Venice Depopulation: 47,625 Residents, an Activist Counter and No Official Count of Day-Trippers

What the counter in the pharmacy window is

The residents' counter belongs to Venessia.com, an association founded by Matteo Secchi. In the May 2026 municipal election Secchi stood for the council on a civic list backing the centre-left candidate (Il Post, 22 May 2026). Il Post describes the counter as an elaboration of Comune di Venezia data. Open (11 September 2023) and il Nord Est (1 November 2025) name the shop as the Farmacia Morelli. When the display was switched on in 2008, the historic centre had just over 60,000 residents, according to Il Post (18 April 2023).

The counter publishes no method and no archive. What survives are readings quoted in the press. It showed 47,995 on 21 August 2025 (Il Post, 8 September 2025) and 47,813 on 17 October 2025 (il Nord Est, 1 November 2025). Il Post reported a reading of 47,652 in an article published on 22 May 2026, without saying on which day it was taken. Each of these is a fair report of what the display showed. None of them is an official statistic.

The official numbers come from the Comune's statistics office, which now sits inside its electoral and registry service. Its table "Variazione della popolazione residente (2015-2025)" is built from the municipal registry. It gives 55,589 residents in the historic centre for 2015 and 47,625 for 2025. The table names the years and no reference day. It is filed among the council's answers to councillors' questions, and a question dated 3 January 2026 asked for the historic centre's population at 31 December 2025 and its change since 2015. That suggests the 2025 figure is a year-end count. The connection between the two documents is our inference, and the table itself does not confirm it.

Il Post reported a third official figure in between: 48,489 residents at the end of 2024, credited to the Comune's statistics office (8 September 2025). We did not find that number in a Comune document. If the 2025 table is a year-end count, the centre lost 864 residents during 2025. The counter's 47,652, reported in May 2026, then sits 27 people above the Comune's 47,625. A display that runs a few dozen people ahead of or behind the registry is no scandal. It is a reminder that the display and the registry are different things.

The long series and what "historic centre" means

In the Comune's tables, the centro storico is the six sestieri plus Giudecca. The other lagoon islands, including Lido, Pellestrina, Murano and Burano, are counted as the Estuario, and the mainland of Mestre and Marghera as the Terraferma. The three together make up the Comune, about 250,000 people. A figure labelled "Venice" can mean any of these, or the province above them. Much of the coverage of depopulation never says which.

The long series used in most coverage comes from a 2019 report by the citizens' group We Are Here Venice, which credits the Comune's statistics office in parts of the document. It gives 174,808 residents in the historic centre in 1951, 108,426 in 1971, 78,165 in 1991, 58,991 in 2011 and 52,996 at 1 January 2018. The report is secondary and not internally consistent: one table gives 111,550 for 1970 beside 108,426 for 1971, and another gives 53,852 for 2018. We use its ten-year points, labelled as secondary, because we found no Comune document that publishes the full run.

On that basis the historic centre has about 127,000 fewer residents than in 1951, a fall of 72.8% to the Comune's 2025 figure (our arithmetic, mixing the two sources). From 1981, when the series gives 95,222, the fall to 2025 is 50.0%. Il Nord Est's rhetorical question about a city that "loses half its inhabitants in just over forty years" (1 November 2025) gives no data, but holds roughly on these figures. Wanted in Rome's figures of 104,000 for 1975 and 71,000 for 1995 (9 September 2025) fall between the ten-year points and are consistent with them, though we found no Comune source for those two years.

Two official series also exist for the whole Comune, and they have drifted apart. The registry table gives 263,352 for 2015 and 251,295 for 2025. ISTAT's series, read through the Tuttitalia aggregator, gives exactly 263,352 for 2015 too, but 249,490 at 31 December 2024 and a provisional 249,385 at 1 January 2026. ISTAT has adjusted municipal counts using its permanent census since 2018, so its recent figures are about 1,900 below the Comune's registry. Neither is wrong. They measure the population in different ways, and setting a registry figure for one year beside an ISTAT figure for another produces a change that never happened.

Deaths, more than departures, drive the fall

The registry table splits the decade's change into its parts. In the historic centre, 2,797 births against 8,810 deaths gives a natural balance of minus 6,013. Moves to and from places outside the Comune, elsewhere in Italy or abroad, brought 11,830 people in and took 10,667 out, a net gain of 1,163. Moves between zones of the Comune brought 7,978 in and took 11,797 out, a net loss of 3,819. We read "internal" as moves within the municipality because the Comune's internal arrivals and departures are equal, at 50,902 each.

