The case

Venice, stop open-and-close shops in the historic centre: -83% of closures

First positive effects of the 'anti-paccottiglia' resolution made final in May: monitoring by the Venice City Council shows a fall in closures and over 200 new openings in the protected areas of the historic centre

by Margherita Ceci

31 December 2025

Venezia (BENOIT PAVAN/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Closures of neighbourhood shops are down by 83 per cent: this is the first figure that jumps out at you when you look at the monitoring conducted by the Venice City Council on the effects of Dcc 26/2022, the so-called 'anti-business' resolution that introduced measures to regulate commercial and artisan activities in some areas of the historic centre for the purpose of protecting and enhancing the cultural heritage.

The administration has long been looking for ways to intervene on open-and-close activities and counteract commercial desertification, which is inextricably linked to tourist exploitation. Introduced in the post-Covid with a three-year trial phase, the measure was made definitive in May 2025: the establishment of 'food retail', 'craft/industrial production', and 'food preparation and/or sale' activities is prohibited, unless they are neighbourhood activities such as butcheries, fishmongers, agricultural products, bakeries and so on. Also prohibited are activities that do not involve the presence of staff, such as laundromats or vending machines.

Not only: existing shops are obliged to adapt the aesthetic/visual impact of the merchandise display to the urban context. Among the measures envisaged, for example, is a ban on displaying products outside the shop.

Results

"At the beginning, they told us that no one would come to open in Venice any more,' says the municipal councillor for trade and productive activities, Sebastiano Costalonga, 'but gradually the traders have arrived, many of them very young artisans. We've given a good thrashing to the system of open-and-close shops, which in a tourist country like ours is depopulated, making unfair competition to those who instead work to stay in the area'.

And now, a few years after the measure, the results are coming in: 222 new businesses have opened in this experimental phase, mainly high-end fashion and artistic handicrafts, followed by art objects and bookshops. Moreover, in the entire historic centre, 71% of the new openings took place in protected areas.

The regulatory path

These actions come at the end of a longer path started by the Municipality with the Veneto Region: already in 2018, in fact, the regional council had expressed an initial agreement on the municipal resolution limiting take-away catering in the historic centre, reinforced in 2020 with the limitations introduced in the area of St. Mark's Square and the Rialto Bridge, in 2022 with the "anti-paccottiglia" experiment and finally this year with the final application of the measure.

"It was not easy to come up with such a resolution, because there is no precise rule that allows us to regulate historic centres," the councillor continues. "There is Legislative Decree 222/2016, which allows us to intervene in a very targeted and restricted manner to protect the cultural heritage, but it was only Florence and limited to the Ponte Vecchio, while we needed to intervene in the entire most important area of Venice

Thus came the idea: to identify the streets subject to the greatest flow of tourists, thanks to a mapping of pedestrian flows in the historical city started in 2014 and updated in 2022.This would cover more than three quarters of the new commercial openings. "We intervened where there was business, but remaining within the regulatory perimeter and working in synergy with the Superintendency and the Region to identify the precise areas where the control of commerce should fall," the councillor continued. At that point we realised that it was a viable and sensible path, so much so that we have recently received the attention of other cities such as Milan, Florence, Naples and Rome'.

Synergy between compartments

However, the model is difficult to replicate elsewhere, unless a true synergy is created between the sectors. "It is obvious that in a measure of this kind you clash with different economic interests of many actors... to achieve such a result you need consultation, you need everyone to take a small step back. We worked with the categories, we sat down with them, we revised some steps, because if we hadn't all been united, everything would have been blown up'.

Decisive for the result is the collaboration between categories, institutions but also research bodies. This is the case of the Iuav University of Venice, with which the municipality signed an agreement for a study on the impact of commercial activities in the historic centre. The results of the research were then used as support for the development of regulatory interventions.

Also from Iuav University comes the research project on historical activities. From the precise recognition of the shops and their signs, an interactive database was born , a sort of map that can be consulted by both citizens and tourists, with the intention of promoting bottom-up initiatives for the protection and enhancement of local identity.