Tourism, the destroyer of hope

'If you live on a Greek island now, there are no opportunities for your children. Their lives will be spent serving foreigners'

Even from the distance of 12 yards, it was an unmistakable noise; the hissing fury of the English art-lover, raised to a pitch of whispering rage. "No, no, no - I will not move out of the way, I am LOOKING AT THE ART and I have no intention of moving so that you can take a picture of your FAT-ARSED WIFE in front of Michelangelo, so why don't you just BUGGER OFF back to Disneyland or Iowa or wherever the HELL you come from..."

Even from the distance of 12 yards, it was an unmistakable noise; the hissing fury of the English art-lover, raised to a pitch of whispering rage. "No, no, no - I will not move out of the way, I am LOOKING AT THE ART and I have no intention of moving so that you can take a picture of your FAT-ARSED WIFE in front of Michelangelo, so why don't you just BUGGER OFF back to Disneyland or Iowa or wherever the HELL you come from..."

The target had his camera already raised; his substantial wife was grinning cheerfully by what they had been assured was one of the greatest works of art of the whole Italian Renaissance. They were, clearly, baffled. What was wrong with asking some guy to shift out of the way? Why was this guy shouting at them? The Englishman in his Panama hat, satisfied that he had made his point, smiled serenely and continued looking without moving. The hordes, camera in hand, moved away from him uneasily, as from a madman holding a machine-gun.

It was the middle of July. I was going from rural Tuscany to Bologna to see a friend, and, changing trains in Florence, it occurred to me that I hadn't been in the city for nearly 10 years. I had a couple of hours to kill; not enough to see anything properly, but maybe enough to go and say hello to Bronzino's chapel for Eleanor of Toledo, which when I was young I loved more than any work of art, or maybe Michelangelo's sacristy for the Medici.

Of course, you know that Florence is crowded in summer. But I don't think I was prepared for it in the slightest degree. There were queues of two or three hundred to get into the cathedral. The piazzas were absolutely full. There was clearly no possibility at all of getting into the Uffizi before queuing for several hours. And when you got anywhere near anything, it was to the constant buffeting of tour groups, to the sound of guides "explaining" the work of art, the blinding of flash photography. It was in the New Sacristy, before Michelangelo's solemn and awful figures of Dusk and Dawn, Night and Day, that I saw one Englishman give way. And by then, I didn't blame him.

Tourism has undergone an explosion in the last few years, and it has expanded so rapidly and so overwhelmingly that we have hardly had time to consider whether we think it desirable or helpful. We like to think that it's a good thing. It brings income to the local economy; it benefits the tourist by exposing him to different cultures and, often, great works of art.

On a small scale, that is of course true. Tourism is certainly a valued part of an economy, a useful supplement to the life of a city or a region. But when it expands beyond a certain point, it starts to kill a city. There are Italian cities now that are all but dead: Florence, Venice and even Rome, for months at a time, are as dead as San Gimignano, as dead as Bath, killed by the sheer weight of tourism. No one would live there if they had any choice. It's impossible to walk down the street; impossible to find a dry-cleaner, a supermarket, a greengrocer, an ordinary department store. Tourists don't need it, so it doesn't exist.

And the quality of what does exist rapidly declines. Restaurants often just don't make the effort, and why should they? They can make an extremely good living out of people who are in the city for one day, and will never come back; they don't need to cultivate a regular, loyal circle of customers.

That makes them sound cynical, and sometimes they are. But if they start with the best intentions, genuinely wanting to cook as well as they can, even if it is only for tourists, you can easily see how their intentions can get worn down. Cooking for Americans who ask for cheese on their pasta con le sarde; for Germans who ask for cappuccino after dinner.

You can see the cooks, sardonically watching the punters putting ketchup on chateaubriand, and making the quiet resolution not to bother so much next time. And 10 years later, you visit that excellent little trattoria in the Via del Babuino and the menu has been carefully translated into three different languages, and the polpettone tastes of soap.

But the economics of it - surely, it doesn't do to be too snobbish about the sort of people who come? After all, they bring in money, don't they? Well, yes, but there is something peculiarly volatile about tourist money. If people can't be bothered to learn one single word of the language of their destination, what possible investment do they really have in a place? Tourist money can evaporate overnight. Egypt, which is highly dependent on tourism, found this when its industry came to a standstill in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, and the economy came under near-catastrophic strain.

And the places which rake in cash from tourism have to recognise that they are at the random whim of fashion. Everyone goes to Florence, because at this point in history, we have been taught to believe that the Florentine Renaissance represents a high point in culture. If and when tastes change - and they will - the locusts will move on, quite happily.

Those Americans in the Medici chapel couldn't have told you why they were looking at Michelangelo; if they had been told often enough that Piazzetta was the Greatest Artist Who Ever Lived, then you can bet they'd be photographing each other in front of him instead. At the moment, if you go on from Florence to Bologna, you can have the sublime Guido Reni paintings in the Pinacoteca there all to yourself; in 50 years' time, that may not be, and Florence may be as empty as the museums our grandfathers flocked to now are.

These things can change, literally, overnight, for no explicable reason. And when they change, it is always clear that tourism has stood in the way of the development of a sustainable economy. The tourist industry has taken over great swathes of the Mediterranean. Florence, Venice, the Aegean islands might very well have developed new industries, new expertise. Why didn't Ios turn itself into a sort of Silicon Island? How did Venice lose its ancient canny expertise, and never acquire new skills?

Well, the tourism industry expands and expands, and edges out any kind of proper industry, any kind of innovation. Because tourists want to see what has always been there, and nothing must be allowed to put them off. Tourists often complain, in rural Greece, that proper roads have been laid where 10 years ago there were mule tracks, not considering how people are expected to get about in January. In effect, they want Disneyland, not a working city.

But the most damaging thing that tourism does to a place is that it destroys any kind of hope. At first, when money started flooding into the Aegean hot-spots, say, it must have seemed the answer to their prayers. But if you live on a Greek island now, there are really no opportunities in front of your children. If they want to stay where they were born, then their lives will almost certainly be spent in serving foreigners. If that does not appeal, then they will be obliged to leave their homes.

A place without proper economic diversity is a place without dignity. There is nothing to be done about it, except to make plans for the blessed, terrible day when the plague moves on elsewhere; to understand why the waiter in a Roman trattoria is a little surly when you order your meal in English; or perhaps, quite simply, to stop going there. That, all in all, might be the best solution.

hensherp@dircon.co.uk