Tourism in Venice: mapping overtourism and exploring solutions

Venice is a tourist destination par excellence. Not surprisingly, therefore, the enormous number of visitors that this unique city has to host each year: the most recent official estimate is about 28 million visitors a year (or 37 million in the metropolitan city), of which only 5 million arrive they are residential tourists who, with an average duration of 2.32 nights, generate almost 12 million overnight stay in registered tourist accommodation. There have been ups and downs in the last few decades, but the trend is definitely on the rise and the most alarming factor is the finding that between the two main segments that make up the Venetian tourism market, the one of hiking is confirmed to have always been of great long most dynamic of residential tourism. As a final result of these trends, as Bertocchi, Camatti, Giove and Van der Borg (2018) have shown, it is now evident that the number of people visiting Venice annually with the needs of the city as a whole is becoming a problem so worrying that it requires the development of even drastic solutions. If in Venice the first signs of excessive tourist pressure had already emerged in the 1990s, it is during the last decades, in particular following the continuous expansion of the total number of travelers worldwide, that a growing number of European cities have begun to feel the consequences of what is now called overtourism. In this context, Venice remains, however, once again an emblematic case and serves as an example with regard to the analysis of the phenomenon as well as the use of management solutions to support sustainable tourism development in a medium-sized art city.