ヴェネチアのみんなの舞台：リアルト•メルカート

The Rialto Market as a Stage for All: A Social Crossing with an Unknown Future

Since the ninth century, the Rialto Mercato in Venice has been the financial, commercial and animated social crossing of the city. This area has long been a remarkable dynamic mix of markets, shops, bars and eateries. It sits within the surrounding vegetable and fish markets, the tribunale law courts, the church of San Giacomo di Rialto, the canal-side landing, and public spaces traversed by locals, sojourners and tourists.

This original spit of high ground at the Grand Canal has retained its coherent and unique significance while evolving over time, space and claimed inhabitation. After a thousand years, there are now signs of big changes brought about by two main factors. First, the ubiquitous onslaught of “extreme tourism” upon Venice has had a particular impact on the Rialto Mercato, one of the city’s prime destinations. Second, the creeping sense of a “slow disaster” has hollowed out the city as the resident population continues to shrink, thereby jeopardizing Rialto Mercato’s future as a vibrant local nexus.

Venice as a dream-like wonder of world cities attracts about 20 million tourists each year, incessantly and en masse. The rich, diverse, seductive and intriguing one thousand year-plus historical phenomena called Venice is overwhelmed by the preponderance of a theme park-like mono-culture. Today in Venice and elsewhere, extreme tourism sweeps across global heritage sites like a plague, with the influx threatening to destroy the venerable sights people come to see in the first place. For a compact, contained, lived-in organism such as Venice, however, the predictable result is suffocation.

This negative impact is particularly evident in the erosion at the Mercato’s ground floor level – the public realm extension of the streets and its squares. The pounding footsteps and sheer number of people weaken infrastructure. The predominant tourist crowd hovers by the souvenir shops at Ruga del Oresi, moving most heavily towards Ponte Rialto and creating stifling bottlenecks. Campo San Giacomo de Rialto is akin to an outdoor free-for-all food court and milling space. But mass tourism does not penetrate every aspect of the Rialto Mercato. As a moving pack, tourists are less likely to spill further toward Canal Grande and the canal-side Erbaria (fruit and vegetable market), or over to Campo della Pescaria (fish market). And as with any typical tidal behavior of tourist groups, their presence is mostly limited to daylight hours, leaving a respite for locals at night.

As had been in the past but is acutely more pronounced for the future, the resiliency of the Rialto Mercato as the city’s commercial and social center is being tested. The urban plight of extreme tourism is not the sole culprit, though. It is accompanied by the other modern endemic symptom of radical demographic shifts emanating across global societies – the trend of an aging population. As younger generations move elsewhere for opportunities beyond tourism, who is left behind to pick up the pieces and maintain the vibrancy of Venice?

We will explore this second theme in more detail later this month and in the coming themes. You can also learn more about the Rialto Mercato in the following:

• Rialto Mercato Venice_ Past / FUTUREs, a study conducted by Shun Kanda and MIT architecture students
• “Extreme tourism in Venice,” a conversation with Shun Kanda
• “Residents fear visitors are destroying their city” (International Business Times)

Experiences and projects in the spirit of the theme Market, with more to come:

• Sojourn through markets, near and far

Share with us your favorite markets, from your local neighborhood to your ideal vacation spot. What is unique about it? How has it changed over time? Submit your experiences through the contact page, Facebook, or with the hashtag #market. We will continue adding ideas as they come in.

Photos by Shun Kanda