Venice as a Smart and Sustainable Destination

As one of Europe’s leading cultural tourism destinations, Venice records over 13 million overnight stays and an
estimated 34,5 million visitors annually, generating substantial economic value while intensifying pressures on
space, identity, and perceived quality of life. Frequently portrayed as the global archetype of overtourism and
urban fragility, Venice is often framed through a narrative of excess and decadence. This paper challenges such
a view by reinterpreting Venice as a long-standing laboratory of resilience and innovation, where overtourism is
addressed not merely as a quantitative issue, but as a relational and governance problem shaped by spatial and
temporal concentration and by the coexistence of heterogeneous city users. Drawing on e-tourism and
data-informed approaches, the study integrates official and passive mobile data (PMD) to define the actual city
users: visitors account for less than half of the more than 200.000 daily city users in the historic city, within a
broader civitas shaped by commuters, students, workers and proximity users across a metropolitan system of
fifteen municipalities, redefining the functional boundaries of the destination, highlighting the need to evolve from
tourism success toward smart and sustainable destination governance.