Phase 2 begins

In my last post I insensitively described small-business owners (shops, restaurants, hair salons, etc.) as “howling” to reopen.  If I were in their place, I would be howling too.  And the same anguished cries are being heard throughout Italy — in Florence, Rome, Milan, in hill towns and beach resorts and places you’ve never heard of — as the bills and “Overdue Rent” notices continue to drop through the slot in the locked doors of shuttered stores of every kind.  But the reopening is planned in stages, and belonging to a category whose stage has yet to arrive is heating up everybody’s atmosphere.  More on that in my next.

At the beginning of the quarantine in Venice, when silence fell and motion ceased, a few people wrote to me expressing variations on “You must be enjoying the peace and quiet!”  I know they would never have written that to a widow just returning home from the funeral, but it seemed similarly inappropriate.  I understood that they meant that compared to the chaos and unpleasantness of being overrun by tourists, the opposite extreme ought to be a welcome relief.  It wasn’t, it isn’t, it can’t be.  One extreme is a bad correction of another extreme.  Even on the first day of quarantine I realized that the quiet did not signify peace — au very much contraire.  We have listened for two months to a silence that might have been that of the world underwater when you’re trying to see how long you can hold your breath.

But the non-essential small-business owners and artisans and their colleagues and cohorts and conjunctions have been living in a world of -3,000,000 per cent peace and quiet because they’ve been closed for two months — and in many cases, it will be three.  And many of their businesses depend on tourists, which apparently have gone extinct.

Please note: No more tourists isn’t a problem just for Venice.  This is a European, even global, phenomenon.  A recent report by a group of analysts estimated that in the month of March, the tourist income in Europe shrank 68 per cent relative to that month last year.  ENIT, the Italian national tourist agency, reports that bookings for Italy from April 13 to May 24 are down 84.6 per cent relative to the same period last year.  (For the record, bookings to France are down by 82.9 per cent, and to Spain 80.3 per cent.)  ENIT predicts that tourism to Italy won’t be back to pre-2020 levels till at least 2023.

High season?  Where?

What can there be in Venice but tourism?  This is a question that people have been struggling with since before I came here in 1994, and have continued to struggle with as the monster grew and grew, like Audrey in “The Little Shop of Horrors,” constantly bellowing “Feed me!”  I hope somebody has been spending their stuck-at-home time studying whether anything else can keep Venice going, because this is the moment to step forward.

Happily for us, the world is coming back to life in via Garibaldi and environs; the first signs were a very sunny Sunday and the following two days.  More motorboats in the canals, more people out on the street, suddenly children were everywhere, running around and shrieking — it’s great.  It’s like some safety valve suddenly popped open.

Some stores have been opening very gradually.  There were those that remained closed from the first day, and will have to remain closed till the official permission is granted (see chart below).  Others shortened their hours to opening only in the morning.  The supermarket closed early, and remained shut on Sunday.  I’ll be interested to see if that continues.

Over the past week or ten days, a few businesses (the office-supply/giftwrap/school supply store, the children’s clothes shop) were open all day, but only on Tuesday and Wednesday.  It was an adventure trying to keep track of what you could get, and when, but I was surprised at how quickly one could adapt.  The daily round just took more planning, and more willingness to wait in line.