Who will be left? When a city becomes a product

Monica Sharp is dismayed to see how tourism is hollowing out her beloved Florence. 

Years ago Jason and I used to joke about Italian tourist traps. This began in Taormina in 2004, our first trip to Italy together, when we stood at the foot of the funicular that carried people from the parking lot to the city above as though borne on angel’s wings to La Vera Italia, where they would empty their pockets and wallets prior to being returned to the parking lot, penniless and breathless. 

We laughed and called the funicular cars ‘people pods’ because they resembled orange squeezers for humans, designed to extract maximum euros from the touring masses in their short time there. We felt ambivalent watching/being tourists cycled through a city among a population we would never know.

Then we moved to Florence with our young family in 2016. Enrolled the kids in local schools. Found local work. Watched how the restaurant owners cluster outside their establishments on Via Cavour, gesturing at passing tourists with urgency. I see them every day.

Tourists and travelers are by definition a transient population. They arrive, they spend, they leave. Perfect, right? Just drop off your money, people! Between arrival and departure, they ‘interact’ with locals in restaurants, hotels, on streets, in piazzas. Some interactions are positive. Some are negative. But fundamentally, they are rootless. 

The tourist never has to return. The local resident must maintain relationships. 

This absence of stakes, rooted in a structural impossibility of accountability, breeds corrosion. Mistrust grows. Annoyance calcifies. And, at worst, spite sets in.

Florence has welcomed travelers for eight hundred years. (We might argue that it began even earlier, as a retirement village for former Roman centurions, living in their idealized ‘Field of Flowers’.) 

The city built an entire economy on the arrival of travelers, businesspeople and tourists. It functioned as a global marketplace of money and influence and a brand maintained with great care. The Medici understood that the aesthetic of power (the palaces, the artworks, the visible splendor) could be converted directly into currency. They squeezed the people pods for florins even then.

But something shifted with affordable travel and a leisure class insulated from global economic shocks. Tourism here has become total. It has stopped being one economy among others and become the only economy. And when a city is organized entirely around visitors, it stops being a place where people live and becomes a place people just visit, which is to say, it stops being a city at all.

Permit me to make an anthropological digression. What does authenticity look like? Margaret Mead built her ethnographic practice on duration. She believed that authentic culture happens in spaces tourists never access and that the act of being observed changes what’s being observed. (Schroedinger’s citizen, anyone?) 

Walter Benjamin warned of a similar erosion as he saw ‘aura’ drain from cultural objects endlessly reproduced for mass consumption. An authentic Florentine dinner shared among neighbors possesses presence; a ‘traditional pasta course’ performed nightly for forty strangers is simulation. 

Franz Boas, pushing back against evolutionary thinking about culture, insisted that cultures could only be understood on their own terms, from within, never as museum pieces staged for external viewers. We all wear our Kulturbrille, but can we wear the Kulturbrille of others?

What all three anthropologists understood is that authenticity requires stakes. 

People have to live somewhere, and have to answer to each other the next day, and the next and the next, inheriting a relationship that they’ll pass on to the next generation.

Tourism disregards that connection. It creates knowledge without understanding and strips interactions of their relationships. We consume without consequence.

The restaurant owner beckoning tourists on Via Cavour is doing what economic survival demands. But the version of Florence he’s performing bears the same relation to lived Florentine culture that, in the words of Benjamin, a photograph bears to the person it captures: recognizable, reproducible, fundamentally absent.

Empty.

Another point that irks me. Consider the pasta-making class in Florence. A popular tourist attraction, €200 per person for a few hours in a restaurant. Cheap red wine flowing in abundance. Tourists perch on tall stools positioned for optimal viewing through the restaurant windows. (Are they viewing, or being viewed?) Each participant receives a branded apron, a coveted souvenir of the experience, a prop for the photograph they’ll post later. What culture are they accessing?

I’ll go first. I think it’s the aesthetic of accessing culture. They’re buying the image of themselves learning something, the story they’ll tell friends at home, a moment they can point to and say: I participated. The pasta is beside the point.

