The Venice paradox: why the entry ticket won't stop the city's depopulation

When the crowds peak, the most immediate reaction is to point the finger at the crowd itself. It's the narrative of the one tourist too many, blamed for the packed vaporetti (the city's waterbuses) and the unliveable calli (Venice's narrow alleyways). It's a reading that mistakes the effect for the cause: you cannot blame an individual visitor for wanting to see a city unlike any other in the world.

The problem is structural. Venice's fame is global, and with a worldwide middle class still expanding, demand to visit will never dry up on its own. If lodging capacity grows, there will always be someone ready to fill the gap. Faced with this pressure, the city administration has so far chosen to manage the flows through economic levers — a strategy the numbers show to be ineffective, and one that risks being discriminatory.

The ticket doesn't reduce the flows — it filters them

The best-known measure is the access fee (contributo d'accesso) charged to day-trippers, introduced on a trial basis in 2024. The data leaves little doubt: arrivals keep growing, and in the first 42 days of the 2026 rollout more €10 tickets (the "last minute" rate) were sold than €5 ones (the advance rate), a sign that the price gap does not change behaviour¹. The idea that raising the entry cost will curb demand is a miscalculation: given global wealth inequality, there will always be a share of the world's population able to pay without feeling it. The ticket does not reduce overtourism; it selects who can afford it.

Against this backdrop, decisions on port infrastructure seem to pull in the opposite direction. While there is talk of raising the entry cost for day visitors, the Port System Authority aims to bring Venice's cruise traffic back to one million passengers a year by 2027 — almost double the roughly 500,000–550,000 recorded in 2023–2024².

Those who stay overnight in Venice, and already pay the tourist tax (imposta di soggiorno), are exempt from the access fee; the same goes for residents, students, workers, under-14s and other categories³. But on the whole the pricing system rewards those with greater spending power and discourages the passing visitor — the one who, according to retailers, "fills the calli but doesn't set foot in the shops".

This is the view of Setrak Tokatzian, a jeweller and president of the Piazza San Marco Association, who in July 2025 proposed charging €100 to anyone arriving for the day without staying overnight, lamenting the collapse in purchases by "hit-and-run" tourists⁴⁵. At the time the proposal was dismissed as a provocation by the then tourism councillor — an assessore is a member of the city's executive — Simone Venturini, who judged it unworkable because the law sets a maximum cap of €10⁶.

Less than a year later, now as mayor, Venturini has revived a similar idea: raising the access fee from the current €5–10 up to a €30–50 range on the busiest days¹⁷. Doing so will require an act of Parliament, since the fee cap is set by a 2021 national law, not by a municipal regulation¹. Were the proposal to pass, a family of four choosing to visit Venice for the day (perhaps unable to afford an overnight stay) could end up paying €200 just to enter the city: a cost that turns access to a shared good into a luxury for those who can afford it.

And the proceeds? Reporting that stays opaque

There is another question, less often asked but just as relevant: where the money goes. For how the revenue is to be spent, the municipal regulation governing the fee defers to the rules on the landing tax (tassa di sbarco): an earmark covering waste collection and disposal, environmental protection and restoration, tourism, culture, local policing and mobility. Legal scholarship on the subject considers this scope deliberately broad and generic — so much so that it "blurs" the earmark itself and makes any precise reporting of expected and achieved goals difficult⁸.

In practice, the administration has chosen a specific path and repeats it year after year: use most of the take, net of running costs, to hold down the TARI (the municipal waste-collection tax). In the 2026 draft budget, for example, the Comune — the city government — stated in black and white that the increase in the waste tariff had been cancelled out thanks in part to €1.77 million linked to the access fee, on top of tourist-tax revenue and recovered tax evasion⁹. It is the budget councillor, Michele Zuin, who has repeated this approach for years, calling it more than once a national first¹².

Revenues, meanwhile, have grown quickly: about €2.4 million in 2024, the first trial year, with 485,000 paying visitors over 29 days¹⁰; rising to about €5.4 million in 2025, with more than 720,000 vouchers issued over 54 days¹¹. How much of that revenue is absorbed by running costs (the digital platform, staff at the gates, the information campaign) the Comune does not quantify publicly in any precise way. Institutional press releases always fall back on the same phrase — "net of running costs" — without ever publishing a breakdown of the items: in 2025 alone, around 140 stewards, inspectors and local-police officers were permanently deployed for on-the-ground checks¹¹.

