[imagesource: Marco Sabadin / AFP – Getty Images]

Before COVID-19 struck, cruise ship holidays had been exploding in popularity for the best part of a decade.

Great news for cruise ship operators, but less so for the people of Venice, Italy, who had grown accustomed to having their city overrun with tourists.

The tourist influx became such an issue that the city introduced a new levy on day trippers, which started at three euros, although due to COVID-19, it had been a full 17 months since a cruise ship pulled in.

That streak ended this weekend, and residents gathered en masse to let the Italian government know they were not stoked.

The Guardian reports:

[This came] despite prime minister Mario Draghi’s government declaring that the ships would be banned from the historic centre. The 92,000 tonne ship MSC Orchestra collected 650 passengers before leaving for Bari, in southern Italy, on Saturday.

“The Italian government has been great at deceiving not only citizens of Venice, but newspapers and public opinion around the world,” said Tommaso Cacciari, leader of the activist group No Grandi Navi (No Big Ships).

In March, the Italian government had stated that cruise ships that usually docked in the city would be diverted to the industrial port of Marghera, while officials developed plans for the construction of a cruise terminal outside of the lagoon area.

There was also a counterprotest, led by Venetians whose livelihood depends on cruise ship visitors, with as many as 5 000 people usually employed at Venice’s cruise terminal.

Even with the counterprotest, suffice to say it was not the warmest of welcomes for the MSC Orchestra:

This is a battle that is likely to continue for a while yet, with that cruise terminal still a long way off:

In reality, to make it feasible to redirect cruise ships to Marghera port, infrastructure work needs to be done first.

In the meantime, the only way for the ships to enter Venice is via the Giudecca canal, where in June 2019 a 13-deck vessel operated by MSC crashed into a wharf and tourist boat, injuring five people.

That crash was utter carnage.

In 2019, at the peak of the cruise ship boom, Venice served as a lucrative turnaround point for 667 cruise ships embarking nearly 700 000 passengers, and carrying a total of 1,6 million.

[source:guardian]