Last week the mayor of Venice came up with a new way to help pay for keeping his city clean and provide essential services: "Let's charge visitors admission!" Not much, just a thousand lire per person, he says, something the "average tourist won't even notice." After all, they're all swimming in cash. Otherwise they wouldn't be traveling. Within the space of a week Lipari chimed in with a similar proposal, and now the Mayor of Florence thinks it's a great idea too. Only rather than do it directly, he wants the city's museums to slip a surcharge into the admission prices, because this way he'll get the day-trippers too. You scrimp and save to come over here and get saddled with what's essentially a garbage tax, or several if you visit several city-run museums. And then get hit by more of the same when you move on to Venice.

This stinks. While one could make a case for charging an admission to Lipari, since it's a small island and has to clean up after several million visitors every year, Florence (and Venice) are already among the most expensive places to visit in the peninsula. Restaurants are expensive, coffee's expensive, museum (and church) admissions are expensive, and even going to the bathroom is expensive in Venice, where it costs visitors a thousand lire per shot to use the public facilities (according to today's lunchtime TV news, which also said that residents pay considerably less, and get discounts on museum admissions and other things). While it's true that tourists add wear and tear to a city's infrastructures, they're also a tremendous bonus for local coffers -- they do after all come and spend money. I sincerely doubt Florence's Via Tornabuoni would have all the major fashion designers and jewelers (Valentino, Armani, Prada, Tiffany's, Versace, Gucci, etc.) if the city didn't get several million visitors per year, and I expect half the elegant cafes would close if tourists went elsewhere; the same is likely true for Venice. Certainly some of the taxes already being collected from the cities' primarily tourism-driven economies can be funneled back into cleaning up after visitors and providing them with services.

This is all the more vexing since the mayors could easily solve the litter problem by telling the municipal police to enforce the laws already on the books. There will be howls over the fines to begin with, especially from the locals, but the cities will become very clean very fast. Much cleaner than they will if the tourists are dunned. And those of us who live here won't have to worry about the trickle-down effect -- I don't want to have to pay admission the next time I stop in some backwoods hamlet.

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