The social enterprise Venezia Autentica thinks so.
what image of Venice do you have when you put it in your mind? Do you want to travel and get to know it just as you imagine it?
Venice is at a turning point in its history , on the one hand, it prepares to charge admission to its visitors, it considers how to manage the problem with the big cruise ships , if you want to keep the title of UNESCO World Heritage , while on the other hand, it finds a possible solution to the already real exodus of the Venetians - around 1,000 leave each year due to rising rents and poor tourism management.
In short, the management in the coming years of the mass tourism (its 53,000 inhabitants receive 30,000 million visitors each year) will be key in its near future.
In this context, a group of young people swim against the tide (or not) to **save Venice**. What is the idea? Venezia Autentica is a social enterprise that connects Venetian shops and companies with a positive and real impact on the city with their potential future visitors.
“We created Venezia Autentica because we saw that the current functioning of the tourism industry is broken. In fact, tourism is not having the positive impact it should have in the places where we live and travel. It harms our local communities and damages the experience of cultural visitors. Furthermore, 70% of the local population has left the city in the last 70 years and visiting the city without adequate information can be a very unpleasant experience ...”, explains its co-founder Valeria Duflot.
Through their platform they make themselves known over 150 local small businesses , from where you can eat traditional food to meet their artisans in their workshops. So that the visitor takes a more real image of the city, from the hand of its artisans, merchants, restaurateurs, hoteliers, etc.
"All the local businesses and associations that you can find on our website are locally owned, they give decent jobs and fair wages to the local community. They comply with the law, they are authentic, of quality and sustainable”, adds Valeria.
Venezia Autencia is online but its headquarters are in the center of the city, specifically in cannaregio , the most residential area of the historic center. And since 2017, the year it was put into operation, it has been growing in followers.
“We also carry out information campaigns continuously to change the image of the city and the impact we have on it, both on our website and on social media. We see that the way people see, talk and write about Venice is changing, and the demand for a better and more meaningful type of tourism is increasing.”