In the image: An artist's rendering of the theme park project to be built on Venice's San Biagio island.
A step in the right direction was taken early this month when a new law was implemented to start banning large cruise ships passing through the Venice lagoon beginning January 2014.
However, threats that the city may be transforming into a theme park - which, for some, has already happened - were amplified when a new project to build an amusement park on an uninhabited island of the lagoon was unveiled.
Antonio Zamperla, owner of the Italian company by the same name that built Coney Island’s latest attractions, is behind the project that includes a 55-metre-tall Ferris wheel, a rollercoaster and other rides, alongside installations illustrating the Venetian lagoon's fragile ecosystem and the city's history.
Zamperla doesn’t like to call it an amusement park though; he said the project focuses on Venice’s history and will enrich tourists’ experience and knowledge. The amusement rides, he added, are necessary to pay for the cultural exhibits: "In order to sustain the cultural investment, we need the attractions. Otherwise, it wouldn't pay for itself."
The island, which Zamperla dubbed “L’isola San Biagio,” once housed an incinerator. It lies at one end of the Giudecca canal, close to Venice’s cruise ship terminal and the historic center of the city. Zamperla said he will clean up the toxic site and create 500 jobs. He said it would take two years to complete the 80-million-euro project if there is no major opposition to it.
But the first detractors are already speaking out, starting with Lidia Fersuoch, president of the conservation group Italia Nostra's Venice chapter, who said the project is inadequate because it focuses only on tourism and doesn't offer ideas to attract residents and the kind of varied and vibrant economy that made Venice a center of trade in the past.
"We need the opposite of what they are doing, the possibility to make Venice a living city," she said. "We are always hostage to tourism."
Fersuoch mirrors the thoughts of many others who claim the city has been reduced to a sort of "Venice-land", under the masses of tourists on the one hand and the exodus of Venetians to cheaper housing on the mainland on the other.
Venice has a population of around 60,000, and is swarmed by the same number of tourists every day, for a total of roughly 22 million visitors a year.
