Rome's night tourism experiment offers lessons for Venice

Rome is testing a new strategy to manage the summer crush: opening its tourist sites at night. Museums, parks, archaeological areas, monuments, villas and historic residences have extended their hours into the evening, according to France 24.

The initiative is a direct response to two pressures that have come to define the Italian summer — record heatwaves that make daytime visits punishing, and crowds that saturate the historic sites from morning to night. By shifting some of the demand into cooler, quieter hours, the capital hopes to ease the strain on both visitors and the monuments themselves.

For Venice, the experiment carries obvious resonance. The lagoon city has spent years wrestling with its own version of the same problem: too many visitors, too few hours in the day, and a fragile urban fabric that suffers under the weight of mass tourism.