Venice's expensive gamble: can a fee save a city?

According to the Guardian, Venice's newly elected mayor, Simone Venturini, has proposed raising the entrance fee for day-trippers to the lagoon city to as much as €50—roughly double the current charge. His stated aim is to discourage visits during periods of 'heightened tourist pressure.' The proposal is part of a broader effort to manage the flow of visitors who have overwhelmed Venice for decades, turning it from a living city into what many observers describe as an open-air museum or, less charitably, a theme park.

The logic is intuitive: make something expensive enough and fewer people will buy it. Yet Venice's problem is not one that price alone can solve. The city receives millions of visitors annually, many of them cruise-ship passengers who spend a few hours wandering the same narrow streets, buying the same souvenirs, eating in the same restaurants. A €50 fee might deter some, but it will not deter all. It may simply ensure that only the wealthy can afford to visit—which raises its own questions about who gets to experience one of the world's great cities.

What the proposal reveals is the exhaustion of conventional tools. Venice has tried regulation, quotas, and now pricing. Yet the underlying pressure—the global appetite for heritage, the economics of mass tourism, the fact that Venice is, quite simply, remarkable—remains. A higher fee is a form of rationing by wealth rather than a solution to the problem itself. It may generate revenue for the city, which is welcome. But it does not address why Venice is sinking, literally and figuratively, under the weight of its own beauty.

The deeper question is whether a city can be preserved while remaining open to the world. Venice's answer, increasingly, seems to be: only if we can afford to keep most people out. That may be pragmatic. It is also a melancholy admission that mass tourism and the survival of historic cities are fundamentally at odds.