Venice admission tax: Should we have to pay to enter Italy's great island city?.

Posted by Frank Barrett, Travel Editor, The Mail On Sunday
Imagine Venice with an admission gate where you are charged almost £30 to enter.
It could be about to happen.
Once again the idea of charging people to visit Venice has reared its head.
Anna Somers Cocks, chair of the London-based charity Venice in Peril, has said that tourists should be forced to buy 'admission' tickets at a cost of €30 each.
She has described the measure as a 'congestion charge' to limit the number of tourists able to visit the city. 'It’s a lot easier to do with motor cars because they have licence plates,' Ms Somers Cocks said.
Venice welcomes around 25 million visitors a year, with the daily total reaching almost 100,000 in the peak season. Over 75 per cent of visitors are day trippers who head for St Mark’s Square and block the main thoroughfares, placing a huge strain on the medieval city’s fragile infrastructure.
The question of charging tourists an entry charge was first raised in 1989 when Venice was flooded with day trippers from the former Eastern Bloc countries who were suddenly able to visit Venice for the first time. The causeway to Venice was chocked with coaches from Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

The situation became critical that summer when Pink Floyd performed a live gig from a pontoon in the lagoon. The weight of visitor numbers and the force of the loud music caused physical harm to Venetian buildings, forcing people to think the unthinkable – it was time to keep people out.
The original plan was to charge coaches for crossing the causeway, but this idea was eventually dropped.
Now, as well as the flood of coaches, Venice also has to cope with giant cruise ships which not only bring several thousands of extra visitors each year, but generate propeller wash , and damage waterfront structures with their comings and goings.
Clearly something needs to be done.
But is an admission charge either sensible or fair?
The anxiety is that places like Venice may become havens for the wealthy – the less well-off will be excluded.
But to some extent, the poor are already being kept out by the high prices involved in making a visit to the city. Buy an ice cream in the tourist heart of the city, and you feel as if you have been mugged.
'Soak the Rich' has been a tried and tested axiom of impoverished governments all over the world.
But if the rich are able successfully to avoid paying income tax, getting out of paying the Venice Levy will probably not cause them much bother either.