Too Big to Sail? A Plan for Venice’s Cruise-Ship Armada
Too Big to Sail? A Plan for Venice’s Cruise-Ship Armada
Even as tourist traps depended on the big ships for a new supply of consumers, local residents cursed the sight of them,
and the Italian minister of culture and tourism, Dario Franceschini, who participated in the meeting, called them a "problem." The local authorities are hailing the new rules as a feat of compromise.
8, 2017
ROME — Away from the throngs of disembarked day trippers marching under selfie-stick bayonets along the Grand Canal in Venice, the headquarters of the No Big Ships Committee has long displayed posters
and T-shirts depicting giant cruise ships as sharks threatening to devour gondoliers, fishermen and the city itself.
A group of local, provincial and national officials approved, after years of debate, a plan to divert large cruise ships weighing
more than 96,000 tons farther from St. Mark’s Square, the Grand Canal, the Ducal Palace and other Venetian treasures.
San Marco said that They have decided nothing,
Tommaso Cacciari, a spokesman for the No Big Ships Committee, called the decision on Tuesday a "fantasy" and expressed doubts
that the environmental authorities would allow the expansion of an already existing canal that is crucial to the project.
Those vessels, not to mention the larger ones that will be diverted by the new rules, still pose too great a risk for defenders of the city’s cultural heritage and environmentalists, who note the damage
that cruise ships cause to the lagoon’s ecosystem and foundation.
Instead of cruising down the Giudecca Canal, the large ships will be required to take a more roundabout path, through a nearby canal
and up to a passenger port to be built in Marghera, an industrial area of the Venetian mainland.
Even as tourist traps depended on the big ships for a new supply of consumers, local residents cursed the sight of them,
and the Italian minister of culture and tourism, Dario Franceschini, who participated in the meeting, called them a "problem." The local authorities are hailing the new rules as a feat of compromise.
8, 2017
ROME — Away from the throngs of disembarked day trippers marching under selfie-stick bayonets along the Grand Canal in Venice, the headquarters of the No Big Ships Committee has long displayed posters
and T-shirts depicting giant cruise ships as sharks threatening to devour gondoliers, fishermen and the city itself.
A group of local, provincial and national officials approved, after years of debate, a plan to divert large cruise ships weighing
more than 96,000 tons farther from St. Mark’s Square, the Grand Canal, the Ducal Palace and other Venetian treasures.
San Marco said that They have decided nothing,
Tommaso Cacciari, a spokesman for the No Big Ships Committee, called the decision on Tuesday a "fantasy" and expressed doubts
that the environmental authorities would allow the expansion of an already existing canal that is crucial to the project.
Those vessels, not to mention the larger ones that will be diverted by the new rules, still pose too great a risk for defenders of the city’s cultural heritage and environmentalists, who note the damage
that cruise ships cause to the lagoon’s ecosystem and foundation.
Instead of cruising down the Giudecca Canal, the large ships will be required to take a more roundabout path, through a nearby canal
and up to a passenger port to be built in Marghera, an industrial area of the Venetian mainland.
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