No, no, ira, not TV! This is 2006! They need an interactive website, that would allow you to "move around" in the city and play games and learn fun facts about what you are seeing!

Ira: good idea. That will save on rubber boots!

There are quite a few places around the world that could do with some combination of regulation and communal revenue-raising from tourists to avoid being swamped and to maintain whatever it is that justifies the interest in the first place. Maybe they could experiment with auctioning off timed admission tickets for places like Venice or Carcassonne.

But who knows, we might not be so far from rationing "carbon miles" anyway.

Our tour from Croatia last month ended in Venice. We arrived by bus which delivered us to the water taxi stop. Just before we arrived in Venice the bus had to stop at a new-looking "toll booth" and pay an entrance fee for each passenger. So the tourist tax is already there!!

BTW, we stayed at one of those new Boutique hotels which was quite wonderful. It was called Dei Dogi and is located on the outer most canal. Had a big garden in back of the hotel. Also we took a water taxi from this hotel to the airport. Never did that before--take a boat to the airport.

The economist might have raised the ire of this or that Italian newspaper but he or she only spoke the truth. The very things that make Venice unusual also make it impractical and expensive for the average person to live there. Venetians - or rather, former Venetians - have voted with their feet.

Ecclesiastes got it right - there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to gather stones together, and a time to cast them away

There was a time for Venice, once. Enjoy the sad beauty of its passing, for it is now the season of its death.

:'(

Margo just confirmed what I had thought I read a couple of years ago about charging an "entrance fee" when coming to the city by tour bus. I don't know if this is the case for cruisers.

I'm glad we've seen this truly unique city and hope we may return before either its or our demise!

"Venice, and how to "save" it, is a VENETIAN matter, for the Veneto region, and the Italian Govt. to solve-NOT meddling British economists with their deliberately provocative, and nonsensical "theories."

If that's so then the people of Italy might stop scrounging subsidies off the rest of Europe (or rather, off Britain, Germany, Sweden and Holland) and pay for the management of their cities themselves. And desist from endlessly begging the rest of Europe to pour yet more money into the Venice in Peril fund.

A charity that was the prime beneficiary of the Intelligence Squared debate (http://tinyurl.com/lkelt) these hyper-sensitive souls are getting up in arms about. Clearly dispassionate debate is something the people of Venice are unfamiliar with.

As it is, most of the money we fork out to keep Italy ticking over gets swallowed up by the country's endemic corruption. Which Italy's long series of criminality-friendly Prime Minsters (Think Andreotti. Think Berlusconi) show no interest in dealing with.

It's characteristic of the country's inability to discuss anything seriously that Italians should dismiss the Intelligence Squared debate as some kind of conspiracy.

The idea that, while the people of Italy were gawping at their national football team's execrable performance against Ghana on June 12, hundreds of us paid good money to discuss Venice <b> because we care about the city </b> is clearly incomprehensible to people with no concept of the word altruism.

And to call John Kay &quot;nonsensical&quot; makes it clear the poster has never read his unfailingly incisive and humane columns or books. Unsurprising, of course, if you're in a country where mass media is concerned mostly with housewives stripping, where bookshops scarcely exist, and where newspapers never discuss anything except the latest round of musical chairs on the Quirinale, football or mafia outrages.

The real problem with Venice isn't the crowds, or the resident flight. It's Italy's inability to do anything that doesn't end up lining some politician's pocket. And its people's preparedness to tolerate the mess they've created.

As you take the vaporetto down the Grand Canal past all the famous casas, take a look at the condition of these houses at water level. Many are in a state that would be condemnable in most cities. I watched workmen restoring one of these casas, and all the work had to be done via barge, including bringing in equipment and supplies, and taking away building debris, and even then they could not get at the major problem which is the rotting and sinking piles on which the houses are built. A week later I saw the same vintage of house being restored at Verona, and the task was obviously much simpler and less expensive. My point is that so many of the buildings in Venice are so badly in need of extremely expensive restoration that I doubt that there is enough money in the world to pay for it. Certainly neither Venice nor Italy could raise the money. Venice MIGHT be there 'in 500 years', and I hope so, but I doubt it. Venice IS sinking, and the seas ARE rising.

One of the pieces of information that we learned while on the tour of Croatia was that the pilings and support logs that the Venetian houses and palaces were built on were logged from the Croatian coast. In fact the forests were darn near stripped to obtain the huge logs that weren't available (at least conveniently) to the new city of Venice. The Venetian Dynasty ruled Croatia for hundreds of years until the Austrians took over maybe 200 years ago. My point is that there are no more old growth large trees left to shore up Venice. I, too, saw much reconstruction of old houses with materials brought in by boat or barge.

It seemed to me that Venice exists now mainly for tourists. When the shops close the owners go to the train station to go home somewhere else.

