I found it difficult not to experience mixed feelings this week after news broke that beginning next month, some large cruise ships will be directed away from Venice's Giudecca Canal to the outlying Fusina and Lombardia terminals.
The re-routings are designed to lessen cruise ships' environmental impact on the historic city's fragile infrastructure. They've been discussed for almost a decade but gained new momentum in June when 2,679-passenger MSC Opera stuck a pier at the Venice Passenger Terminal and then rammed Uniworld Boutique River Cruises' River Countess.
I'm sure almost everyone agrees that any reasonable measures that can be employed to preserve Venice's priceless natural environment should be enacted. The city is already prone to crippling floods. At least once in my past visits, I've walked on wooden boards across flooded San Marco Square to reach the bar at Caffe Florian (I made it).
While preservation of the natural environment is paramount, tourism and the proceeds generated from cruise ship traffic are important to the Venetian economy. Formulating a solution, even as cruise ships grow ever-larger, has proven difficult. And despite this week's announcement, it appears authorities are not closer to finding one.
Several Italian political parties and environmental groups want cruise ships out of the Venetian lagoon altogether. Conversely, local authorities, cruise companies, port officials and area businesses support an alternative route to the present-day cruise terminal that they say will preserve tourism jobs and activity while also protecting the environment.
This week's re-routing announcement was made by Danilo Tonelli, Italy's minister of transport, who said his "working group" will explore alternatives that could re-direct some ships to mainland cruise terminals through the end of 2019, although no decision has yet been made.
Yet even Venice's mayor and other politicians have previously criticized Tonelli for not acting on 14 alternatives proposals submitted him to more than one year ago in a review launched by his own political party.
Moreover two years earlier, another Ministry of Transport committee, which included representatives of Venice and other lagoon communities, plus the Port System Authority and the authority overseeing the lagoon itself, agreed on an alternative route.
The proposed would have ships transit another part the Lagoon compared with the present route. The largest vessels would continue to an as-yet undeveloped cruise terminal in an industrial port area, while smaller ships would continue to call at main Stazione Marittima. The project would also involve dredging the Vittoria Emanuele Canal.
"CLIA cruise lines have been actively engaged in discussions for a considerable time about using the Vittoria Emanuele Canal as the preferred alternative solution," said Andy Harmer, UK and Ireland director for the Cruise Lines International Association UK, in a UK trade press report.
Added Harmer, "We are in agreement with the solution developed in 2017 to utilize the Vittorio Emanuele Canal as the best and most prudent means to move larger cruise ships away from the Giudecca."
Clearly, Tonelli and the cruise industry aren't on the same page. But in a way, the Venice situation mirrors those of other A-list historic and environmental tourism sites, from Machu Picchu to Dubrovnik to the Amazon River region.
Maintaining critical tourism activities in these regions will take creativity, cooperation and an enlightened sense among all that only by working together will we solve these complex issues.
I have to say, I'm something less than optimistic.
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