Grande Fratello

I love Venice.  When I think back to my 2012 visit to Italy and Greece, I spent twice as much time in Rome as I did in Venice--but my first thoughts are always of Venice.  It's a city like no other in the world.

I've read, but cannot right now find substantiation for the claim, that before WW2, Venice had upwards of 150,000 inhabitants.  Today it has just over 50,000 inhabitants--and the city hasn't gotten any smaller.  My point is that Venice can handle plenty of people, but it's popular to complain that the city has too many tourists.  Sadly, that complaint leads to this:

They're watching you, wherever you walk. They know exactly where you pause, when you slow down and speed up, and they count you in and out of the city.

What's more, they're tracking your phone, so they can tell exactly how many people from your country or region are in which area, at which time. 

 

And they're doing it in a bid to change tourism for the better. 

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." 

Before Covid-19 struck, tourists were arriving in often unmanageable numbers, choking the main streets and filling up the waterbuses. Authorities had tried various measures, from introducing separate residents' lines at major vaporetto (waterbus) stops to bringing in turnstiles that would filter locals from tourists on busy days. A planned "entrance tax," due to debut in 2020, has been postponed to January 2022, due to the pandemic.

 

But as well as controlling footfall, the authorities wanted to track tourism itself -- not just by registering overnight guests but, in a city where the vast majority of visitors are daytrippers, by counting exactly who is in the city -- and where they go.

 

Enter the Venice Control Room. 

One wonders if the screens are two-way.  Paging Mr. Orwell, paging Mr. Orwell, please dial extension 1984 on the white courtesy telephone. 

Italians are logged by the region they live in. Of the foreigners, the system breaks down where they come from (data is based on where their mobile phone is registered, so most likely their country of origin), and displays them as bars on a map on the city -- a graphic representation of overcrowding in real time, with colors going from white to red as the numbers get higher...

 

The system took three years to build, at a cost of €3m ($3.5m). And although some might baulk (sic) at the privacy implications (although no personal data is recorded, you and your provenance is essentially being logged as you move around the city), the authorities are very proud.

If they don't want people to go there, why not just say, "Don't come to Venice!"  It would be a lot cheaper and a lot more honest.