Declining population coincides with efforts to control tourist numbers.
The population of Venice’s historic centre continues to decline, dropping to below 48,000, according to the latest figures from the Italian lagoon city.
A total of 47,995 people currently live in Venice’s centro storico, according to Venessia.com, an activist group that has tracked the city’s population decline for the last 25 years using municipal data.
The historic centre includes the city’s six sestieri, or historic neighbourhoods, and the island of Giudecca. The other lagoon islands and the mainland are excluded from the count.
Declining population
Since the 1950s, Venice’s main island has lost more than 120,000 resident inhabitants.
In 1975 there were 104,000 residents, plunging to 71,000 in 1995, and 55,000 in 2015, according to figures from the Venice city council’s statistics office.
The numbers have continued to slide over the past decade, albeit at a slower pace, with around 52,000 residents in 2020, falling to 48,489 by the end of last year.
To highlight the declining population, in 2008 Venessia.com installed a counter in the window of a pharmacy near the Rialto Bridge to display the regularly updated number of residents in the city centre.
Factors
Venice councillor for citizen services, Laura Besio, cited by Il Post, has argued that “continuing to tell the world that Venice is dying does this city no service.”
Besio said that Italy’s declining birth rate is a significant factor, something the municipality cannot do much about, and that there are still between 8,000 and 15,000 people living in the city who are not residents.
Other factors driving away residents include spiralling rents and house prices, with Venessia.com noting that “internal migration” within the municipality is emptying the central districts.
Mass tourism
The falling resident population in the centro storico comes amid ongoing efforts by the city to control overtourism in the canal city.
Venice collected €5.4 million in tourist entry fees in 2025 by charging more than 720,000 day-trippers an entry fee on 54 peak days, with a base rate of €5 if booked in advance and €10 for last-minute bookings, almost doubling from the year before.
Photo credit: Irentravel / Shutterstock.com.
