Campaign For A Living Venice

The Morelli pharmacy updates the resident counter: every day 2.6 residents leave, with no end to the negative trend  

By Manuela Pivato

15 October 2021

VENEZIA. The Venice resident counter at the Morelli pharmacy shows that another seven hundred residents have left Venice in the past nine months, an exodus that is not slowing. In the window at campo San Bartolomeo, among the seasonal remedies, the red display indicates 50,582 residents (which has fallen in the meantime to 50,580), fewer than the number of spectators at the San Siro stadium.

The Residents

Since the beginning of the year the historic center has seen the departure of another 721 residents, with an average of 2.6 per day, and what last January seemed a hopeless number – 51, 321 residents – today almost appears desirable.

Nothing, and no one, seems to be able to reverse the accelerating trend of depopulation which, if it continues at this pace, will bring the number of residents to less than 50,000 by next summer.

The threshold, evidently not only psychological, of 51 thousand was crossed last April, when the historic center, which dropped to 50,922 individuals, was discovered to be even worse shape, with a loss of almost three residents a day since the beginning of the year.

Always constant, but not as slow as it was years ago, the demographic decline registered a loss of 961 residents in 2021. In 2021 the trend has further accelerated. In the first four months of the year another 251 residents left the city. With the fall that number has risen, arriving at 721.

The Exodus

It is difficult, faced with this data, to imagine a substantial reversal of the trend, despite the cry of alarm from residents and businesses that grows stronger every day. Without residents a city dies.

The exodus of young couples, the high rents, the transformation of homes for residents into apartments for tourists, but also the mortality among seniors due to Covid, the continually rising median age (25% of the population is over 65 years old), the decline in births (there were 336 babies born in 2020 at the public hospital SS. Giovanni e Paolo, compared to 355 in 2019 and 340 in 2018), all of these contribute to eroding the city’s human capital.

The resident counter was placed in the window of the Morelli pharmacy as part of an initiative by Venessia.com on March 10, 2008, to show the demographic agony of the city.

The Data

The data from thirteen years ago would today be like manna: 60,720 residents in 2008, which at the time seemed like nothing. It was certainly small compared to the 66,386 residents in 2000, while ten years previously there were 78,165 and so on, in a reverse crescendo, from 95,222 in 1980, 111,550 in 1970, to the 145,402 Venetians of 1960.

Source: La Nuova di Venezia e Mestre