowding and the impossibility of finding affordable housing, but Mayor Brugnaro's only measure has been the introduction of access tickets, which are not effective at limiting the number of tourists but only at filling the municipality's coffers, cementing the island's status as a pay-to-enter amusement park.
The situation is not any better in Naples, where there has been a boom in annual visitors in just a few years, from 3.2 million in 2017 to 12 million in 2022, compared with a population of less than a million. However, in contrast to the residents, the tourists are all concentrated in the historic center. Here residents have been evicted to make way for Airbnbs, which have risen from about 1,300 in 2015 to 10,000 in 2022, and “authentic”-branded restaurants offering the experience of an artificial “Neapolitan-ness.” So far, the city administration has remained indifferent to the housing issue.
Florence, with 7 million tourists per year and 360,000 residents, has been the only Italian municipality to introduce a limit on short-term rentals, but the regulation was struck down recently by the Territorial Administrative Court. The list could go on with many other cities, large and small.
In Rome, tourism risks becoming unmanageable with the Jubilee. In Bologna, “City of Food” policies have turned the historic center into an enormous open-air restaurant, while Cinque Terre in Liguria is unable to handle all the people who want to visit, same as many other seaside and mountain resorts. Italy is suffering from widespread overtourism, but unlike other countries – first and foremost Spain, which has seen prominent protests against excessive tourism – Italy stands out for its lack of large-scale demonstrations as well as a lack of local and national measures.
The municipalities that have taken any measures at all can be counted on the fingers of one hand, while the government continues to favor the hyper-touristic economy. For some examples, one could mention the €25 million Fund for Sustainable Tourism allocated for the three-year period 2023-25, which is nothing but a generic incentive for promotional investments by accommodation businesses with an overall “green” theme; or the €430 million for the modernization of ski lifts and the generation of artificial snow for 2023-28, supporting an already-dying system.
Regarding short-term rentals, the “Anticipi Decree” only provided for the obligation of obtaining an identification code for tourist leases, without putting any limits on the phenomenon; while Salvini's “Salva Casa” program, which simplifies the procedures for the change of use of a property and allows small building interventions without authorization, will further increase the number of vacation homes and B&Bs. Furthermore, the Competition Decree allows the outside seating areas that were supposed to be temporary structures to help businesses during the COVID period to become permanent, de facto privatizing many public spaces and restricting the right to enjoy a square only to those who consume.
Tourism Minister Santanche is repeating almost daily that tourism is “Italy’s oil,” without realizing that a fossil fuel metaphor is outdated in the time of climate crisis. And she is invoking “sustainable tourism,” despite the fact that tourism is unsustainable by its very nature, as it pursues a growth mechanism that inevitably takes it over the threshold of sustainability.
Furthermore, tourism is a very precarious economic sector: all it takes is one unpredictable catastrophic event (wars, floods, mucilage events) and it dries up. When such phenomena occur in locations where tourism is a monoculture, this triggers a crisis due to the lack of economic alternatives. We saw this during COVID: in the absence of tourists and with the inhabitants already gone, the historic centers of Venice and Florence were full of permanently-drawn shutters. However, despite these warnings, the municipalities and the government continue to put all their eggs in the tourism basket.
Looking at the issue of too much tourism, limiting the phenomenon is not enough: it can be reconceptualized without denying its basis. Overtourism is a consequence of more and more people having leisure time. We are all tourists, real or potential, and everyone wants to see the most beautiful places in the world. But in recent years, it has become normal to visit a city thousands of miles away for just a few days and stay in an apartment found on Airbnb, in search of yet another experience to post on Instagram.
This practice is not sustainable: it fuels both pollution and the injustices of the platform market. The environmental crisis is already resulting in the first signs of a possible “end of tourism”: it doesn’t snow in the mountains anymore, beaches are under threat by rising seas, and soon it will be too hot to visit the most renowned cities during summer. The result is that vacations could return to being slower and closer by. And, to restore the lost balance, those in charge of administering cities should stop making them even more touristic and focus on making them more livable for residents.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/italia-uno-tsunami-cancella-i-centri-storici on 2024-07-28