2024-02-16 14:57:18
Calls for urgent action to protect the center of Florence, a UNESCO site, intensified last month after a museum director said “rampant” tourism had turned the city into a “prostitute”. Last summer, the city was visited by around 1.5 million tourists, up 6.6% on the previous year, and more and more independent shops and residential apartments are being converted into fast food restaurants and holiday complexes.
Goldsmith Tommaso Pestelli has been evicted from his historic workshop in Florence to make way for a luxury hotel – another casualty of the mass tourism that critics say is ravaging the Italian city.
“We’ve been open since 1908. If you get rid of us and a lot of others like us, you take away some of the spirit of the city,” said Pestelli, whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather were goldsmiths before him.
Pestelli, 55, was able to find another small workshop nearby, but says many other artisans have not been so lucky.
The average monthly rent for a home jumped 42 percent between 2016 and 2023, and the number of apartments for rent jumped from about 6,000 to nearly 15,000, official data showed. Even in February, lines of tourists snake around the Duomo district and crowd around Michelangelo’s David.
With locals pushed out and traditional shops disappearing, “Florence is becoming an empty box,” says Pestelli.
Elena Bellini, 47, who sells works by local artists, says the decline in long-term residents has blighted neighborhoods and led to more crime, such as attempted burglaries.
“Florence is dying!” – read a sign on the window of a jewelry store, which said that the city had been “sold” to big business.
The capital of Tuscany is not alone. In Venice and other top destinations such as the Cinque Terre in northwestern Italy, locals are also driven out by the astronomical rents, overcrowded areas and endless souvenir shops.
As Venice trials a ticketing system where day visitors will pay an entrance fee in high season, Florence’s centre-left city council has launched a campaign to keep tourists away from the centre.
“People are increasingly looking for ‘experience-based itineraries’, so we need to promote… other places of historical, artistic, natural and gastronomic interest,” said Deputy Mayor Alessia Bettini.
Visitors to the surrounding villages, castles and abbeys rose by 4.5% in January, and the number of tourists taking the Way of the Gods across the Apennines to Bologna rose by 22% last year.
The city council also tried to free up housing for local people and prevent further rent rises by banning new private short-term holiday rentals in the historic centre.
The measure, passed in October, also includes tax breaks for landlords if they revert to regular leases. Despite the ban, around a dozen artisans have been evicted from workshops in a building near the Ponte Vecchio amid plans to turn it into a tourist attraction.
“The Florentine goldsmithing tradition was disintegrating quite quickly,” says Pestelli.
A few streets away, Gabriele Maselli, president of the Association of Historic Enterprises of Florence, is hand-painting a gold frame for a picture, and behind him are rows of brightly colored dishes and powders on the shelves:
“People come to Florence for quality things, made painstakingly by hand. But if one factory is forced to close, it affects the entire production chain. A whole world closes and disappears forever.”