London: Venice has staged its own "funeral" in a bid to highlight the drastic shrinking of its native population -- 60,000 and falling.
Three gondolas escorted a red coffin symbolising the death of "La Serenissima", as the Venetian republic was known in its independent heyday, along the Grand Canal yesterday in a symbolic lament for the once-bustling lagoon city.
The casket was then lifted onto dry land and deposited outside the town hall to mourn the decline of its people, 'The Daily Telegraph' reported.
In the 1950s, there were some 300,000 native Venetians but the latest surveys show the population has dipped beneath the psychologically crucial threshold of 60,000 largely due to a lack of jobs and the crippling cost of living.
Venetians fear that they are becoming an endangered species and that their home will end up a vast open-air museum thronged with tourist day-trippers by day, but a virtual ghost town by night. Sky-high rents and exorbitant property prices, fuelled by wealthy Italians and foreigners seeking a slice of Venetian magic, have fuelled a mass exodus of its inhabitants to nearby towns on the Italian mainland.
"People leave because life is becoming impossible. All the normal shops are turning into stores selling souvenirs like Venetian masks and Murano glass. It's no good for the locals -- you can't eat glass.”
"Over the past seven years, the number of historic buildings turned into bed and breakfasts has gone up by more than 1,000 percent. There's a bed and breakfast on virtually every corner and new hotels open every day," Matteo Secchi, one of the organisers of the "funeral" said.
In fact, Venice has been so consumed by tourism over the last few decades that there is very little other economic activity left, so job opportunities for anyone who does not want to work in a hotel or a tour guide are limited. "We need to find new kinds of business," Secchi said.
Bureau Report