Venetians are becomingly increasingly angry over the number and size of cruise ships stopping at the city disgorging thousands of tourists every day
Elbowing my way through hordes of tourists jostling for the best selfie vantage points on Venice’s famous Bridge of Sighs, I was arrested by a sight in its way more awesome than the Byzantine architecture that surrounded me.
Like some mighty leviathan rising from the deep, a vast cruise liner — as long as three football pitches and as tall as a tower block — had lurched into the canal, eclipsing the 200ft high bell-tower on a nearby island, and passing perilously close to the crowds thronging St Mark’s Square.
Marketed by its Swiss owners as a ‘fun for the whole family kind of ship’, with a mini-golf course, virtual entertainment room, solarium, theatre, shopping mall and ‘Beverly Hills bar’, the 65,000- tonne MSC Lirica was returning to its home port after a week in the Adriatic.
If some of the sightseers seemed unnerved as they pointed their phone cameras towards this floating city — which rocked gondolas and water taxis with its swell — they had good reason to be alarmed.
For earlier this month, not far from where we stood, the MSC Opera — a cruise ship described as the Lirica’s ‘identical twin’ — hit a small tourist boat, the River Countess, injuring five passengers, before ploughing into the quayside.
It had apparently suffered mechanical failure while attempting to dock. Marine experts and officials say it was a ‘miracle’ it hadn’t happened in a crowded area, otherwise many people could have been ‘massacred’ and centuries-old buildings and monuments destroyed.
Last week, as my hired motorboat pulled alongside the patched-up and repainted Opera — at anchor in Venice’s passenger terminal while the accident was being investigated — the potential danger of manoeuvring such a hulk through waterways intended for oars was obvious.
Particularly when you compared its size with that of the River Countess, which ‘crumpled like it was made of paper’ when it was rammed, according to a witness, and now languishes nearby, its wrecked bow covered with tarpaulin.
The near-disaster has caused an outcry in Venice, reigniting protests that began in 2006, when officials first allowed super-cruisers to sail into this magical city so that passengers could enjoy its spectacular sights without leaving the decks.
The massive cruise liners tower above the ancient architecture and locals fear they are damaging the very fabric of the city
In recent days, a flotilla of small boats staged a waterborne protest, flying banners demanding ‘Stop Big Cruise’ and ‘Save the Lagoon’.
Thousands marched in St Mark’s Square, where demos had been banned since 1997, when it was stormed by armed militants demanding Venice’s independence. But the authorities made an exception this time because feelings against the cruise industry are running so high.
‘These huge ships have no place here,’ gondolier Samuele Frollo, 23, told me yesterday, eyeing the MSC Lirica angrily from his boat. ‘They are not only dangerous to people, the huge amount of water they displace is causing unseen damage to the foundations of our ancient buildings.’ Yet this row extends beyond the single issue of whether Venice should ban these gigantic ships — which, according to environmental campaigners, are also causing untold damage to the lagoon’s fragile ecosystem while bringing scant benefit to the local economy, since passengers come ashore for only a few hours, spending little in shops and restaurants.
Locals claim the huge cruise ships, such as the MSC Magnifica have no place in Venice as they are too big for the lagoon
The cruise liners are only the most visible symbols of an out-of-control mass tourism tsunami that is threatening Venice’s survival.
Centuries ago, when the city was a powerful republic in its own right, its ambience was so tranquil and its buildings so elegant that it became known as ‘La Serenissima’ — the Most Serene.
According to my guidebook, that place still exists. It promises ‘gliding gondolas, glorious sunsets over the lagoon, Renaissance palazzi...a time warp’.
In some backwaters, this may be true, but there is little serenity in the main sightseeing areas.
During the past few days, I have been stuck in gondola jams as bad as London traffic snarl-ups, one of which resulted in a ‘canal rage’ shouting match between a water taxi driver and a striped-shirted oarsman, who had been shunted into a wall while serenading a Japanese couple.
I’ve watched drunken revellers swig vino in the streets and toss the empty bottle into the water; immodestly dressed young women trying to enter places of worship; and people flouting all manner of rules designed to preserve the sanctity of Venice, from picnicking on the pavement to feeding the pigeons in St Mark’s Square.
Locals have begun demonstrating against the massive cruise liners which they claim bring an unsustainable number of tourists into the city each day
Surveying these scenes disapprovingly from AD Murano Glass, an upmarket shop in the square that sells locally crafted artefacts, manager Mario remarked: ‘Tourism may be growing day by day, but it’s not good for us.
‘They come from many cultures and don’t want to respect us. Twenty years ago, we had a very different type of tourist. These people are, frankly, lower quality.’
It may have been an unfair generalisation, but he had a point. There is a Facebook page where exhibitionists post risqué pictures of themselves in the city’s iconic locations.
One young woman perches naked on a bridge, another reclines on a balcony in only a leather basque.
Shades of Magaluf. But this is the city where artists such as Canaletto produced their finest works, where writers from Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron to Ernest Hemingway sought inspiration and Thomas Mann wrote his scandalous novella, Death In Venice.
This is the city that, during the 17th and 18th centuries, became a magnet for aristocrats and intellectuals making the cultural ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe. Though its miraculous, stilt-supported buildings remain resolutely intact, that place of yore has sadly gone.
Today, swamped by 30 million visitors a year — while its resident population has shrunk to just 55,000 — Venice is sinking under a tide of tourism that jeopardises its existence, like the great floods that have threatened it down the centuries.
Only five per cent of these marauding trippers decant from cruise ships, but for besieged Venetians the behemoths that transport them here have become a lightning rod for all the perceived evils of this new breed of selfie-snapping, pizza-munching
