Venice rebels against cruise ship intrusions

VENICE, Italy — It's a matter of perspective. From aboard a 12-deck cruise liner, the sight of St. Mark's Square, the Doge's Palace and Bridge of Sighs gliding past from a cabin balcony is a breathtaking thrill.

But against the backdrop of Venice's storied canals and Byzantine architecture, these floating condominiums present a jarring sight, out of scale and sync with the surroundings.

The fatal grounding of the Costa Concordia off the Tuscan coast has sharpened the focus on the largely unchecked boom of these ever-larger luxury liners, and nowhere more so than in Venice, a fragile city already struggling against mass tourism and the steady deterioration of its underwater foundations.

There's growing clamor for an urgent rethink to the expanding cruise liner traffic through Venice's historic center. Critics point not only to a threat of accidents, but also air and water pollution, and the injection of an additional 2 million more tourists a year into a city already under constant siege.

The city wants to reroute cruise ships arriving in Venice so they stay farther from St. Mark's and other prominent monuments as a possible step toward keeping them out of the lagoon altogether. And UNESCO, the U.N. culture organization, charges that the liners cause water tides that erode building foundations and pollute waterways.

Venice in the space of 15 years has become one of the world's most important cruise destinations, the port serving as a lucrative turnaround point for 650 cruises a year — up to nine a day in high season. Since 1997, the number of passengers cruising through Venice has risen from 280,000 to 1.8 million last year.

"One third of all cruise ships worldwide come to Venice each year," said Roberto Perocchio, managing director of the Venice passenger terminal, which manages cruise traffic in the lagoon.

He expects the appetite for cruising to continue to grow, citing forecasts that the 5 million annual cruise passengers a year in Europe is expected to double by 2020.

If the cruise ships were modern buildings, which they strongly resemble, they would certainly not be allowed in Venice, a UNESCO heritage site that mandates the view of protected places cannot be permanently altered. But because they move, there is no official sanction against them.

Just a day after the grounding of the Costa Concordia, dozens of protesters demonstrated as an MSC cruise liner sailed across the St. Mark's basin. Grassroots opposition to the luxury liners predates the Costa disaster, but it has taken new impetus.