| inbluevt | Date: Monday, 2013/09/16, 8:28 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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The recent accidental death of a German tourist along the Grand Canal has fed-up Venetians asking whether tourism has finally gotten out of hand. But they fear that the city has already sold out, and that politicians can do nothing to hold back the crowds.
On the day criminal law professor Joachim Vogel was carried to his grave at a cemetery in the southern German city of Tübingen, his daughter's pink shoe was still lying on the ground next to the Grand Canal in Venice. It was precisely the spot where Vogel was crushed and fatally injured on Aug. 17 while trying to save his daughter after the gondola they were in had collided with a water bus. His 3-year-old daughter survived. Her shoe, now decorated with flowers, has been left
behind as a memorial. At the very moment when a procession of 16 gondoliers marches in front
of the coffin in Tübingen, the only signs of mourning in Venice are the black ribbons tied to the bow irons of the city's gondolas.
Life has already returned to normal at the accident site, where Germans, Japanese and Arabs crowd along the seawall in the midday heat or take snapshots of each other in front of the Rialto Bridge. In a take-it-or-leave-it voice, a gondolier explains that the official rate, €80 ($106) for 40 minutes, doesn't apply to trips in idyllic smaller canals. "For that price, I can take you up and down the Grand Canal, again and again. Is that what you want?"
It isn't.
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Nowadays the old section of Venice, with its population of 57,960, sees up to 80,000 tourists a day.
Some 425 gondoliers, more than 200 water taxes and dozens of vaporetti, or motored water buses, are jockeying for space in Venice. And then there are the private boats, the commercial vessels for garbage and sewage disposal and, finally, the barges that deliver beer, wine and
seafood to more than 1,000 restaurants and bars.
Message edited by inbluevt - Monday, 2013/09/16, 8:31 PM |
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