This opacity is also at the heart of the political clash in the city council (Consiglio Comunale). The opposition — in particular the Partito Democratico (PD, Italy's main centre-left party) and civic lists such as Tutta la Città Insieme — has long asked that the data on flows and revenues be cross-checked against other municipal sources, such as the Smart Control Room, and that the studies commissioned by the Comune (for instance the one entrusted to CISET, the International Centre for Studies on the Tourism Economy) be published in full, not just in selected extracts during council-committee meetings¹³¹⁴. Back in 2023, even before the trial began, the PD's city branch had distilled its suspicion into a sharp quip about the real intentions of the Giunta — the mayor's cabinet¹⁵ — an accusation the administration routinely rejects, insisting that the goal is not budgetary but the protection of residency.

The point, beyond the mutual accusations, is that to date there is no public, verifiable list of specific measures — from the restoration of public housing to the strengthening of local public transport — funded in a direct and traceable way by the access fee. The only use declared with precise figures remains keeping the TARI down: a real benefit for city residents, but also the only spending line the administration chooses to make public with exact numbers.

The real crisis is demographic

While public attention stays on the turnstiles and the access fees, the more serious crisis is playing out in housing. The figures trace the arc of an inexorable collapse. As reported by the news outlet Il Post²⁰, in 2008 residents of the historic city numbered just over 60,000 and tourist beds about 12,000. Today the situation has completely flipped: tourist beds in the historic centre exceed 50,000, outnumbering residents, who have settled steadily below 49,000 (far from the all-time peak of 175,000 recorded in 1951).

The dynamic behind this demographic replacement is plain: for anyone who owns a property in the historic centre, converting it into a short-term tourist rental comfortably covers the mortgage and costs and generates a profit margin that a long-term residential lease cannot begin to match. Giving that up, to safeguard the community's social fabric, is today a choice very few owners are willing — or able — to make.

The consequence is a self-reinforcing cycle: fewer permanent residents means fewer neighbourhood shops. Grocers, hardware stores and doctors' surgeries close to make way for businesses aimed solely at visitors. Daily life in the lagoon becomes ever more complicated and expensive, pushing yet more families to leave, in an urban space that reorganises itself entirely around tourist consumption.

The Constitutional Court ruling

If the goal is to preserve Venice as a lived-in city, the most promising lever is not the ticket price but the regulation of land use. And here something has actually moved: with judgment no. 186 of 2025, filed on 16 December, the Constitutional Court — Italy's Consulta, which rules on whether laws comply with the Constitution — rejected the national Government's challenge to the Tourism Code of the Region of Tuscany (Regional Law 61/2024), confirming its full legitimacy¹⁶¹⁷. (In Italy a Region is an intermediate tier of government between the State and the municipalities, with its own legislative powers.)

It is important to be precise about what the ruling says, because it is a point often misunderstood in public debate: the Court did not directly grant municipalities the power to limit short-term rentals. It established that it is legitimate for the Region, through its own law, to assign municipalities that regulatory power — justified by the aims of territorial governance and protection of the social fabric, and not in conflict with the freedom of enterprise guaranteed by Article 41 of the Constitution¹⁶¹⁸. The ruling, in other words, concerns a division of powers among the State, the Regions and the municipalities: it legitimises a tool, it does not switch it on automatically everywhere.

This means a city cannot today lean on the ruling to zone or block new short-term rentals on its own: first its Region must pass a law modelled on Tuscany's. This is no minor detail. Emilia-Romagna (another of Italy's regions) has already done so, approving a similar law on 17 December 2025, a day after the ruling¹⁹.

