Venice is considering driving pigeons from St Mark's Square, their last refuge in the lagoon city.
Many tourists find the city's famed flocks of pigeons charming, but they carry disease and damage buildings.
Like several other European cities, Venice has already banned people from feeding pigeons in all other parts of town, saying they are a public health menace and a nuisance, eroding monuments with their excrement.
The traders who sell bags of feed in the city's most famous square obtained a reprieve, saying their livelihoods were at stake.
Now the new city commerce councillor, Giuseppe Bertolussi, thinks it's time to end what he calls a "health emergency".
Heedless of calls to spare the remaining pigeons which tourists love to feed and snap in front of St Mark's, Bertolussi aims to close down the square's two dozen feed stands.
Bertolussi's initiative has also received backing from heritage experts who say pigeon droppings are eating away at St Mark's flagstones and increasing the risk of the 'acqua alta' that puts the square underwater for much of the winter.
However, Bertolussi says the process will be gradual and "only carried out with the agreement of the people involved".
The councillor aims to find alternative work for them or offer them handsome settlements to give up their time-honoured trade.
"We'll have to take a 'softly softly' approach, weighing things up with the interested parties".
Asked when St Mark's would be pigeon-free, he replied: "I hope it'll happen soon, but it can't be a top-down solution".
The St Mark's pigeons are the last survivors of a sweeping drive, launched in 2000, to rid the city of disease-bearing animals.
The plan to spiff up the city's streets and piazzas has drastically reduced its pigeon and rat populations.
Council officials have rooted out bird's nests and got citizens to clean their window sills regularly.
But, unlike London for instance, authorities have stopped short of bringing in hawks to kill what the mayor described as 'flying rats'.
The city's battle against actual ground rats targeted areas that harbor the local rodents, including storage spaces, the Rialto marketplace and areas beneath paved roads.
A 2000 bomb attack on the Rialto Courthouse taught city officials something about the rats' habits, by uncovering the dwellings of well-fed rats who were living underneath the pavement in the area.
To curb the rat population and to make the city cleaner overall, Venice has stepped up trash control programs, by allowing pay-as-you-go rubbish collection services on Sundays and holidays, adding extra barges to haul garbage and closing down open-air dumps on the city's periphery.
Street cleaning has been made more frequent with the help of special equipment, including boats that can chug along the city's canals while cleaning the adjacent terra firma.