Deaths exceeding births explain about 75% of the net fall (69% of the summed components). The centre gained people, on balance, from outside the city. Its net loss through moving was to the rest of the Comune, and the mainland gained 3,103 people through moves between zones. The parts do not sum exactly. They add to minus 8,669 against a recorded change of minus 7,964, which leaves 705 people unexplained, probably registry corrections the table does not show (our arithmetic and our inference).

The age data fit the same pattern. The average age of historic-centre residents rose in every year of the table, from 49.3 in 2015 to 51.4 in 2025, against 47.5 on the mainland and 48.7 for the whole Comune. A research group at the Iuav university, coordinated by Elena Ostanel, reports that 32% of Venetians are over 65, 8% are under 15 and 65% of households have a single member (il Nord Est, 1 November 2025). The press report gives neither the year nor the area, so we cite it only as reported.

This changes the shape of the tourism argument without settling it. A population this old shrinks even if nobody leaves, unless younger households arrive. Residents' groups argue that tourism bears on that second part, through rents and the conversion of homes into holiday lets; Renzo Scarpa of Venessia.com told Il Post that the outflow of Venetians has never been studied (8 September 2025). None of that appears in a death column, and the registry does not record why people move. Laura Besio, the city's assessora (executive member) for services in the outgoing administration, told Il Post that repeating that Venice is dying does the city no service, and said that between 8,000 and 15,000 people may be living there without being registered (8 September 2025). That range has no published source. It is an official's estimate, and it cuts both ways: unregistered residents are not counted, and neither are registered residents who live elsewhere.

Do tourist beds outnumber residents?

The claim rests on a second display. The Osservatorio CIvicO sulla casa e la residenza (OCIO), a group that has monitored housing in Venice since 2018, installed a beds counter on 17 April 2023 in the Marco Polo bookshop in Campo Santa Margherita. Il Post reported that the counter takes monthly figures from a mapping application on the Comune's website that catalogues accommodation, hotels and short lets alike. At launch it showed 48,596 beds against 49,365 residents, the latter as of 11 April 2023.

The readings reported since then tell a consistent story. In September 2023 the counters showed 49,693 beds and 49,304 residents (Open, 11 September 2023, citing the Guardian). In December 2023 Secchi announced 50,016 beds against 49,211 residents (espansionetv, 18 December 2023). A Ca' Foscari paper gave 49,964 beds against 48,951 residents in July 2024 (DiTe, 3 September 2024). In October 2025 the displays showed 51,679 beds and 47,813 residents (il Nord Est, 1 November 2025). On these readings, beds passed residents in the second half of 2023, and the gap had grown to about 3,900 by October 2025.

Other numbers circulate and do not fit. A VITA magazine article by the Iuav researchers, in its September 2025 issue, gives 60,638 beds and 56,165 residents for September 2023 and attributes them to the same displays. That is nearly 11,000 beds and 6,900 residents above the readings reported that month. A wider area would explain it, but the article does not say, and we do not use those figures.

Is there an official bed count? There is a table, which we could not read. The Comune's Annuario del Turismo for 2023 contains a supply chapter, "L'offerta ricettiva" (pages 85 to 95), with tables on beds by zone and type, including one on the trend in beds for the Comune and its zones. Those tables are not in the PDF's text layer, and this run could not extract them. The Comune's own proposal on tourist lets, dated 16 September 2024, gives a related official count: 8,001 locazioni turistiche across the whole Comune in 2023, 90.42% of non-hotel accommodation, located "almost entirely" in the historic centre. That is a count of units for the whole Comune, and it cannot be turned into beds without a figure for beds per unit that the document does not give.

The verdict is narrow. The claim that tourist beds outnumber residents in the historic centre is supported by two activist counters, one of which draws on a Comune mapping source. It is plausible, and it is unverified against any official bed table we could read. OCIO's figure, reported by Il Post in 2023, that the centre holds 61% of the Comune's tourist beds and 20% of its residents has the same status. The resident half can be checked. The Comune's 47,625 for 2025 is 19.0% of its registry total of 251,295 (our arithmetic).

