‘It’s surreal, nobody’s here:’ Venice becomes a ghost town as coronavirus keeps tourists away

Piazza San Marco looks vast, grey and empty. Normally one of the most visited squares in Italy, today only a handful of tourists saunter in the square home to Venice’s basilica, under the drizzle.

Elsewhere in Venice, the canals are also quiet, with many gondolas kept tied to the docks.

“It’s surreal, there’s nobody around,” says Natalia Spolador, a 56-year-old resident.

She has been a professional tour guide for 35 years, including 15 in Venice, but she says that today she has stayed at home, cooking and “doing nothing”.

“Most of the tours have been cancelled,” she tells The Independent. “Today, this week and most of next week I am unemployed.”

Despite a lockdown in other parts of the country, most of Venice – a city that welcomes about 28 million tourists a year – was open for business on Monday, including bars, restaurants and museums.

But tourists have started to shun the city as northern Italy experiences the most severe outbreak of Coronavirus in Europe.

In just one day, between 29 February and 1 March, the number of contagions jumped by more than 500 people.

The Italian Civil Protection said this now brings the total number of people infected to over 1,500 since the outbreak of the epidemic. Some 83 people have recovered from the virus, while 34 people have died, although authorities say that they have not yet ascertained that coronavirus was the cause of death in every case.

World Health Organisation chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Monday the epidemic in Italy was among the body’s chief concerns, alongside Iran, South Korea and Japan.

The “red zone”, where the outbreak started and where a dozen towns have been put under lockdown, lies south of Milan, some 150 miles west of Venice, and the Metropolitan City of Venice, which includes nearby towns as well as Venice proper, has seen only 42 contagions until today – but the epidemic has scared tourists, prompting a wave of cancellations of visits to the city.

“The Coronavirus has brought the entire region on its knees, not just the ‘red zone’,” Roberto Marcato, the assessor for economic development of the region of Veneto, which comprises Venice, said in a press release.

He called for the government to come to the rescue of the most affected regions of the Italian north. “All of Veneto is an economic red zone,” he said.

Tourism accounts for 13 per cent of the Italian GDP but is a particularly important source of income in Venice, where almost half of the city’s workforce is employed in the retail, tourism and transports sectors, according to some estimates.

But business owners also point to the government’s failure to step in and support industry in this time of dire need.

“What is hitting us is another type of virus, not the coronavirus but the virus of idiocy,” says Arrigo Cipriani of the historic Harry’s Bar Cipriani, which employs about 80 people near Piazza San Marco.

He says he has observed an 80 per cent drop in customers – about 20 or 30 per day compared to the 150 his bar would see every day in the winter – but he blamed politicians and social media for fuelling “moronic” behaviour.

“I hope the government will pass measures not just about the virus but about the economy,” he says.

“We have been open for 86 years. The only other time we had so few customers was during World War Two, when fascist troops seized the premise,” he continues.

Claudio Scarpa, director of the Venetian Hoteliers Association, said the number of hotel rooms currently filled in Venice oscillated between 10 per cent and zero, depending on the hotel.

“But it tends to be closer to zero,” he adds.

Most flights to northern Italy have been cancelled due to a drop in demand.

British Airways announced on Friday that it had cancelled 56 roundtrips from London airports to Italian terminals including Milan, Bergamo and Venice. EasyJet, Wizz Air and Brussels Airlines were among the other airlines who also announced they would cut flights to the region.

With the US advising citizens against travelling to northern Italy, Scarpa says that so far, the only relief might come from the Italian government, which is expected to announce emergency measures at the end of this week.

Natalia Spolador, the tour guide, is also worried about the future.

“I think I can carry on for a couple of weeks, after that it will be a disaster,” she says.

She says that cancellations have started right after the first case of Coronavirus was discovered in Codogno on 19 February, fuelled by the belief that Italy was infecting other European countries.

Her next appointment is scheduled for this weekend, but she expects to receive a request to cancel “any time now”.

“We tour guides are all self-employed, and most of us are women. It’s hard to get by because we have expenses, like everyone else.

“What we can do is prepare for future tours. We invest our time, hoping for the future.”