(Radio France Internationale). At four o’clock in the afternoon, Venice There are a lot of tourists here. Everything seems chaotic. But the police are looking for information from an anonymous building. and advanced Surveillance system returns data. Floor, Nationality, age.

This is a Smart Control Room, an intelligent control room. Infrastructure that will add additional information from this Thursday: data new reservation system and fee 5 euros for visitors who spend only one day in the city. His goal: to stop massification tourists.

“Our goal is to find a different balance between tourism and the people and workers of Venice. It is obvious that tourism is the wealth of Venice. But if there are too many of them and at the same time concentrated, and this happens every day, it creates some problems for the city,” says Marco Venturini, a member of the city’s tourism board.

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“This year we will experiment with it for only 29 days, and if we see that it works, we will use it again for more days in the coming years,” he adds, clarifying that the new rate will apply this year only on non-continuous days until July 14th.

That is why the axis of the project is the Smart Control Room, operating since 2020. The police officers monitoring this system have access to more than 600 cameras and triangulate phones which cover almost the entire city center.

But like many critical citizens, Mario Secchi of the Venice Association is not so concerned confidentiality as if all these measures are ineffective.

“I think they are making mountains out of molehills. All this analysis, all these machines, all this intelligence… what benefit have they brought us? Please, absolutely nothing,” says Secchi.

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Police officer Luka Busolin from the smart control room replies: “This serves monitor tourism inside Venice. “A lot is being done to protect this city, which is very fragile.”

Venice, the city that gets up 40,000 travelers per daycontinues to look for solutions to the problem of mass tourism and knows that other cities are watching closely.