ARE WE LOVING VENICE TO DEATH?
“THE VENICE OF TO-DAY,” wrote Henry James back in 1882, “is a vast museum… and you march through the institution with a herd of fellow-gazers.”
Ah, Henry, Henry. If you only knew. A century and a half after James wrote those words, some 30 million visitors overwhelm La Serenissima each year. Its resident population meanwhile has shrunk to fewer than 53,000, from a peak of 175,000 in 1951. Mammoth cruise ships damage its centuriesold foundations and its fragile lagoon, and there is even talk of putting up permanent turnstiles for Piazza San Marco, Italy’s most iconic square.
And yet there I was last fall, trundling a suitcase into a “real,” living, uncrowded Venice. In the western end of the Dorsoduro district, modest ocher apartment buildings flanked a workaday canal where a barge unloaded sodas and cheese into a genial one-man salumeria, and students from the nearby universities dawdled over macchiatos at a sweet local bar, which, come early evening, dispensed two-euro spritzers and tasty , Venetian tapas. Settling into my Airbnb—massive, affordable, and furnished with time-capsule ’50s decor—I surveyed the scene from my back balcony. Below me lay small residential backyards, their trees still heavy with oranges in late October, under
