On the slab wall of a random building in the narrow alleyways of Venice, someone wrote the sentence in black Sharpie, “Tourists bring litter the fun.” It was one of the first little things I noticed when I wandered the streets, an instant summary of the clash so many cities that rely on tourism face.

When you travel, of course, you have expectations. You’ve seen these cities on TV, in textbooks, and in advertisements everywhere. You get hyped up. You get to see that random place Rick Steves made a random dad joke about. That osteria Anthony Bourdain had some deep connection to.

What happens, though, when a city depends on tourism? What happens when the power a city once had has long since faded, and now you’re left with the remnants portrayed in art galleries or museums?

Traveling through Italy, you start to notice certain similar things. Paintings and statues of Madonna with Child, stalls full of cheap “University of [insert city name]” sweaters, plastic aprons featuring David’s dong, posters of Da Vinci doodles; all in cities where the statues or artists or thinkers don’t originate.

The sad thing about so many places relying on tourism is that they start to appeal only to tourists.

Like the First Visit to Disney

When I stepped off the train in Venice, I immediately recognized the city’s unique beauty. It almost seems like a fantasy, a world built by a great writer like Shakespeare or Dante that surely can’t be real. The first thing that greets you outside of the train station is the famous canals lined with multi-colored buildings, cafes, and restaurants and filled with boat traffic. It was something my American-trained, mini-mall-saturated brain couldn’t wrap my head around.

I continued the day awestruck, taking a boat bus to the Rialto, enjoying getting lost in the mazy alleyways trying to find our hotel. I was traveling with friends from New Orleans, Nick, a high-school friend who works in film and Sam, a musician who was particularly excited about this trip to the home of Vivaldi.

After we checked into our hotel and got settled, Sam had to pop into a phone store, so Nick and I sat down in a cafe in a beautiful piazza, spending an hour drinking rounds of €4 spritzes and munching on courtesy potato chips.These spritzes were garnished with an olive instead of the traditional orange slice, a Venice twist that utterly disgusted me.

Sam had read an article that mentioned Venice’s iconic cicchetti, small plates sampling the restaurant’s specialty, and ombra, cups of wine, all at affordable prices. We found a panini restaurant near the spritz piazza named L’ Bacaro de’ Bischeri to test the waters. We all ordered mini-sandwiches, and noticed ombra on the menu – €2 cups of wine. For a traveler like me who likes the finer things in life and loves them even more when they come for a bargain, this was heaven.

As we ate our sandwiches and drank wine outside the restaurant, we spotted a college-aged group of Italians who were clearly out cicchetti hopping. They stopped by the restaurant and had a few bites of panini and ordered a round of wine. In total, they were there for maybe ten minutes before ordering another round of wines to go and moving on.

Venice is the perfect place to do something like this, I noticed as we walked back to our hotel. There is no car traffic, no red lights or stop signs to wait at, no Lime scooters running you off the sidewalks. The streets are littered with restaurants and bars, the front windows providing a tantalizing gaze of their selection of obmra and cicchetti – shelves lined with small pancetta sandwiches, bruschetta, or fried seafood.

On the way, we noticed a restaurant called Sepa around the corner from the hotel that was full of Italians with a line out the door. We were really excited about the Venetian “tapas” they had.

“I hope this food sucks,” Sam said to Nick with a smile, as we allowed the attractive girl with a cute accent to up-sell us, piling cuttlefish on bread, bruschetta, pate, and other seafood items on a plate. Things took a turn for the weird when she popped the overflowing plastic plate in the microwave, closed the door shut, and set a timer for two minutes.

We reluctantly chewed on the unevenly warm food on the street full of empty plates and cups of half-drunk wine piled next to the restaurant’s overfilled garbage can. The tapas, which were a majority of our meal, weren’t sitting right for any of us, but we gobbled down the fried seafood, which was perfectly salty and still hot from the fryer.

