With temperatures in the low 90s these days (33 degrees C)--and as most Venetians don't have air conditioning (even in the grandest palazzos)--the only relief from the heat is to be found in one's own boat or on the beach; or in a boat on the beach, as at Sant' Erasmo above.
Just beyond the right edge of the image above is the bacan, or sand bar, a focal point for summer boaters. You can read about the scene here in a 2011 post entitled "Belly Up to the Sandbar: 'Locals Only' off Sant' Erasmo."
The "locals only" part of that post's title is outdated, however, as a number of tour operators now offer trips to the bacan: promising to deliver tourists to "authentic and hidden Venetian experiences," which of course become markedly less "authentic" and "hidden" with each arriving tourist.
Venetians! Don't let the tourist industry prostitute your identity! Certain places should be kept secret.
ReplyDeleteI suspect, Jon, that some people feel they have no choice: in a tourist monoculture, with so many competitors for tourist business, one must try to distinguish one's own offerings from the competition. One way of doing this is, of course, to target those visitors whom you flatter as being more "discerning" (even as you flatter yourself that your own offerings bear not the least resemblance to "destructive" mass tourist packages--certain terms are agreed upon as signifying this distinction: "eco" or "green," "slow," etc). I think the majority of individuals offering such off-the-beaten-track adventures do so in good faith, maybe with the highest ideals. It doesn't change the fact that , unfortunately, for the vast majority of locals, tourism is the only game in town, and when one's choice is to move away from your birth-place or home or come up with your own angle on the monoculture, anyone with self-respect will try to put the best face on what is not merely the usual necessity of earning a living, but of finding a way to do within the most constrained & unpromising of economies. The fact is, however, that I've met a number of people who are obliged to work in the tourist economy and are quite open about how much they loathe it--and others who have moved away rather than do it.
DeleteThanks for your clarifying Venetian point of view. My job has suffered a transformation and has ended up slave of mass tourism. Every year it's more and more tourists and I find it an invasion. My hometown is loosing it's true identity by opening the same business, same decorating, same cliches, as any other tourist town on Eartn. I guess, that's life. Sad.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear that, Jon, but, yes, it's not only places like Venice that are facing this and, unfortunately, it's not enough to appeal to "good" tourists to come rather than "bad" ones. As Amitov Ghosh has written in his book about climate change, while it's nice for each of us to act "responsibly" and recycle and all the rest, such isolated, individual acts alone are insufficient to address the threat: in the absence of large scale policy initiatives the idea that individual initiative alone, no matter how diligently practiced, is enough is rather like believing that pushing a cross walk button gives you control over all the street traffic in a city (my analogy, not his). Protecting the distinctive character of any place now depends on public policy and things like zoning, etc; the ostensibly lasseiz faire approach (which is itself rigged to favor those with greater stores of capital) leads, as I was reminded on our recent visit to the US, to every place seeming basically the same. (I don't think it's just life, as we did visit one county in the US in which chains were not allowed and it was distinctly different than other places.)
DeleteIn any case, now 55, I will visit Venice in winter, as I've done periodically since I fell in love with her when I was 16. I'll pay a quick visit to you promise!
ReplyDeleteVenice in winter has much to recommend it, as you well know!
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