Venice is the latest tourist hotspot to consider imposing a limit to the number of visitors it receives in order to preserve the integrity of the UNESCO World Heritage site.
According to Italian newspaper La Stampa, local city officials are considering the introduction of an online ticketing system that would put a cap on visitors and a smartphone app that would help with crowd control.
A special committee has been designated to study about half a dozen proposals that could be implemented as early as 2017.
The initiative comes after UNESCO expressed “extreme concern” about the deteriorating state of the lagoon with the arrival of behemoth cruise ships which offload about 30,000 passengers into the city every day.
For perspective, Venice's population is 55,000 but averages 22 million visitors a year.
This past summer, UNESCO urged the Italian government to ban large cruise liners from docking in the lagoon city, or risk being put on the UN's “endangered list.”
In addition to Venice being overrun by tourists, large cruise liners are degrading the local ecosystem and structural integrity of the city, which UNESCO calls an architectural masterpiece, made up of 118 small islands with a history that dates back to the 5th century.
In September, fed-up locals organized protests and blockades in an attempt to block cruise ships from entering port.
Hundreds of residents also took to the streets with shopping trolleys and strollers to highlight the difficulties of negotiating passageways and streets that are clogged with selfie-taking tourists.
And this summer, tourists received a cold welcome with posters plastered across the city that read “Tourists Go Away!! Your Are destroying This Area.”
Venice is the latest tourist destination forced to take measures of crowd control. Cinque Terre in Italy, Machu Picchu in Peru, Yosemite National Park in the U.S., Antarctica, Spain's Barcelona and the Galapagos Islands have all implemented strategies that limit visitor numbers or put a freeze on hotel development and tourist apartments.
