52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Chapter 19: Italy

In Which I See Many Very Cool Sights With Very Many People, And Consider The Collective Action Problem Of Overtourism

It was muggy, beautiful, and way too crowded.

Was that my thought as I stared at the ceiling of Sistine Chapel? Or maybe I’m confusing that memory with a different Michelangelo work when I saw the Statue of David in Florence?

Perhaps it was actually when I navigated through the masses in the Roman Colosseum, or the foot bridges of Venice, or the tiny alleyways of Cinque Terre?

Or maybe that’s the constant state of being if you’re a visitor to Italy in the summer of 2024.

I spent two weeks there, visiting six places: Milan, the five tiny villages of Cinque Terre, Florence, Rome, Siena, and Venice.

Like the rest of Europe, I did this completely by train — Italy’s system is very good, with tons of high-speed lines — and like the rest of Europe, I greatly enjoyed the public spaces and cultural attitudes and museums and gelatos and everything else.

But more than any other country on this trip, I grappled with the realities of overtourism.

This was partly because most of Italy was with family, as my brother and father joined to make good on a planned 2020 trip for Dad’s 60th birthday that got pandemic’d.

Travelling with two people with minimal experience abroad, I became much more aware of just how packed everywhere was, and how crucial it was to book experiences ahead of time to avoid the important places being sold out, more so than any other country in Europe.

And part of it is simply the fact that Italy is teeming with tourists: Italy had 57.2 million of them in 2023, 4th in the world, with the sector contributing 13% of its GDP, third highest among the world’s 20 largest economies.

Over the past three decades, the country has gone from about 3 million tourists visiting in July and August to around 10 million the last two years.

In this summer of European tourism backlash, much of the focus has been on individual cities like Barcelona or Amsterdam.

In Italy the issue is national scope, because its combination of beauty, history and diversity of geography means there are popular attractions just about everywhere.

So let’s talk about what I enjoyed from those cities and attractions — and the difficulties of trying to reign in so many people visiting them.

Italy is known for many things, but “livable cities” is not really one of them.

In both the Mercer Quality of Living ranking and the Economists’ Global Liveability Ranking, no Italian city cracks the top 40 (I’m done with stats now, I promise). Unlike the exploding cities in Asia, the centrally-planned jewels of France and Netherlands and Austria and the Nordics, or the urban renewal stories of America, Italian urbanism doesn’t really have a story to tell.

And in terms of some key things that make a city good for residents — strong transit and parks, easy to navigate roads, a vibrant central area for tourists and locals alike — Italy is definitely lacking compared to a lot of areas I’ve visited.

Some of this has to do with how old many of the cities are, making their basic bones harder to improve. For example, Rome has less Metro lines than Vancouver, in part because the massive amount of archeological finds whenever excavation happens makes new additions prohibitively time-consuming.

But these urbanism questions are mostly problems for residents. The experience for tourists?

🤌

Italy works incredibly well for tourists, on both an individual and collective level.

Individually, the main cities have things that are irresistible to travellers: cool looking centres with tons of hotels, squares and cafes. Plenty of famous landmarks and artwork. Enough cultural differences to be superficially fascinating, without being difficult to navigate.

(This is my way of saying I saw a lot of non-Italians being very pleased as they said “scusi” and “grazie”)

However, it’s the collective impact where Italy shines. In many countries, tourists might be attracted to The One Big City, or The Cute Coastal Villas, and perhaps maybe A Couple Historically Important And Architecturally Interesting Secondary Towns, but there can be a certain sameness about them, or be difficult to connect together outside of a fancy cruise.

Italy doesn’t have those problems. Rome, Venice, Florence are all big *and* historically significant cities, but are wildly different in terms of visuals and overall pace. If you’re a city person, Milan and Naples also have a lot to offer and encapsulate the Country’s north vs. south cultural split. Want more water and cliffs? Cinque Terre, Lake Como, the Amalfi Coast are all iconic, but all provide slightly different experiences.

oh right and then there’s tuscany too

A lot of these difference has to do with the political history of Italy — or rather, the fact Italy didn’t politically exist until the end of the 19th century, with a collection of tiny kingdoms and states dominating their separate zones instead.

It means Rome, Florence, Venice and Milan and so many other places had different centuries where they flourished with different patrons and political goals, and consequently have different aesthetics that last until this day.

And because Italy is relatively thin, and its train system so extensive, you can easily get from place to place, picking the individually places that speak to you most.

Little wonder why the people come and enjoy themselves.

Clockwise from the top: Rome, Venice, Siena, Cinque Terre, Florence and Milan are all brilliant in different ways.

