I do know people who genuinely want to have a nice, relaxing vacation. They book holidays at the beach, in warm countries, at 5* hotels. They don't bother much with overrated and crowded touristy places, really.
Want to walk around the city walls? That'll be €20! And if over-priced, mediocre restaurants are your thing, there's plenty of them too.
This is the approach the city of Amsterdam is trying in order to alleviate the huge tourism pressure. I'm not sure how effective it has been. It has resulted in funny things like "Amsterdam Castle" or "Amsterdam Beach" in tourist promotions that have nothing to do with Amsterdam. But, if it spreads the load...
We actually found Florence to be busy almost everywhere, even with lots of people still wandering around at night. The Uffizi was the one place that was impossible to enjoy, mostly because of the tour groups. I wish they would limit the number of people in any given room at a time. But, we wandered across to the Museo Galileo and had it to ourselves.
The one thing that bugs me about museum tours these days is that they all wear in-ear headphones connected to the guide. Which means whereas before you'd mostly have groups of 5 people with one guide, you now have groups of 20 people walking 20 meters behind one guide because distance isn't an issue. Some rooms become unbearable, it's like you take a super busy street market in Mumbai and hang up some paintings and expect people to enjoy the art while navigating through a flood of people.
In a way it helps because you get fewer guides and possibly less shouting. You'd hope this makes things more quiet but it doesn't. It drops the costs of a guide for individuals to next to nothing due to the size of the groups, so you get massive groups and more groups.
Having a few groups of two or three individuals standing around isn't an issue. But when it's a blob of 15-20 people, it's no longer possible to navigate through it or look through/past it, you have to go around and if they're infront of an art piece, you're mostly out of luck.
As for the city, in many parts you hardly hear any Italian and if you do, it's someone in the tourist business trying to sell you something.
I'm not necessarily complaining, I'm part of the problem haha. Just sharing my experience.
Does seem to support the article's hypothesis that people are really determined to collect the marquee experience and don't necessarily feel motivated to do much else.
While medieval and in a certain shabby way as attractive as Firenze they only get a small percentage of the tourists.
One could argue that, by accounting for eight per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, tourism is killing the sights along with the planet.
Any unnecessary and polluting economic activity that is actively killing the planet, yes.
> A greenhousing effect would also not be harmful to all or even most tourist sites.
I doubt that. If it won't be directly harmful in the next 100 years, there will be as many as 143 million people that'll be displaced due to climate change by 2050. Even if the tourist sites in question are in relatively safe locations such as Europe, you will most certainly not recognize them.
All economic activity pollutes, and therefore according to your logic, is "actively killing the planet".
And if you want to be Spartan about it, a significant portion of economic activity is unnecessary, so your criticism is equally applicable to a major share of everything humans do.
In reality people need more than the basic necessities, and will pursue more than them. You're not offering a reasonable way forward with your over-critical analysis that singles out tourism as a harmful activity because of a particular set of properties that it has, that are shared by numerous other activities.
There's a reason they've been "romanticised for centuries", even when there was not a "lure tourists" motive: they are beautiful.
(Not that 90% of the modern tourists could appreciate beauty in anything else than a superficial way, as something to photograph semi-bored to post to their social account, when what they really want is a burger and some shopping -- but I digress).
Those other places, not so much. So, this "load balancing" can't work very well.
Are you arguing those other, less known places are not beautiful? I can't agree with that.
There are perfectly valid reasons why Florence and Venice are tourist bottlenecks: they are well known because they are historically important cities, featured in famous works of arts -- paintings, literature, etc -- all over the world. So of course I want to see Venice and cities like it: they have well deserved fame. But they are not the only or even the most beautiful cities, they are just the most well known (again, for valid reasons).
The same reasoning can be applied to many "tourist bottlenecks": of course it's reasonable to want to see the Mona Lisa or visit the Eiffel Tower: they are world famous! You learned about them in school! But are they the best or the most beautiful? Nope.
(For the record: I thought Venice was ugly. YMMV)
Well, yes. Milan or Napoli or Brindisi or whatever, is no Florence or Venice or Rome. And there are nice cities like Verona that are nonetheless not in the league of the latter.
You can find nice landscapes all around Italy, but if you want to visit cities, some are naturally more beautiful than others.
Like how Santa Fe is nicer looking than Oklahoma City.
>But they are not the only or even the most beautiful cities, they are just the most well known (again, for valid reasons).
Well, they are the most well known for their beauty. Part of it is totally objective reasons: they were huge wealthy patrons of the arts (Florence) and capitals of naval empires (Venice), so they have more major works (architectural, etc) built than others.
Nearby Venice there's so much interesting stuff and small cities, a bit further are big cities. None of them really struggles with tourists as much as Venice. Maybe you'll see a huge line for Firenze Duomo but that's it, streets and other sights are practically lineless.
Why Florence struggles with Duomo and Venice struggles in general? Because they're famous all over the world for things they're struggle with. Everyone know about floating city of Venice, and Florence's Cathedral. Those things are being romanticised for centuries.
All Italy has to do is start load balancing tourists. Advertise other sights in the area, build easier public commute to other stuff. They have means to do so, they have tourism ad budget, they have 'city_name' cards which grant discounts to different sights.
I've been to Croatia this summer, they are struggling with Dubrovnik too. But most beautiful things are not there. Plitvice is like heaven and past 2pm I was walking there practically alone, Split's old city is as beautiful as Dubronik's and except 12-2pm is not crowded, beaches in Makarska and on Hvar are way more scenic and comfortable than Italy's and there's no crowds.
Go other places or rot in queues of over advertised sights.