Pilgrims and Followers : Venice between the needs of residents and the demands of tourists

The Italian peninsula has a long history as a travel destination. Documented travel practices related to religion, culture or leisure date back at least to Medieval times with Christian pilgrimages, followed by the educational journey, thermalism and the Grand Tour. Starting with the 19th century tourism emerged as a new phenomenon that only in formal aspects can be compared to the previous practices, since it originated from a new relationship with the world. The maturation and evolution of bourgeois society led to a radical transformation of travel, and not simply to a transition from the Grand Tour to organized tourism. Italy played a fundamental part in this process, actually being a leading destination for longer than it has been a modern state. Within Italy, and globally as well, Venice assumed –and still assumes– a paradigmatic role. In fact, according to the Healthy Travel and Healthy Destinations report published by Airbnb in 2018, Venice is the world capital of mass tourism. A record that is cyclically the cause of queues and congestion of spaces and public transport as well as increase in costs for access to primary services. These negative consequences, both on the quality of life of residents and on the visitors’ experience, are barely controlled by the governing bodies and find their origin well back in time. In this continuous coming and going between universalization on the one hand and differentiation on the other, Venice increasingly embodied the tension between search for antiquity and desire for modernization. If this tension pertains to a cultural dimension, another issue that proved to be crucial in the complicated relationship between the city and tourism is the scale of interventions and their effect on the evolution of the morphology and character of the metropolitan area.