As for what I enjoyed?

I ran into the problem of EuroSaturation: I had seen so many cathedrals and churches and cute alleys and the same boring variations of Madonna and Child in the Renaissance wing of museums — look, when you go to enough art galleries in a summer you develop certain pet peeves — that Milan, Florence and Rome didn’t overwhelm me with amazement.

I grant this is the very definition of a champagne problem, so let’s give a more objective guide:

• Milan is great if you like a cosmopolitan and fashion forward city. The rooftop of the Duomo is amazing, and the Last Supper a special if expensive experience. Otherwise, it is a generic, good but not great city.

• Florence has a nice vibe of being big without overwhelming, and has a lot of options for places to stay that are close to everything while being fairly affordable for Europe. At the same time, your love of it will depend greatly on how much you like Renaissance-era churches and art.

• The historic centre of Rome is legitimately amazing, with the Colosseum and the Roman Forum incredibly preserved, and you could spend an entire day in the area and be wowed every hour. However, compared to other A-List cities there are a much smaller number of areas that are really interesting to wander, and the Vatican might be too crowded to properly enjoy.

The places I enjoyed the most were the ones with out of this world geographical features: the postcard perfection of Cinque Terre and the iconic canals of Venice.

The trick to Venice? Stay until nighttime.

In both cases, the land dictates unique ways of moving around: Venice’s famous gondolas and 472 pedestrian bridges are well known, but Cinque Terre is equally interesting, with the small mountains between each town resulting in amazing hiking for those with time to spare, and a fun shuttle train for those that just want to quickly explore.

In Venice, what could feel like a hollowed-out Disneyfied experience is tempered by all the context: you’re surrounded by amazing art and culture and the history of an important European power for many, many centuries. It’s easy to get lost in the swamp of people while deciding which of the 83 glass sculpture shops to visit when you’re not staring at the canals. A richer experience involves stumbling into tiny art galleries, learning the history of some of the palaces and patrons, and wandering the city at night, where 85% of the people are gone and the energy turns romantically haunted.

Meanwhile, in Cinque Terre, what could be just another series of coastal villas for the wealthy is protected by its relative inaccessibility: with no real roads in any of the five towns, just enough distance from any big city and only one sandy beach, it keeps the energy and businesses open to a wider range of people and a more vibrant energy. 

(Also, for the record, the correct ranking of them is 1. Vernazza 2. Riomaggiore 3. Corniglia, 4. Manarola 5. Monterosso)  

But of course, this is part of the problem, because geographical features are also the very things that make the overtourism feel worse: you can’t just pen the tourists off into Ye Historic Old Zone if that’s your entire town.

Incidentally, geographical scarcity is also a massive driver of the biggest tension back in my home of Vancouver, albeit for housing prices rather than tourism.

In both cases, the old saying “Buy land, they're not making it anymore,” reads less than advice and more like a warning.

I could show 60 pictures of Cinque Terre and not run out of good photos.

So what to do?

This year, both Cinque Terre and Venice tried something well known to any government trying to disincentivize behaviour: tax it.

Venice began a pilot program of charging 5 Euros to any day trippers visiting, while Cinque Terre created a new fee to use a reopened coastal walking trail, in addition to the already mandatory fee to access the rest of the trails connecting the towns.

(Which, it should be noted, are very spectacular)

Venice had already instituted regulations that banned cruise ships from docking in the area, and the Italian government is mulling raising the countrywide accommodation tax from a maximum of 5 Euros a night per person to 25. Do the math, and that adds up to nearly an extra thousand Canadian dollars for a family of four taking a week-long vacation.

Would that actually deter people?

We live in an era where individual liberalism reigns supreme, global communication creates worldwide adoption of trends, wealth provides unparalleled freedom, and collective action problems are everywhere.

Overtourism is the housing crisis, is climate change, is misinformation, is getting through just one more wave of the pandemic, is everything else where in the midst of our stress the solution seems so bloody straightforward and yet impossibly out of reach.

Maybe this one seems easier because it’s just a bunch of overly tanned Americans getting off a boat and surrounding some old statue.

But I’m willing to bet all of these problems will be solved together, or will keep on growing.

After all, the Famous-Only-In-British-Columbia band Spirit of the West’s most famous song is about partying too hard in London and needing to go home for a rest.

Their second most famous song?

It’s about going to a tourist trap in Italy, with a chorus about falling in love with it, consequences be damned.

“And if Venice is sinking

I’m going under

‘Cause beauty’s religion

And it’s Christened me with wonder”