And look closer at who’s ‘teaching’. In windows throughout the centro, other ‘pasta makers’ stand at stations, often women, often immigrants, performing. They are not Florentine. They are here because Florence offers them an opportunity: visibility, euros, the possibility of staying. Like Maupassant’s Butterball in the short story by the same name (‘Boule de Suif’), they are trapped, complicit, and essential to the machinery that contains them. They facilitate the transaction in which they’re caught, out of both necessity and choice.

The pasta makers teach tourists to roll pasta in Florentine kitchens, where this skill was enacted rather than performed and where it once carried the weight of inheritance and continuity. The kitchens are now tourist hives or short-term rentals. 

These workers function as the interface between the people pods and the hollowed city, a permanent underclass required to maintain the fiction that culture still exists here. 

Neither victims nor villains, the pasta makers are living proof that once a city is commodified, it requires a steady supply of disposable labor to keep the simulation running.

The numbers tell the story. Forty thousand people live within the ZTL, the Zona Traffico Limitato that encompasses the historic center. Forty thousand residents live today in a city that once held two hundred thousand. 

Where did they go? Some left by choice. Most were pushed. Rents climbed. Property values tripled, then quadrupled. Landlords did the math: a tenant paying €800 a month is irrational when a short-term tourist rental can generate thousands every month from tourists rotating through in three-night blocks.

The residents who remain are both complicit and trapped. They benefit from the inflated property values because their apartments (if they own) are worth more than they ever imagined. But they’re also caught. Move where? The city offers conveniences: everything is close, everything is walkable, the compact medieval geography that made Florence human-scaled for five hundred years still exists. But the disadvantages accumulate. The noise at 3 a.m. The impossibility of grocery shopping or purchasing kids’ clothing. The knowledge that every tourist rental represents another resident gone.

After ten years, we count the reasons to stay. We count the reasons to leave. The list is shifting.

We talk about Scandicci, outside the center, where housing is more affordable, where streets are quieter, where people live. It also feels inevitable.

If we’re lucky.

Will Florence become like Machu Picchu, a city in the clouds without residents, hosting busloads of tourists daily who only imagine what it was like when people actually lived here? 

Or will it be the opposite of Gertrude Stein’s famous dismissal of Oakland, that there is ‘no there there’. Perhaps Florence will endure as a place preserved, but there won’t be any people left. Because the only people who will live in the center are those wealthy enough to weather the noise and alienation or desperate enough to teach pasta to strangers for wages that keep them eking out a living just above homelessness.

The city’s future may be one of managed emptiness. Venice without the water, Prague without the musicians, Barcelona without the language. A beautiful shell. A perfect photograph. No one’s home.

We’ve seen it happen in Venice, Barcelona, Amsterdam. Where cities stopped being a place and became a product. 

The product is perfected. The authenticity curated into marketability. But the real thing, the messy, difficult, irreplaceable thing that is an actual community of people with stakes in each other’s lives, is sold and gone.

I’ve been a tourist and a traveler myself. I love to travel. The encounter with the unknown, flirting with disorientation, the necessity of paying attention. But I’ve also watched what my presence does to a place. 

And I think: what if we admitted the problem and designed a different solution? For example, a high-quality virtual reality experience, a genuinely immersive one, could offer the encounter without the extraction. Include scent technology (the Egyptology museum in Turin does this brilliantly, piping in the smell of ancient tombs and fragrances).

Let us walk through Machu Picchu or the streets of Kyoto or the temples of Thailand in full sensory immersion without adding the foot traffic eroding these places into oblivion. I would take that trade. I would rather explore the world thus than add myself to the chaos consuming it. 

Admittedly this may not be realistic; tourism is too profitable, virtual reality too expensive, the desire to be there too deeply wired. But it’s worth naming as an alternative, if only to acknowledge that we know what we’re doing when we board the plane.

We know the cost. We choose the experience anyway.

My son Victor (age fifteen) said he would never accept a VR trip because ‘trying new food is my number one goal in new places’. Fair enough.

As for us, we’ll probably eventually move to Scandicci. Again, if we’re lucky. The people pods will keep being squeezed. The pasta will be rolled. The photographs will be taken. Florence will endure.

But who will be left to call Florence home? 

This article first appeared on Monica’s Substack Sharp Monica. For other stimulating articles by her, click here. This article is re-published in Adamah Media with her permission.