Welcome to Venice!
Or, more appropriately, “Go Home, Venice doesn’t want you here”. They’ve actually run campaigns asking people to stay away. It isn’t working.
Once the home of one of the world’s greatest every trading empires, hardly anyone lives here anymore. There is still a “Venice” that has people in it, but it’s on the mainland nearby.
On a typical day, the old part Venice sees about 55,000 tourists. That’s roughly equal to the number of people who live there. Moreover, most of the tourists are there for the day - they don’t pay for overnight accommodation, which would be a useful source of revenue. As such, residents have to pay a fortune for just about everything they buy there, because everyone overcharges.
And the city, a treasure of Renaissance architecture, is showing its age. Venice was built on thousands of timber piles which sit in very soft soil, and the city sinks further into its lagoon every year. Back in olden times, when a building sank too much, they would demolish it, leave the rubble, and build on top of it. Given that most of the buildings there now have too much importance, that’s no longer an option, but it’s been several hundred years of everything getting closer to the lagoon.
Also, the city has no proper sewage system. They just let it wash out to the Mediterranean with the tide. Having 50,000 visitors a day just adds to the problem.
And to say the tourists are literally destroying the place is putting it mildly. One of the biggest problems is the boats speeding tourists through the city are actually causing structural damage to the buildings from their wakes.