John Berendt, reporter for The Times, points out that the ocean is no respecter of national boundaries. Rotterdam, New York, London, Tokyo, Miami, Bangladesh, Alexandria, New Orleans, Calcutta, and Shanghai are also low-lying cities. Furthermore, hundreds of millions of people live in these cities (countries in the case of Bangladesh) whereas only 58,000 people live in Venice.

There is a good argument, and one that I support, that after over 30 years of indulgence, it is time we focused on the larger picture. Cities are to live in, they are not just the subjects of romantic sentiment. As it is on my last visit in 2004 I found myself longing to go home with the rest of the workers to spend the night in Mestre. It might be architecturally ugly, but at least it isn't dying.

It makes no more sense to try and transplant people into cities using artificial and inefficient incentives (read: bribes) than it does to try and grow given species of plants in areas of which the environment would not, even on an infrequent basis, naturally sustain such vegetation.

A city that was designed on the basis of a now centuries-outdated military defense strategy has shown itself, along with its government, of being incapable or unwilling to adapt to a changing world. You can't solve this kind of problem with money, in fact I suspect it has made the situation worse, with even such salvage operations as are feasible being postponed while the fool's errand of &quot;save it all, and hang the expense&quot; is run indefinitely.

Death should be accompanied by dignity.

Well, after seeing how much the average visitor spends in Venice, I just had to go home and add up my credit card receipts. In three days, my family of 5 spent in the neighborhood of $1850 (yikes!), so that is $123 per person per day.

Sue,

I don't have any idea where you live, but I'd be surprised if you live someplace where you and your neighbors haven't been given incentives to live there in the form mortgage interest deductions or tax breaks to the developer who built the apartment building where you live. If you live in someplace like New York City or Chicago, there has been no end of incentive-giving in the housing market to revitalize neighborhoods, and if you live in Europe, the array of housing subsidies is even larger.

Most municipal governments in the United States spend the bulk of their time figuring out how to create inncentives and disincentives in their local housing stock to attract more of the kind of stable population they want and shoo away what they don't. Cities and towns throughout history have risen and fallen and risen again. Tourism has actually rescued a lot of places that otherwise would have died of neglect. Tourism has actually created from scratch some now-thriving cities. Tourism has also destroyed some places.

Ideological pronouncements sound lofty, but they don't track the complexity of what happens in the real world. Venice has got some of the most expensive real estate on the planet, so reports of its &quot;dying&quot; are both premature and in need of historical perspective: Venice has overwhelming been a destination for foreign visitors for centuries now.

Global warming is an enormous danger to Venice AND Mestre. That's what people should be most concerned about. One wonders if a conservative newspaper like the Times of London is prepared to admit that, or if it would just rather tsk-tsk about government interfering with the business of letting cities die.

Adeben -ever heard of the MOSE (Moses) project?

The &quot;sinking' of Venice, and the ever-worsening acqua alta is caused, according to scientists and engineers, primarily because of two factors (1) the pumping of water for industrial use in the nearby port city of Marghera, which has caused the historical center of Venice to sink 5 inches and (2) the fact that sea levels have risen 4 inches due to climactic changes-read, global warming. The seas are expected to continue to rise, and Venice is going to continue to experience worsening acqua alta.

In response to this problem (which culminated in the great flooding of 1966, where several thousand Venetians lost their homes) and the outcry of the world to save Venice from the sea, the Italian Govt. decided that yes, Venice WILL be saved, through this project.

MOSE involves setting up 79 mobile barriers at the 3 openings of the lagoon where the tide rushes in, and these barriers will be raised and prevent the highest tides from reaching Venice. This would only be done a few times a year for the worst high tides.

The other complementary projects that go with MOSE-repairing canal walls and raising pavements-this is already being done, several &quot;miles&quot; of paving will eventually be raised.

The project is about a 1/4 of the way through-they are already &quot;lifting&quot; -expected completion date: 2011.

MOSE is not a perfect solution by any means: it doesn't solve the issue of medium level acqua alta, or of soil erosion, and eventually, the barriers will have to be left up permanently, destroying a lot of the lagoon life. This is one solution, it is not the fix-all solution-there isn't one of those.

But in the coming years, while many of the coastal cities of Italy could well be under water- La Serenissima will not be.

So we'll all be moving to Venezia to say dry! Bravo.

Or another possibility is that if people don't come to their senses and doing what it takes to reverse global warming, we'll be modeling our coastal cities on Venezia, with vaporettos up and down Fifth Avenue and gondolas in Miami.

I want dueling orchestras and great coffee on Capitol Hill.

The US Senate recently voted to spend $12,000,000,000 to rebuild New Orleans.

I would much rather see the money go to protecting the art and architecture of Venice.