Tourists hover in Venice like rare birds

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Barely open the borders of Italy, the sighting of foreign tourists in Venice is similar to the observation of rare birds. The first to arrive are striking in relatively empty streets and squares.

A merchant claims to have heard an English-speaking couple near the Fish Market in Rialto; a waiter served another who spoke French on the island of Giudecca; The owner of an upscale grocery store attended a Chinese couple who came into his business with large Louis Vuitton shopping bags.

They were their first foreign clients after almost three months of quarantine due to the coronavirus epidemic. To their surprise, when the city was still theoretically closed to the outside world, this couple arrived in Venice through Vienna, from where they traveled by car.

"It is calm compared to the previous visit, there are not so many people, and it is one of the reasons why we decided to come today, because it is open to foreigners," says Igor Kramer, who came from Zurich accompanied by a friend from Constance. (Germany), to meet on a day trip with her relatives, who came from Slovenia.

There were no border controls , Kramer says, but he found unexpected road traffic from maintenance works and truck caravans from Eastern Europe. Sitting on the terrace of Café Rosso, one of the most distinctive of Plaza Santa Margherita, the group was preparing to continue on their way.

Two German friends from the city of Cologne and residents of Switzerland strolled along the street XXII Marzo, with fashion stores and luxury galleries, which leads to St. Mark's Square. It was his first time in Venice. Until now they had not come due to the saturation of tourists, but when the pandemic paralyzed travel, they waited for the time to visit interesting places.

"A couple of weeks ago we said we should go to Venice as soon as the borders were opened and we did," says Jan Hoffmans, 38, a chef by profession.

"We wouldn't come here if it was a normal Venice day, with cruises and all that, but this was the idea," says his friend, brewmaster Hannes Gutschmidt, 36. He also liked the city. "Twenty million people a year can be so wrong?"

And a few minutes later a group of four couples walk past the Gucci business speaking German. "We are all from Frankfurt. From there we fly to Saint-Tropez and today from Saint-Tropez to Venice to enjoy it, have lunch, take a gondola ride on the canals and then return to Frankfurt," says one of them. " It is a day trip; we came by private plane ."

A young couple from the German town of Landstuhl refuse to be filmed while having lunch on the terrace of a café in a nearly deserted St. Mark's Square. To do so they drove almost 10 hours. They found little traffic and, to their surprise, border controls in Austria when they entered from Germany.

Fear of mass tourism

Since the relaxation of the quarantine measures a couple of weeks ago, the terraces of the city's cafes and restaurants had begun to come to life, especially with locals and visitors from neighboring towns and cities, most from the Veneto region.

Not a few are foreign students who live in neighboring cities, such as a group made up of two Greeks, two Senegalese, one Hungarian, and one Egyptian -some of them from the Erasmus program- who came from Padua and were rushing to take the train back from the 19.10 five minutes before he left.

Angela Barbato of the Bel-Air Fine Art Gallery, featuring works by Carole Feuerman, Peppone, and Robert Indiana, works with 70 percent of foreign clients, awaits their return, and responds to inquiries from callers from the United States, Australia. or Germany, among other places, to find out if they can already return to Venice.

"We are a group of international galleries and we already have loyal clients abroad and Venice is clearly a very international recruitment site," he says.

In the late afternoon, a Romanian couple travels by vaporetto to the center of Venice for dinner and then return to their motorhome, with which they are touring Europe. They came from Jerez de la Frontera (southern Spain) - "we have a bottle of (wine of) sherry in the car," laughs the woman - and were preparing to return the next day to their home in Bucharest through Slovenia.

The gradual return of foreign visitors, while reviving a local economy, feeds the anxiety of residents who have begun to get used to a clear and decontaminated city, and who fear a flare-up of mass tourism.

Last Monday, a human chain of about a thousand people joined two districts of Venice at the end of the afternoon, in a protest against two works that the neighbors fear further compromise the already difficult residence in an expensive city and before besieged by the tourism of masses.

The groups Area Ex-Gasometri, Italia Nostra, No Nav and others called the demonstration against the construction of a new jetty for tourist ships in Fondamente Nuove, lagoon promenade in front of the cemetery island of San Michele, as well as a company plan Private from building a hotel or luxury apartments in the old Gasometers, a formerly public area.

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