Restituzione dell'incanto : Venezia. Heritage-Turismo: riconciliare l’inconciliabile

Over a billion tourists are traveling around the world every year, driven by the desire to achieve those images seen multiplied on the screens, Rialto bridge, Colosseum, Brandenburger Tor, etc. With the impressive volume of photos they take back home and the inability to relate the experience of the trip, they witness the impermeability of the places they have visited, which can be touched, consumed, even destroyed, but not crossed. Big tourism is no longer interested in knowing and experiencing works of art and landscapes, because what really counts is possessing them. In this article I will focus in particular on the effects of big tourism on the destination Venezia, as it represents an extreme case even just considering the numerical data. If in New York the ratio between residents and tourists is 1 to 7 and in Milan 1 to 6, in Venice it is almost 1 to 600, with a population less than 50000 inhabitants, compared to the 200,000 inhabitants of half century ago. Today a twofold reflection is imposed by big tourism. On the one hand, how to defend the residents and the destinations by tourist assaults. But on the other, how to make sure that the assaulted places are not taming to tourism to the point that they loose themselves and, therefore, also the tourism. No tourist destination has any guarantee of lasting forever, because big tourism is fickle and is affected by the projection of the media, its icons. The strange phenomenon we witness in Venice in recent years is a sort of "precession of the simulacrum" where it is no longer the tourist experiencing Venice but, on the contrary, it is Venice who tries to penetrate the consumerist, ephemeral dimension of big tourism. Venice simulation is becoming reality itself.