Venice Bans Overweight American Tourists as City Continues to Sink
The tourism economy of Venice, Italy has taken another blow from restrictions as overweight American tourists have been banned from visiting. Venice, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been sinking at steady rate for decades, until recently when that rate increased dramatically. Between sea level rise and the subsidence of the city, more frequent and higher levels of flooding continue to plague the city causing damage to cultural heritage sites and soggy footwear. The Venetian mayor's report on subsidence of the city shows a higher rate of measured sinking of the city, which coincides with increases in increasingly large American tourists. The mayor, in a press conference, also pointed to cruise ship companies limiting the number of passengers by weight and the obesity rate of Americans at more than 40% of the population. The MOSE Project (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), an expensive engineering marvel consisting of a series of flood barriers around the Venice lagoon to limit flooding events in Venice, has so far failed to achieve its goals, instead reaching new records for both floodwaters and government corruption scandals. UNESCO has warned Venice that it will be removed from the World Heritage list if the city sinks any lower into the lagoon, the Piazza San Marco remains more wet than dry, and most of the fabulous architecture of the city must be visited in scuba gear. The mayor and the city council moved quickly to ban American tourists with a body mass index (BMI) of more than 30, causing concern and outrage among members of the Institution for the Protection and Conservation of Gondolas and Gondoliers which had recently started advertising wider gondolas for larger tourists.