Venice and the Tourist’s Two Faces

Our writer travels to Italy, and tries to comes to terms with two strangely contradictory sides of mass tourism

Feature by Jim Troeltsch | 08 Apr 2014

After a couple of months spent as a tourist in Rome and the main cities of Northern Italy, I became sure of two things: 1) tourists are a blight, a ruinous and malign influence on their host destination, which, in almost every non-economic way, would be better and more authentic without them; 2) tourists are one of the few things that make modern travel worthwhile, and lend to it a real, lasting, old-fashioned value. Bear with me.

The first one, being a widely held view, I had expected to be borne out pretty quickly in such a visited part of Europe – but I was surprised to be hit over the head with its blunt truth on only the trip's second day. I started in Venice, which may seem like I was asking for it, but, despite being the most densely touristed city on my itinerary, it proved to be typical. It took me until the second day to become fully aware of its problems, though, because on the first I was all but struck dumb by its odd beauty.

I arrived by train in late afternoon, and after the sudden appearance of gondoliers smoothly gliding alongside the window as it crossed the lagoon, the first thing I noticed was Venice's much-vaunted light. It really is different, the light: golden in a burnished, hazy kind of way, it hangs low over Venice's domed Byzantine skyline and gives the impression that this is somewhere wholly other, distant, exotic – not Italian, not even European. Once out of the station and standing in front of the low, dense, waterlogged sprawl of the city, watching the boats churn along the thick vein of the Grand Canal, this impression is reinforced: Venice is easily one of the strangest cities on earth. The mellow-toned, Easternish buildings that lined the canal looked like they'd recently risen from the sea, and, tidemarked and weathered, they looked like they could return to it at any moment. There was no sense of peril, though: they looked too strange to be occupied; they could have been false fronts, part of a grand stage set.

Unfortunately, the whole bewildered-awe thing didn't last long. The following day, I visited the Piazza San Marco, which turned out to be a dire microcosm of touristic vulgarity. The first thing you notice, approaching the piazza from the water, is not the busy mass of fellow tourists. What's far more imposing is the black-and-acid-green Heineken ad, about the size of two houses stacked together, overlooking the Grand Canal. Then, as you move into the piazza itself, home of some of Venice's most venerated buildings – St. Mark's Basilica and Campanile, the Doge's Palace – you see another ad, this time a monstrous MaxMara canvas stretched out at the piazza's far end. And suddenly you realise it's really not so exotic after all – because nothing, just nothing, neutralizes a city's staggeringly original strangeness like a few massive beer and clothing ads draped across its landmarks. To think we've not yet reached this kind of thing's logical terminus. How long until, in the manner of football stadiums, the whole square is renamed the Emirates Piazza?

This crass, culture-defacing commercialism makes it difficult enough to truly appreciate the place's richness and importance – artistic, architectural, historical – but when factoring in the seething hordes of tourists (the ads' large audience) it becomes almost impossible. The tourists were everywhere, all the time, as though Venice was a city entirely without permanent residents. It's wasn't even summer yet, and already the piazza swarmed with what looked like thousands of amateur photographers, all wielding SLRs and iPads, many grouped in tight packs behind gesticulating tour guides, who stormed through other tourists and tourist packs like a rocket's tip.

Even in the magisterial St Mark's Basilica, one of God's very own personal houses, sanctuary wasn't to be found. They poured in and rushed through as though breaking a personal best. Who had time to stand still and admire the basilica itself, in all its smoky battered golden grandeur? Blithely disregarding the ugly no-photos-please signs standing here and there, they flashed away, mostly at shiny or important-looking things, or at themselves, solo, in twos, threes; smiling, pouting behind peace signs, striking jokey poses, before evacuating as hurriedly as they'd entered, loot safely stashed in their cameras, and probably never looked at again (not that objects photographed were really looked at in the first place: can you really remember what you've seen if you've seen it mostly through a camera's viewfinder?). Near the altar, one or two people knelt in prayer. They looked out of place.

It was easy to be depressed by the whole thing, and to feel exactly this kind of self-righteous (not to mention hypocritical) animosity towards the seemingly infinite tourists, especially when so many really did seem to embody the map-carrying, McDonalds-eating, monoglot stereotype. But it was even easier to feel this way when the combination of commercial greed and touristic greed – which of course feed into and off each other – turned out not to be unique to Venice, but to be rampant in practically every city I subsequently visited.

As the trip progressed, and I came to witness masses of tourists as they, say, crowded the Colosseum's gift shop (yes, built into the Colosseum itself), or lined Florence's Piazzale Michelangelo (from where there's a view of the city in all its unweatherable terracotta-roofed Renaissance glory that's so perspectively perfect it looks computer-generated) in an obscuring frenzy of photo-taking. Or, most striking of all, when I noticed the conspicuous absence of tourists; such as in an area of St Peter's Basilica, that was for some reason cordoned off, and which, standing grand and hallowed in its emptiness, had me gawping in awe. After seeing these things, it became hard to reject the idea that mass tourism can really only ever be a deadly enterprise.

Here's where the opening paragraph's second point comes in, though. Because seeing things this way is easy and natural, but it fails to do justice to the other side of tourism, the tourist-as-individual side; the side that showed itself in the many people I'd met and talked to as I went from city to city. This part's a lot more difficult to explain, so there's a good chance this is going to look more than a little artless, not to mention simplistic...

I'd argue that the real, lasting value of tourism has to do with how, with startling frequency, many of these people I met – these individual tourists – gave up themselves in conversation, and did so a lot more quickly and fully and generously than they would in ordinary quotidian life (and far, far more than the cities' locals did). Whether it was the laid back, alcohol-drinking, meat-eating Hare Krishna woman from Utah, first time in Europe, who'd saved up to take her teenage daughter to the Krishna festival in Florence; or the two sprightly, wild-haired old French women on the vaporetto in Venice, friends from university, who after their husbands both died recently decided to travel around Europe and, if they could manage it, Asia; or the lonely and stereotypically stoic German in Trieste who, after losing his job as a climbing instructor in the Alps, spent two years cycling from Alaska to the south of Argentina (with a two-month break in San Francisco), and who was, when I met him, in the middle of cycling between his hometown, Berlin, and Istanbul; or any of the dozens of others.

It was as though, on the basis of some sliver of touristic commonality, and with the knowledge that the time with one another was strictly limited and unlikely ever to be repeated, small talk was dispensed with. All the usual conversational nonsense was pared away, and instead, in the space of a few short hours, these people were happy to run through their lives, revealing freely (to the extent that it was possible) the things that make them who they are, the things by which they are defined.

And it turned out that these encounters, or whatever you'd want to call them, long after the best of what the cities had to offer – the transitory pleasures of their views, galleries, restaurants, and so on – had all faded into nothing, were the things that remained; the stuff that seemed to stick.

So now that the game's lost, and almost all once-culturally-vital cities are now so overrun with rabid tourism that there's no going back – their pristine glory days gone forever, if they ever even existed – it doesn't seem all that unreasonable to come to the conclusion that such brief but revelatory human encounters are among the last few truly valuable experiences that modern travel's got left to offer. And that, in the end, they might even be worth all of mass tourism's soul-deadening horrors combined.