Venice, the city that refuses to become Europe's Disneyland
The city is headed towards being in a city virtually without residents within the next 30 years, becoming a sort of Disneyland-crowded with tourists, but without citizens.
The register of residents, tallied every 10 years shows that the population of Venice was nearly cut by half from 121,000 to 62,000-since the great flood of 1966. The city that once ruled an empire, but if it continues to lose people at this...
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Venice, the city that refuses to become Europe's Disneyland
The city is headed towards being in a city virtually without residents within the next 30 years, becoming a sort of Disneyland-crowded with tourists, but without citizens.
The register of residents, tallied every 10 years shows that the population of Venice was nearly cut by half from 121,000 to 62,000-since the great flood of 1966. The city that once ruled an empire, but if it continues to lose people at this rate, will be "empty" for 2046.
While the pace of population decline has slowed in the last 10 years than in previous decades, today it is accelerating and threatening to strip Venice residents fixed sooner than expected. Since 1996, the register of residents dropped by 800 a year. But in 2005, 1,918 people who left town or died than moved in or were born there.
Today, 25% of the population is over 64 years. The latest council estimate is that the rate of decline in population will increase to 2.000/2.500 per year. This does not mean that the city has no inhabitants because foreigners and Italians are buying a second home in Venice, but it does mean the native Venetian is an endangered species. Venice may then become a living museum-city-a place to enter, would be "normal admission fee. The 1966 flood caused the ground floor of some 16,000 houses being abandoned and the growth of mass tourism, combined with rising water levels meant that the living in Venice increasingly difficult.
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