Or instead of raising bureaucracy and locking out people (not everyone has a smartphone), you could do the more sensible approach and just make things more expensive overall until less people come.
Increasing hotel fees doesn’t stop day visitors. Venice also has plenty of Airbnb available, which in my uninformed opinion ruins any control the city has (maybe they require permits and tax?)
Increasing food prices hurts the locals, and just means many tourists will skip eating out.
Those gondolieres? Standard Venetians usually don't use them. Entry to palazzos? Ferries? Street coffees? Raise the damn prices! (Offer a highly discounted year pass to not affect locals).
Like come into the city? People aren't necessarily riding gondoliers. These are all independent businesses pricing things according to their own interests (as they can and should). The stated problem is that there are too many people coming in so they are directly addressing that behavior.
It is legitimate to tax consumption of goods and services, e.g. make gondolieres pay an extra 10 Euros of taxes per trip. It is not legitimate to tax people based on race, sex, or country of origin - in fact, the entry fee scheme probably violates European Law, if unevenly applied (e.g. residents are not forced to pay).
See also: the German "foreigner's toll road" scheme.
How is that not locking people out also? It’s the same concept applied with a different metric.
Not to mention raising prices broadly hurts locals and not just visitors? Entry fees are a pretty simple solution, I hardly imagine it being bureaucratic.
In the UK at the same time, Blackpool "claimed around eight million visitors per year, three times as many as its nearest British rivals, still drawn largely from the mill towns of East Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackpool#Towards_the_present
My grandparents drove their entire family to the Grand Canyon back in the 1950s, and they were farmers/blue collar workers.
Then let’s say cultural tourism has been for the wealthy (until the post WWII era of affordable tuition led college students to travel on the cheap). The “grand tour” was for the wealthy, and Venice was certainly on that itinerary.
Instead of money, cultural sites could use knowledge to gatekeep. Require prospective visitors to pass a nontrivial quiz on the history and cultural significance of Venice to be able to enter. Take a short college course on the City and receive a lifetime pass. Those who expend the preparatory effort to truly appreciate Venice are permitted to physically visit the City, and the rest get access to streaming videos and stock photos into which to edit themselves.
Some sort of access control is needed. If you think today’s Venice is bad, wait until the Chinese tourists, with their exceptionally high tolerance for crowded conditions, start arriving en masse by rail. Congestion effects are nonlinear…
Your "cultural tourism has been for the wealthy" has a tautological component.
That is, the culture you likely refer to is the 'the culture of an upper class (an aristocracy) or of a status class (the intelligentsia)', quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_culture .
In the 1920s people went to Nashville to visit the Grand Old Opry and hear country music. People went to the Catskills to see vaudeville. How are these not examples of "cultural tourism" by the non-wealthy, pre-dating WWII?
19 million people went to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. How is that not mass tourism?
> cultural sites could use knowledge to gatekeep
They certainly can. But there are many such ways to gatekeep. The article mention cash. What about "Tourists to Venice must be able to read and write Venetian"? The very choice of how to gatekeep reveals much the gatekeeper.
A question like "Which James Bond films were filmed in Venice?" focuses on a different culture than "What famous club-footed author swam the length of the Grand Canal and across the lagoon to the Lido?" (And both question set the focus on foreigners, rather than locals.)
A more practical set of gatekeeping questions might include: "It is illegal to feed the pigeons on St. Mark's Square. What is the fine? A) 50 euros, B) 100 euros, C) 200 euros, D) 500 euros".
> wait until the Chinese tourists ... start arriving en masse by rail
The xenophobic comment is uncalled for. Just how many Chinese people do you think will travel several days by train from China to visit Venice? And why Venice, when there are so many other places to visit which are closer?
> exceptionally high tolerance for crowded conditions
] Some researchers claim that tourists from Asian countries, whose places of residence are commonly characterised by congestion, are more tolerant of crowding than those from Western countries (Pearce, 1995), yet contradictory findings are suggested by emerging studies. For example, Chinese tourists show unexpectedly sensitive attitudes and low tolerance of tourist crowding in China compared with Westerners (Jin & Pearce, 2011). In addition, in Taiwan, tourists from Japan, Korea, Singapore and the US have been found to be negatively affected by the large numbers of mainland Chinese tourists, while no significant impact has been found among tourists from Hong Kong, the UK and Australia (Chou et al., 2014; Su et al., 2012). These contradictions imply that the influence of cultural distance is more complicated than previously noted (Bi & Lehto, 2018).
Chinese tourists may be more likely to avoid a crowded Venice than American tourists.
My parents went to Venice on holiday a few times in the 1970s. No, it was not overburdened with tourists. I have seen many photos and heard good stories. The insane levels seen in Venice and Amsterdam only started in the last 10 years.
I don't think that's coincidence. Cheap air travel opened a window on the world and absolutely ruined a lot of places. To the point that if you haven't visited Machu Picchu the consensus is that you haven't really lived. Tourists are roaches, they bring some much needed income to some places but they utterly ruin others, crowd out the locals, cause living spaces to be converted into hotels and make it impossible to buy food and drink at normal prices for the people that live there.
