Venice is extending its successful 'urban decorum' campaign to the souvenir stalls that clutter historic squares and impede access to storied churches.
''We're going to get these tacky stalls to clean up their act,'' the city's cultural heritage superintendent, Renata Codello, said Thursday.
''What the people who run these stands have to understand is that it isn't enough to have a license to operate.
''They have to play by the rules, which means keeping a proper distance from designated buildings and making sure they aren't a nuisance,'' she said.
''Some stalls constitute full-fledged examples of urban decay,'' she thundered, vowing to free famed churches like San Geremia and San Giovanni Elimosinario of the presence of ''these unsightly vendors''.
Venice city council is already entangled in a legal row with vendors who were moved away from the Rialto Bridge this summer but have since appealed to a regional court.
Meanwhile the decorum scheme has just kicked into a new gear with a winter campaign of advertising aimed at residents and visitors.
Large bilingual posters at key locations and on canal waterbuses invite all-comers in Italian and English to Tenere La Citta' Pulita (Keep The City Clean).
Public Decorum Councillor Augusto Salvadori, who has earned headlines by ridding St Mark's Square and other famous landmarks of monument-defacing pigeons, has also distributed nearly 70,000 'pooper scoopers' for picking up doggie-do.
On the manners front, waterbus users are being urged to give up their seats when needed and backpackers have to take their packs off before boarding or risk being left on dry land.
The decorum pointman is also targeting people who hop onto boats without paying and is thinking of setting up turnstiles.
The clean-up czar has scored a string of victories in his battle to burnish Venice.
People are now obeying orders not to stop and snack in St Mark's Square after multi-lingual signs went up to point people to better places for a picnic, such as the Royal Gardens.
Salvadori has also taken aim at the graffiti despoiling palazzi and monuments, announcing plans to install scores of new surveillance cameras and seek compensation from the 'writers'.
Venice authorities have launched an international competition for other schemes to lessen the impact of mass tourism on the city.
Venice launched its decorum drive two years ago to fight a modern wave of scruffiness and lax behaviour it said was dragging its image down.
'CITY ANGELS' SPREAD MESSAGE.
Among other things, it has employed so-called 'City Angels', a band of young women, to tell tourists to put their shirts back on, stop putting their feet in fountains and have their beer and sandwiches away from the most popular sites.
The city managed to rid St Mark's of the pigeons many people associate with it by banning feed vendors and taking other moves to shoo the birds away.
Authorities recently said the anti-pigeon measures were proving ''an unqualified success''.
The square's pigeon population was down from its historic levels of 20,000 to a bare thousand.
''Just a few months after the feed ban most of the square is free of the animals who have moved off to find food on the islands,'' said Codello, the heritage superintendent.
She said the birds had ''almost completely disappeared'' from the logge on Palazzo Ducale (the Doge's Palace), once their favourite gathering spot.
The animals, which have been judged a health hazard as well as a threat to city monuments, had also decamped from St Mark's Basilica, allowing the historic church's facade to be cleaned.
