Why Are the Venetians Fleeing Venice?

Doomsayers have been predicting that Venice will sink into the sea for decades. For hundreds of days every year, water (known as acqua alta) floods the city's main squares and low-lying streets, causing structural damage to the ancient buildings and bestowing headaches on anyone trying to get around on foot. The average water level in the lagoon has risen by 24 centimeters over the last century. At this rate, even the most conservative predictions give Venice less than 100 years before it is completely submerged. (Article continued below...)

But now there may be a more imminent threat to this picturesque city. Venice isn't sinking as much as it is shrinking—demographers predict that by 2030, there won't be a single full-time Venetian resident left. The city that was once an anchor of the 19th-century Grand Tour is at serious risk of becoming an empty façade with as much life as a Venetian carnival mask.

When Venice resident Matteo Secchi started counting down the city's dwindling population in 2006, there were 62,027 permanent residents, just over half of the population 30 years earlier. (Venice's population has actually been falling steadily since the 1960s.) Fearing what the decrease might mean for the future of the aquatic city, Secchi and other Venetians formed the online community Venessia.com to hold a steady vigil while the numbers dropped. They vowed that when the population dipped below 60,000, they would mark the occasion with a funeral.

In October, when the population dipped to a new low of 59,984, Secchi and his Venetian gang kept their promise and began organizing. On Nov. 14, a red casket will travel by a three-gondola cortege through the city's canals. "This is truly a tragic sign for this wonderful city and all that Venetian culture once stood for," says Andrea Morelli, a Venetian who keeps an electronic population ticker in his pharmacy window off Venice's Rialto bridge. "We have been abandoned. We are ruined."

It is no secret that the tourists are the ones pushing the Venetians out of their city. They have always been part of the city's landscape, but the difference is that in decades past, "elite" visitors sojourned for days and even weeks or months at a time, pumping valuable revenue into the city coffers. Now, with cheap flights and package deals that pair Venice with other cities like Florence and Verona, daytrippers make up the bulk of visitors. There is no need to stay in expensive Venice when hotels elsewhere are much cheaper. Local officials say that most visitors don't even buy tickets to the city's museums or eat at the restaurants.

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