The Venice paradox — Andrea Fontana

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The Venice paradox: why the entry ticket won't stop the city's depopulation

The overtourism debate tends to focus on visitor numbers. But Venice's real crisis is structural: pricing policies that don't work, runaway property rent, and a resident community that keeps shrinking.

By Andrea Fontana<br>13 July 2026<br>10 min read

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St Mark's Square, deserted: Venice, 26 December 2020, midday.<br>Photo by Francesca Berton · CC BY-ND 4.0

When the crowds peak, the most immediate reaction is to point the finger at the crowd itself. It's the narrative of the one tourist too many, blamed for the packed vaporetti (the city's waterbuses) and the unliveable calli (Venice's narrow alleyways). It's a reading that mistakes the effect for the cause: you cannot blame an individual visitor for wanting to see a city unlike any other in the world.

The problem is structural. Venice's fame is global, and with a worldwide middle class still expanding, demand to visit will never dry up on its own. If lodging capacity grows, there will always be someone ready to fill the gap. Faced with this pressure, the city administration has so far chosen to manage the flows through economic levers — a strategy the numbers show to be ineffective, and one that risks being discriminatory.

The ticket doesn't reduce the flows — it filters them

The best-known measure is the access fee (contributo d'accesso) charged to day-trippers, introduced on a trial basis in 2024. The data leaves little doubt: arrivals keep growing, and in the first 42 days of the 2026 rollout more €10 tickets (the "last minute" rate) were sold than €5 ones (the advance rate), a sign that the price gap does not change behaviour1. The idea that raising the entry cost will curb demand is a miscalculation: given global wealth inequality, there will always be a share of the world's population able to pay without feeling it. The ticket does not reduce overtourism; it selects who can afford it.

Against this backdrop, decisions on port infrastructure seem to pull in the opposite direction. While there is talk of raising the entry cost for day visitors, the Port System Authority aims to bring Venice's cruise traffic back to one million passengers a year by 2027 — almost double the roughly 500,000–550,000 recorded in 2023–20242.

Those who stay overnight in Venice, and already pay the tourist tax (imposta di soggiorno), are exempt from the access fee; the same goes for residents, students, workers, under-14s and other categories3. But on the whole the pricing system rewards those with greater spending power and discourages the passing visitor — the one who, according to retailers, "fills the calli but doesn't set foot in the shops".

This is the view of Setrak Tokatzian, a jeweller and president of the Piazza San Marco Association, who in July 2025 proposed charging €100 to anyone arriving for the day without staying overnight, lamenting the collapse in purchases by "hit-and-run" tourists45. At the time the proposal was dismissed as a provocation by the then tourism councillor — an assessore is a member of the city's executive — Simone Venturini, who judged it unworkable because the law sets a maximum cap of €106.

Less than a year later, now as mayor, Venturini has revived a similar idea: raising the access fee from the current €5–10 up to a €30–50 range on the busiest days17. Doing so will require an act of Parliament, since the fee cap is set by a 2021 national law, not by a municipal regulation1. Were the proposal to pass, a family of four choosing to visit Venice for the day (perhaps unable to afford an overnight stay) could end up paying €200 just to enter the city: a cost that turns access to a shared good into a luxury for those who can afford it.

And the proceeds? Reporting that stays opaque

There is another question, less often asked but just as relevant: where the money goes. For how the revenue is to be spent, the municipal regulation governing the fee defers to the rules on the landing tax (tassa di sbarco): an earmark covering waste collection and disposal, environmental protection and restoration, tourism, culture, local policing and mobility. Legal scholarship on the subject considers this scope deliberately broad and generic — so much so that it "blurs" the earmark itself and makes any precise reporting of expected and achieved goals difficult8.

In practice, the administration has chosen a specific path and repeats it year after year: use most of the take, net of running costs, to hold down the TARI (the municipal waste-collection tax). In the 2026 draft budget, for example, the Comune — the city government — stated in black and white that the increase in the waste tariff had been cancelled out thanks in part to €1.77 million linked to the access fee, on top of tourist-tax revenue and recovered tax evasion9. It is the budget councillor, Michele Zuin, who has repeated this approach...