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Welcome to the Campaign for a Living Venice Web Site

The site was launched in 2016, after UNESCO had threatened to list Venice as an Endangered World Heritage Site, and our goal is to serve as an English language source for news and information about current events and issues in Venice. The hope is to help build international awareness and support for Venice and its citizens, who are organizing and working towards a sustainable future for Venice and the preservation of a unique and special culture.

Our News page features translations of news from local news sites and journalists in Venice. Stories are posted weekly, and the News page has stories going back to late 2016.

To help orient new readers, here is a brief synopsis of the main issues facing/threatening Venice today:

  • The Venetian residential population is being forced out of the city due to high rents and lack of available work.
  • The stock of residential buildings is rapidly converting to tourist lodgings, while thousands of public housing units sits empty.
  • There are far too many tourists entering the city at far too high a cost to the city.
  • Since the pandemic tourism numbers have climbed to record heights, reaching 30 million in 2023.
  • The recent experiment with the entry ticket to the city for certain tourists on certain days has in fact seemed to make the problem worse.
  • Many of those tourists are there to drink, often in large party groups, which has turned the city into a noisy, undignified open air bar that is abused by these partygoers at all hours.
  • The lagoon, and the foundations of the city itself, are being destroyed by waves from too many boats going too fast, and by the huge water displacement caused by cruise ships, as well as by excavation in the lagoon. The city is not regulating speed of boats and is not intervening to do needed maintenance.
  • The MOSE project, designed to save the city from higher sea levels (which it has quite notably), is not yet completed, and cannot work as a permanent solution. Hundreds of millions of Euros will be needed to operate and maintain it every year after an expenditure of 6 billion Euro.
  • The vast majority of money from the city’s budget surplus was spent (91 million euros) on the Bosco dello Sport, while another 100+ million euros was taken out in loans that the city will have to pay back, diverting badly needed resources from the city.

To get a better understanding of what’s happening in Venice, subscribe to this blog and get our weekly posts, or browse our categorized archive of news stories.

Thank you.