After 17 months of pandemic-related interruption, a cruise ship set sail from Venice for the first time on Saturday.
The exit of the 294 meter long “MSC Orchestra” was accompanied by protests, but also by cheers.
While the demonstrators of the “No Grandi Navi” (No Big Ships) movement protested loudly on Saturday afternoon at the Fondamenta delle Zattere and with boats and small ships in the Giudecca Canal, unions, the “Venezia Lavora” (Venice works) committee and tourism representatives celebrated the “maiden voyage” with a marching band and colorful pennants.
Matthias Rüb
Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.
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During the passage of the ship with 840 passengers on board through the Giudecca Canal, escorting taxi and cargo ships from “Venezia Lavora” and protest boats from “No Grandi Navi” sometimes came so close that the water police had to intervene. And while the demonstrators in Zattere chanted “Big ships out of the lagoon!” And waved their flags, the proponents of the cruise business let the horns of their ships sound.
Only at the end of March did the government in Rome issue a moratorium on the passage through the Giudecca Canal, which is particularly popular with cruise passengers - to protect the "historical and cultural heritage not only of Italy, but of the whole world", as it was then in the joint Declaration by the Minister for Transport, Tourism, Culture and Ecological Change was called. The temporary decree was erroneously proclaimed by many media outlets as the banishment of the ocean liners from the lagoon.
Celebrities such as Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, actress Tilda Swinton and director James Ivory joined the protest against the cruise ships with an appeal to the Italian government to “stop the traffic of large ships in the lagoon”. For the around 1,700 employees of the Venice passenger port, who were able to resume their work on Saturday after an almost one and a half year break, the celebrity protest should not have been a downer in their joy at the restart of business.
The closure of the Giudecca Canal to cruise ships by the government in Rome, which was effectively lifted after two months, was also linked to the tendering of an ideas competition for a new cruise terminal outside the lagoon. There are no concrete plans yet. Instead of around 500 cruise ships as in summer 2019, a maximum of 70 luxury liners will arrive in the lagoon city over the next few months, around three per weekend.
Meanwhile, Venice experienced the first rush of tourists of the summer season last weekend. In some cases, long queues formed at the stops of the vaporetti (water buses) because the number of permitted passengers is limited due to the hygiene and distance rules that continue to apply. By 2019, the number of overnight stays in Venice had risen to 13 million annually. In the “pandemic year” 2020, the tourism industry in the lagoon city experienced a 90 percent drop in sales.
Before the pandemic, there were plans to charge day visitors to Venice an entrance fee. There is no longer any talk of that for the time being. Instead, the Veneto region has launched an advertising campaign to get tourism going again. From this Monday on, Veneto will be considered - next to Abruzzo, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Liguria, Molise, Sardinia and Umbria - as the "white zone" with the lowest risk of infection.