Venice ponders future without big cruise ships
Passengers on vessels that exceed new size restrictions are now denied those grand arrival and departure views.
The spectacle of big ocean liners entering Venice’s Grand Canal, which leads to the city’s St Mark’s Square heartland, has been commonplace for decades.
Mass cruising has proven a goldmine for the northern Italy city, but not all the benefits have gone to the local tourism industry. Pre-booked shore excursions with scheduled stops mean passengers are likely to spend less freely than regular visitors. Even when Venice is the “home port” for embarkation and final disembarkation, there’s a trend to fly in or fly out and not spend hotel nights.
For more than a decade, the sight of swarms of visitors following flag-carrying leaders, ticking off the top sights and filing into “approved souvenir shops”, has given Venice the air of a Renaissance Disneyland. Been there, done the (gondola) ride, got the pictures.
Even before MSC Opera, a 275m-long ship with capacity for 2150 passengers, had a collision in 2019 with a relative minnow of a tourist boat, injuring five people, the cruise industry was on notice. After the MSC Opera incident, thousands of “big ship” protesters marched in the centre of Venice demanding to know why plans to divert liners away from the waterways of the city’s heart, announced in 2017, were never properly implemented.
UNESCO had Venice on notice, too, for water pollution, overcrowding and environmental risks that included further flooding and erosion in a city already challenged by its fragile foundations. Despite the cruise industry boosting tourism-related local jobs, estimated to be more than 500,000, things had to change.
In April, Dario Franceschini, Italy’s Minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, announced, “Anyone who has passed through Venice in recent years … has been shocked to see these ships hundreds of meters long, as high as condominiums, passing in such fragile places as the Giudecca Canal or in front of San Marco.”
Sceptics might posit that the threat of UNESCO downgrading the city’s 1987-awarded World Heritage List status to “endangered” had finally provided the necessary impetus. Issues cited included mass tourism, residential population decline and environmental degradation. A reprieve was given earlier this year when the Italian government banned passage into the “main cruise basin” of the lagoon for container vessels and cruise ships longer than 180m, taller than 35m and weighing more than 96,000 tonnes. In August, Franceschini announced the lagoon surrounding the Grand Canal was to be declared “a national monument”. But is it enough?
“The persistent issues afflicting the precarious state of conservation of Venice and its lagoon have long been associated with a complex and ineffective governance framework,” Stephan Doempke, chairman of World Heritage Watch, told the UNESCO committee. “It lacks a long-term vision and a strategy involving the local community.”
Cruisers on ships that exceed the size restrictions are now denied those grand arrival and departure views; the new routes bypass St Mark’s Square and the narrow Giudecca Canal to dock at the industrial mainland port of Marghera, which needs a significant infrastructure upgrade. Meanwhile, Royal Caribbean has moved its home port to the architecturally significant city of Ravenna, 90 minutes away and connected to the Adriatic by the Candiano Canal, and the line has won the contract to build a cutting-edge, energy-efficient terminal in Ravenna, complete with parklands and public amenities, due to open in mid-2024.
Ravenna’s proximity to Venice, as well as three regional airports, could give that city a tourism bounce, while other major cruise companies, including Holland America Line, seem keen to reposition away from the Venice big-ship debate by docking in Trieste (“near Venice”) and taking passengers overland. For its east Mediterranean sailings across the 2022 season, MSC will be basing its high-capacity fleet in Monfalcone on the Gulf of Trieste.
The winners in the contentious cruise issue are operators of smaller ships,
which conform to the allowable specifications to enter, and dock within, the “cruise basin” of the lagoon. A spokesperson for Silversea says the boutique line is “evaluating its 2022/2023 embarkation/disembarkation plans for Venice” but has scheduled 53 cruises
that include the port between March 30, 2022 and November 9, 2023, mostly deploying Silver Dawn and Silver Moon, each with capacity of 596 passengers,
plus Silver Spirit, accommodating 608. Those who book well in advance can expect early-bird discounts of 10 per cent and free economy-class airfares from Australia.
