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.
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…