Too Big to Sail? A Plan for Venice’s Cruise-Ship Armada<br />Even as tourist traps depended on the big ships for a new supply of consumers, local residents cursed the sight of them,<br />and the Italian minister of culture and tourism, Dario Franceschini, who participated in the meeting, called them a "problem." The local authorities are hailing the new rules as a feat of compromise.<br />8, 2017<br />ROME — Away from the throngs of disembarked day trippers marching under selfie-stick bayonets along the Grand Canal in Venice, the headquarters of the No Big Ships Committee has long displayed posters<br />and T-shirts depicting giant cruise ships as sharks threatening to devour gondoliers, fishermen and the city itself.<br />A group of local, provincial and national officials approved, after years of debate, a plan to divert large cruise ships weighing<br />more than 96,000 tons farther from St. Mark’s Square, the Grand Canal, the Ducal Palace and other Venetian treasures.<br />San Marco said that They have decided nothing,<br />Tommaso Cacciari, a spokesman for the No Big Ships Committee, called the decision on Tuesday a "fantasy" and expressed doubts<br />that the environmental authorities would allow the expansion of an already existing canal that is crucial to the project.<br />Those vessels, not to mention the larger ones that will be diverted by the new rules, still pose too great a risk for defenders of the city’s cultural heritage and environmentalists, who note the damage<br />that cruise ships cause to the lagoon’s ecosystem and foundation.<br />Instead of cruising down the Giudecca Canal, the large ships will be required to take a more roundabout path, through a nearby canal<br />and up to a passenger port to be built in Marghera, an industrial area of the Venetian mainland.