This was the first warning sign, one that I easily brushed off as the wine started hitting and we happily got lost in the narrow alleys of the city. I was still excited by the prospects of ordering such cheap food samples that I didn’t notice the pattern: the unsubstantial portions of white bread and thinly sliced cured meat, pre-fried fish hastily microwaved and handed over.

Venice Through Mosé’s Eyes

This particular group of travelers I found myself a part of were pretty last-minute planners. Nick, Sam and I originally wanted to wander the Doge’s palace and the cathedral, two of the key landmarks in the city, by ourselves, hoping that Rick Steves had an audio Europe guide to tell us some fun facts about the places. But we didn’t plan far enough ahead, and the entry-only tickets were sold out, so we had to purchase

tickets for a tour. The only ones available were the more expensive “skip the line” version. This turned out to be the best decision we made.

The tour met in San Marco Square around 9:30, and we met our guide, Mosé. He had an amazing stereotypical sing-songy Italian voice, full of passion and interest. He told us the way most visitors enter Venice today, through the train station just off the mainland, was not how original Venetians wanted you to be introduced to the city.

A center of commerce and trade with no military or political power like a monarchy, Venice used trade and psychology to show their power. Visitors entered by boat between the statues of St. Theodore and St. Mark and were immediately greeted by the Doge’s palace, cathedral, and huge piazza meant to leave an impression of wealth and power.

In the Doge’s palace, there were several welcoming rooms meant for exactly what their name implies: to make visitors wait. When other powerful people came to visit, usually ambassadors or even royalty, they were asked to pause, first on their boat at the entrance to the city, then in a series of rooms in the Doge’s palace, each one larger and more impressive than the last.

The Venetians were all about power plays. Making these visitors wait gave the Council and the Doge, the leader of Venice, a one-up on their distinguished guests when they finally met. This powerplay is still used today. Ever wait forever in the waiting room for an interview or a new job? This is to throw you off your game, to see if you can “handle the pressure.”

The Venetians knew that they had to create and use every advantage they could. When the original inhabitants settled on the islands, they were simply doing so to avoid the “barbarians” on the mainland. With no natural strategic resources or military might to boast, they had to rely on other means to stay relevant and, importantly, stay safe. For hundreds of years, they did this by offering what many places in Italy couldn’t: resources from the East. They relied on their trade routes and business savvy to keep them safe, and for hundreds of years, it did.

But when they were finally conquered and taken by Napoleon’s forces, Venice had long ago lost its power. Now that countries traded with everyone, Venice no longer had the monopoly on the silk and spice trade. It lost whatever crutch it had over the mainland and the rest of Europe. People didn’t really care if they were conquered.

The first couple of days in Venice, everything I saw was unique and exciting. I went in like a child at Disney World for the first time. There was even a rubber ducky store full of all different types of characters, from gladiators to Donald Trump, that we found quaint and exciting despite the overwhelming corniness. “I’m gunna buy my mom a ducky next time we pass by,” Sam said when we first saw the store. Clearly, the ducky store had understood their audience.

A Day Too Long?

On Monday, our last day in Venice and our final day of the trip, things I started noticing days before began to add up. After our failed attempt to get the gondola ride we paid for because “they were out of boats, come back in 40 minutes,” we looked for some lunch. We walked to a restaurant that had 4.7 stars on Google with over a thousand reviews. When we got there, though, we realized that the menu was copied & pasted from the restaurant we went to the afternoon before.

I’d noticed little things like this a lot in my time in Italy. In Rome, our server would deliver food from a restaurant across the street to our table. In Venice, my friend almost bought a glass Christmas tree from the shop that gave a ten-minute glass blowing demonstration from their very disinterested glass master, only to see an identical piece in another store window.

Venice had always prided itself on its mercantile nature. In the Doge’s palace, Mosé pointed out an inscription in Latin which he said roughly translated to, “as long as we have the money, we have the power.” But today’s commodities are the silk and spice of centuries past, but rather tourism and consumerism. Chain restaurants and stores litter the narrow Venice streets, cheapening the authenticity of the city. Yet without this commerce, could Venice survive?

