The stunning Italian city of Florence, the capital of the beautiful Tuscany region, is planning to take extreme and wide-reaching new measures to tackle overtourism.
The mayor of Florence, Sara Funaro, has announced a 10-point plan that involves banning specific – and very unpopular – items from the city’s historic centre, which attracts a staggering number of tourists every year, the Mirror reports.
In 2019, for example, Florence registered over 15 million tourist overnight stays, over 20 times its population of 708,000.
That number did take a beating during the pandemic and tourist numbers dropped off, however the number of visitors to the city has bounced back impressively, reports The Irish News.
According the national statistics bureau ISTAT, Italy saw its highest visitor numbers in 2023, with 134 million arrivals and 451 million people staying in hotels or similar registered accommodations.
One of the moves introduced by Funaro involves banning the use of key boxes – which enable owners of Airbnbs and other short term holiday lets to leave keys for their guests so they can check themselves in. The use of loudspeakers by tour guides will also be prohibited.
Frustrated locals recently protested by placing red ‘X’s over the holiday apartment lock boxes, expressing their anger at the way the UNESCO world heritage listed city centre. This includes its 13th-century cathedral and the Galleria dell ‘Accademia, which displays Michelangelo’s “David” sculpture, has been transformed into a hub of short-term holiday rentals.
Angry residents say they can no longer afford to live in the city and that short term holiday lets are also uprooting long-standing businesses.
In an earlier crackdown last year, Florence announced that there would be no more new short-term private rentals in the city centre. The city’s leaders have also pushed for a national cap on the number of days a property can be rented for: a maximum of 120 in total.
In an effort to reduce congestion, Florence will also restrict the use of vehicles like golf carts, used by tour guides to shuttle groups through the narrow streets. These vehicles will now be limited to certain areas where car traffic is already controlled.
It isn’t the only Italian city to introduce restrictions on visitor numbers recently. Last week, the ancient site of Pompeii announced a daily visitor cap, and Venice has introduced plans to impose an entry fee during peak tourist times from 2025.
However, as Florence prepares to host the G7 summit, from November 25-26, Italy’s tourism minister Daniela Santache painted quite a different picture. She said that overall Italy is hardly taking advantage of its tourism potential and needs 50 million extra visitors a year.
“We can grow much more, we can develop much more and the industry of tourism can truly become the leading industry of our nation,” she declared.
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