@trikko: increases in prices reduce demand, there is no question about it. The data from 2024-25 means nothing: if the visitors kept increasing means they would have increased even more without the fee. The claim "it filters visitors by income rather than reducing them" is nonsense: there isn't a max capacity (the ticket applies only to day tourists anyway) so those who are filtered out are not replaced by anyone else. Besides, the tickets implemented so far were very small so their impact was presumably small too.

Yes Venice is dying anyway, but the biggest issue is that Venice is an impractical city to live in, without any of the infrastructure of modern cities, without any industry or services to work for (except of course the University and the various cultural institutions). I really wonder who are all these people who have a job in Venice but can't find a home because all the apartments are rented out to tourists.