That said, it is worth stressing Venice's competitive advantage within the national legal landscape. While for most Italian municipalities judgment 186/2025 is a framework that must be taken up by regional legislation before it becomes operational, Venice already holds a specific delegated regulatory power thanks to the "Pellicani amendment" (Article 37-bis of Decree-Law no. 50/2022). The Court's ruling did no more than lock in, at constitutional level, the legitimacy of restrictive measures on short-term rentals, dispelling any doubt about their compatibility with economic freedom. It follows that, unlike other cities, the Comune of Venice already possesses, de facto and de jure, the legal basis to implement a system of time-limited licences or a cap on tourist rentals. The absence of more incisive measures, therefore, can no longer be blamed on a lack of powers or a legal vacuum, but solely on the administration's political will to use the powers the State has already amply granted it.

A proposal: time-limited licences

Precisely because the ruling grants municipalities wider room to act than had been thought (exclusion zones, land-use requirements, permits with conditions and expiry dates for non-hotel accommodation¹⁷¹⁸), it is worth taking that logic all the way with a concrete proposal — one that Tuscany's law does not set out in these terms, but which the principle affirmed by the Court would make feasible: fixed-expiry licences.

The mechanism, in three steps, could work like this. First: the Comune of Venice maps the sestieri (the city's six historic districts) and declares the historic centre's sustainability threshold saturated, blocking new tourist lodgings in residential apartments. Second: licences already active would not remain open-ended, but would be given an expiry date — five or nine years, say — just as already happens with other commercial permits subject to periodic renewal. Third: on expiry, the holder must apply to renew planning compliance; if the area is still saturated in the meantime, the Comune can legitimately refuse, regardless of any change of ownership or inheritance, and the property reverts to residential use.

It is a framework compatible with what the Court has already validated for Tuscany, where a municipal permit with graduated measures and safeguards is envisaged¹⁸, but it goes beyond that specific text. It is not (yet) law in force: it is a policy proposal that uses judgment 186/2025 as a basis of constitutional legitimacy, not as its direct application.

Venice is not at risk of disappearing because it is too loved, but because political choices and property-market dynamics are hollowing out its urban dimension in favour of a commercial one. The most effective path does not run through the price of the entry ticket, but through the capacity of politics to set limits on rent-seeking and to give living in the lagoon back the character of a right, not a privilege.

Sources

1. «Il nuovo sindaco di Venezia vuole alzare il ticket di ingresso fino a 50 euro», Il Post, June 2026. ilpost.it ↩
2. «Crociere, Venezia punta a un milione di passeggeri nel 2027», ANSA, March 2023. ansa.it ↩
3. «Ticket d'accesso a Venezia a 50 euro, la proposta del sindaco», Virgilio Notizie, June 2026. virgilio.it ↩
4. «Venezia, i commercianti di Piazza San Marco: "Serve una tassa di 100 euro"», TgCom24, July 2025. tgcom24.mediaset.it ↩
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8. «Il contributo di accesso veneziano e l'insostenibile overtourism: natura giuridica e prospettive di implementazione», Rivista di Diritto Tributario, November 2024. rivistadirittotributario.it ↩
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10. «Il biglietto d'accesso a Venezia ha funzionato ma nel modo sbagliato», Rivista Studio, March 2025. rivistastudio.com ↩
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12. «Contributo d'accesso 2025: ecco come Venezia usa le entrate», Metropolitano.it, April 2025. metropolitano.it ↩
13. «Scontro sui dati nei giorni del ticket: "Pubblicateli tutti". "Non era stato richiesto"», VeneziaToday, March 2025. veneziatoday.it ↩
14. «Contributo di accesso, oltre 720mila visitatori giornalieri paganti. Zuin: "Bilancio positivo"», VeneziaToday, July 2025. veneziatoday.it ↩
15. «Contributo d'accesso, i motivi dei tanti "No". Dubbi sui turisti della terraferma», VeneziaToday, September 2023. veneziatoday.it ↩
16. Corte Costituzionale, judgment no. 186/2025, filed 16 December 2025. cortecostituzionale.it ↩
17. «La Corte costituzionale: legittime le norme della Regione Toscana su locazioni turistiche e affitti brevi», AG Studio Legale, December 2025. agstudiolegale.com ↩
18. «Affitti brevi, per la Consulta sono legittimi i limiti della legge toscana», Misterlex, December 2025. misterlex.it ↩
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20. «A Venezia c'è un nuovo contatore per i posti letto turistici», Il Post, April 2023. ilpost.it ↩