Parts of the city remind me of parts of New Orleans, my hometown. Once a vitally important port, the Crescent City now relies almost entirely on tourism to survive. And with this dependency comes those who want to cash in on the visitors’ money. Bourbon St. Bars that offer none of the local culture charge $7 a Budweiser (this is highway robbery in New Orleans) while cover bands play atypical tourist music in the background.

A Beautiful Contradiction

My friend Sam was eager to see some Italian classical music, so we headed to San Marco Square on our last evening. Part of the appeal of the square is that there are multiple small bands playing music. You can wander the square and stop to listen to each group as they play.

We went to the square for music every night, but we only heard one Vivaldi song. Everything else was covers of the same American music you can hear on Bourbon Street, “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Stand by Me,” “Help!” Even worse, simply sitting at the tent in St. Marco Square costs €6, and you have to buy a drink. An Aperol Spritz would run you €16). Yet how much of these inflated fees actually go to the musicians?

I freely admit I’m a culture snob. I can’t tell you how furious I get when I’m walking down the tight alleys in Venice listening to crowds of Americans making the same dad jokes that you might overhear at Disney World, Times Square, and Bourbon Street. My point is there has to be a balance. Sixty-thousand people now live in Venice. Most of their livelihoods rely on the money tourists bring into the city, much like my hometown. But when does a city lose its identity by simply trying to survive?

Sam asked our tour guide, Mosé, a great question when our tour was over. He said, “you are so passionate and knowledgeable about this city, and everything you’ve told us has been so fascinating. So my question to you would be, what do you think your role is as a tour guide?”

People like Mosé represent the conundrum of places like Venice. He relies on the income provided by tourists, a job that he clearly loves evidenced by the passion with which he spoke about the politics, paintings, and sculptures we saw in the palace. But was this the future he envisioned when studying history at the National Library Marciana for his Ph.D.?

“That’s a really good question,” he said in his sing-songy Italian accent.

I’m going to paraphrase here, because I was really hungry, and every time Mosé said something about the “past,” it sounded like  “pasta” in his Italian accent, and this was distracting me.

In short, he said that his “role” is as a cultural ambassador. He can accept a position that may be considered “beneath him,” despite his impressive credentials, because he knows passing the history of the city down to people from other cultures is so important. Just as music is so important to the cultural cultivation of New Orleans. People may only be coming into town to “have a good time,” Italians coming for a wild weekend bachelor party, foreigners coming to snap photos for their social media accounts. But even if someone comes to New Orleans to spend time on Bourbon Street or if they want to go to Bra nightclub in Venice, at least these visitors are putting in some form of money, whether that be sales tax or the money they directly spend at certain places, to keep people like Mosé in business.

I have conflicting feelings about the “Disneyfication” of everything, where cities with rich history become theme parks, where we go to observe and wait in long lines to reenact the picture we saw online or experience that thing we read about, not to live. Is this an inevitability that happens to cities that transition to reliance on tourism? Can I accept that “different folks have different strokes” and let these tourist traps be for those who enjoy them? When I hear Americans singing “Don’t Stop Believing” at the top of their lungs in a piazza in Italy, it makes me wonder why these people even leave home.

Despite the negative impression that parts of Venice left on me, people like Mosé, like the woman who was closing her pasta shop but stopped to chat with us about music, or Francesco, the gentleman who bought us wine at our very first stop for food in Venice are what makes Venice genuinely authentic.

And there were special moments, too, like the 30-minute organ recital at the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute. High-quality cicchetti and drinks, at Vero Vino, a wine bar sitting on the canal. Incredible beer and snacks at Bar Venezia.

I want to go back to the city one day. I want to visit smaller islands and stay away from the hubbub. At some of the places we stumbled upon off the beaten path, we had some of the most delicious cicchetti with wine to match. These places exist. They aren’t insanely difficult to find. It just takes more effort, or perhaps less. Less planning and more wandering. More talking to the locals and less clamoring to see the Disney-esque 10-best-top-things-to-do-in-Venice we read about online.