Venice is stepping up efforts to fight slovenly behaviour among the scores of visitors that crowd the city each day.
In its latest move to discourage bad manners, the city council is enlisting an army of unpaid 'sentinels', ready to rap tourists who fail to show Venice the respect officials feel it deserves.
Augusto Salvadori, head of the council's 'urban decorum' office, has already met with the first batch of Venetian residents that have volunteered to give up their free time in defence of the city.
The recruits will start patrolling tourist hotspots from mid-September, kitted out in a vest emblazoned with the city's lion mascot and the slogan "Servizio per il rispetto della citta" ("Service for respecting the city").
Their mission is to prevent "indecorous behaviour" among tourists, which the city has decided includes sitting on the sidewalk, eating sandwiches there or going bare-chested.
"The council's battle for Venice's decorum is shared and supported by everyone," said Salvadori.
"It is a battle we will continue to fight, for our own dignity and in order to defend Venice's image. Sitting around criticizing is useless but taking action demonstrates a real love for Venice".
The councillor declined to say how many sentinels had enlisted so far but stressed that volunteers could apply any time until the end of the month.
The volunteer army are intended to provide backup to seven female 'guardians of decorum', who started patrolling the city centre at the start of June.
Every day since then, dressed in smart blue trousers, white tops and white caps, they have tried to gently enforce the rules.
The guardians, all aged between 24 and 30 and fluent in three languages, have the option of calling in a traffic warden, authorized to issue fines if rule-breakers refuse to mend their ways.
So far over 100 tourists have been slapped with 25-euro fines. But with 60,000 people visiting the city every day, making sure everyone behaves is a mammoth task.
"It's like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon," commented one of ten traffic wardens on duty in the area around St Mark's Square.
"We hand out fines in the worst cases. You can't control everything. These are all people who just come to Venice once. They don't know the rules".
GET TOUGH ACTION ALSO TARGETS PIGEONS. Witnesses say the women guardians are understanding with weary travellers wanting to rest their feet but implacable when T-shirts came off or improvised picnics began.
The women, who work for a municipal agency called Vesta, have already earned the nickname Vestali, the Italian word for the Vestal Virgins who looked after an important temple in ancient Rome.
The regular patrols are just part of Venice's strategy to ensure the city stays clean and maintains its charm despite the presence of 20 million visitors a year.
The city is also working on laws to stop the sale of fast food in the piazza so as to limit the amount of rubbish that accumulates there and which street cleaners can only remove once a day.
Even the vendors who sell tourists grain to feed the pigeons in St Mark's Square are being forced to move away so as to reduce the quantity of droppings which soil the piazza and erode its buildings.
In another move to keep Venice looking smart, administrators are preparing to crack down on the street artists that flock to the lagoon city hoping to earn a few euros from well-heeled tourists.
