It’s a fact that rats have always been present in Venice. But tourist rentals, and countless bars and restaurants are responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of rats in Venice.
By Martina Zennaro
It’s a fact that rats have always been present in Venice.
Since garbage collection began door-to-door, the situation has improved significantly, as garbage is no longer left lying outside people’s doors in the evening or even early in the morning. However, the increase in tourist rentals – with visitors who are uninformed about how to properly dispose of home-cooked food waste – has brought the situation back to shocking levels, creating serious problems in this city, where the number of rats certainly exceeds that of the just over 48,000 residents who still live with the well-known Venetian rats.
In addition to tourist rentals, the countless bars and restaurants are also responsible for the increase in the number of rats in Venice.
In the evening, after closing time, many so-called nightlife areas are left with a large amount of food waste, pizza scraps, cans, and bottles, a fertile breeding ground for countless rodents, much larger than normal mice, known in Venice as pantegane.
The correlation between rats and nightlife reported in local newspapers gives me the opportunity to connect overtourism to garbage collection, pointing to how 100,000 daily visitors make this city dirty and full of rats, to a point where sanitation workers are insufficient despite their good intentions.
There is no separate waste collection in Venice because there are no bins, and the few, too-small bins are filled with everything without distinction. And when the bins are full, which is often the case, visitors leave waste everywhere: in the streets, on bridges, leaning against windows and doors.
The rude tourism that is now present throughout the continent has no care for the planet it inhabits, and instead exploits and destroys it, day in and day out.
Food waste from 1,200 bars and restaurants has also fed the rats in recent years. Often, managers – not all of them, of course – fail to remove the trash left by customers after closing time. The bad habit of staying outside after closing time with leftover food and glasses in hand certainly doesn’t help eliminate or reduce the number of rats. And who knows: maybe these rodent inhabitants also take part in the noisy nightlife found in some areas at night: …is the saying true that rats dance?
Source: Ytali Global
Campaign For A Living Venice 