Venice tourist numbers threatening to ruin the city

By Anthony Dennis
October 22 2016 - 12:15am
Venice is beautiful but fragile with the city sinking, centimetre by fearful centimetre, into its own muddy underbelly. Photo: Juliet Coombe
Venice is beautiful but fragile with the city sinking, centimetre by fearful centimetre, into its own muddy underbelly. Photo: Juliet Coombe

Far removed from the Grand Canal, at times as frenetic as any paved main city street, one of the city's magnificent matrons of Venice is crossing, crab-like, over a small arched bridge over a narrow pea-green canal. Hatted and fur-coated, she is chortling as she goes, waving her walking stick in the air after having noticed us admiring – of all of the sights in Venice – an assortment of washing extended on a line between two flats, several storeys above a classic cobbled laneway. "Ah," the woman says in English. "It's like a fairytale."

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