Venice's bid to train tourists to be more respectful of the city is working and scores of sloppy visitors have been fined in the last two months, according to a top city official.
Before the summer the lagoon city introduced strict rules for anyone visiting St Mark's Square. Tourists are not allowed to go about bare-chested, sit on the pavement or eat sandwiches there.
On June 1 seven female 'guardians of decorum' went into action. Every day since then, dressed in smart blue trousers, white tops and white caps, they have tried to gently enforce the rules.
"Things are gradually improving. We're getting the message out that you have to show respect for Venice," said Augusto Salvadori, head of the council's 'urban decorum' office.
The guardians, all aged between 24 and 30 and fluent in three languages, have the option of calling in a traffic warden if rule-breakers refuse to mend their ways.
"Every day I ask the traffic wardens how many fines they've given out," Salvadori said.
So far over 100 tourists have been slapped with 25-euro fines.
Wardens explained that, 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," one of the ten on duty in the San Marco area said on Thursday.
"We hand out fines in the worst cases. You can't control everything. These are all people that just come to Venice once. They don't know the rules".
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.
They 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.
The council is targeting in particular the musicians who play in front of open-air restaurants and the mime artists who dress in 18th-century costumes and offer to liven up tourists' photos with their presence.
New rules soon to be approved will place a limit on the number of such "performers" in the city and ban them from St Mark's Square, the famous piazza next to the Doge's palace at the end of the Grand Canal.