What the official nights data can check

The 2023 Annuario is the latest edition we found online; a 2024 edition was not located. It records 3,817,295 arrivals and 9,091,691 nights in the historic centre in 2023, with an average stay of 2.38 nights. That is 72.0% of the Comune's 12,628,079 nights. For scale, the centre had 19.0% of the Comune's registry residents in 2025 (a different year; our arithmetic). Hotels accounted for 4,689,819 of the centre's nights and non-hotel accommodation for 4,401,872, or 48.4%. Tourist lets alone accounted for 2,925,240, or 32.2% of the centre's nights (shares our arithmetic).

Those figures allow one rough cross-check on the counters. Spread over 365 days, 9,091,691 nights equal about 24,900 guests sleeping in registered accommodation on an average night. Against roughly 50,000 beds on the OCIO counter, that implies average occupancy of about half, which is plausible for a seasonal city with a winter trough. The calculation sets official nights against activist beds, so it is a test of consistency and nothing more. It does suggest the counter's order of magnitude is not far off.

The missing denominator: day visitors

The Annuario counts overnight guests only, and the word for day visitors, escursionisti, does not appear in its text. The nearest thing to a full count comes from the Comune's Smart Control Room, which estimates presences from TIM mobile-phone data. A three-year analysis is being written up by VSF, the Fondazione Venezia Capitale Mondiale della Sostenibilità, under the title "Analisi dei flussi di presenza a Venezia. Rapporto 2026". We found no published version by 31 October 2026. What exists is an op-ed by the foundation's president, Renato Brunetta, in il Nord Est on 10 July 2026.

Brunetta gives an average daily presence of 223,000 people in historic Venice. At night he counts about 48,000 residents and about 35,000 overnight visitors. Presences peak at 305,000 on the Saturday of the Redentore festival and fall to 131,000 on Christmas Day. The mainland averages 376,000 presences a day and the whole Comune 685,000. He puts the difference between day and night in the historic centre at 134,000.

These are counts of everyone present: residents, commuters, workers, students, day visitors and overnight guests. They cannot be read as tourists. They also do not quite tie together. Taking 48,000 residents and 35,000 overnight visitors from 223,000 leaves 140,000, which is 6,000 more than the stated gap (our arithmetic). With the report unpublished, the difference cannot be resolved. His 35,000 overnight visitors is also well above the 24,900 a night implied by registered nights in 2023. Unregistered stays, a different period or a different definition could each explain that, and nothing published lets a reader tell which.

His headline claim, that a million people use Venice every day, refers to a "functional Venice" of 15 municipalities, for which he gives no method. The op-ed also mentions 43.5 million visitors over three years, with no definition of a visitor. We use neither figure. The result is that no official count of day visitors to the historic centre exists. The mobile-phone estimate is official in origin and unpublished in detail, and the access fee counts only paying day-trippers on fee days. A ratio of tourists to residents that includes day visitors cannot be computed from published data.

Nights per resident on three bases

Overnight stays can be set against residents when scope and year match.

For the whole Comune that works. The 2023 Annuario gives 12,628,079 nights and ISTAT gives 250,290 residents at 31 December 2023. That is 50.5 registered nights per resident, on the same scope and in the same year (our arithmetic). ISTAT's 2024 release gives the municipality about 13.3 million nights, third in Italy after Rome and Milan, with 86.9% of them by foreign guests. Against 249,490 residents that is about 53.3, on rounded nights. The two ratios come from different series (the Annuario includes registered tourist lets; ISTAT's city figure excludes non-business private rentals) and should not be read as a change between years. ISTAT's 2024 city figures do not include non-business private rentals, which ISTAT published for the first time, separately from its headline totals, in this release; the change of basis is explained in our analysis of Italy and Spain's tourism nights.

For the historic centre the ratio can only be approximated. The Annuario gives 9,091,691 nights for 2023, and we found no official resident figure for the centre at the end of 2023. Against the end-2024 figure of 48,489, the ratio is 187.5 nights per resident. Against the counter's December 2023 reading of 49,211 it is 184.7. The first mixes years and the second uses an activist denominator. The two are close enough to say that the historic centre hosts roughly 185 registered nights per resident a year, about 3.7 times the Comune's same-year 2023 ratio, though on a mixed base. Anyone citing that figure should carry the caveat with it.

Il Sole 24 Ore computed a different ratio in March 2024: 13.27 nights booked through short-let platforms per resident in 2022, using Eurostat platform data and about 250,000 residents. That figure comes from a different series and an undefined city boundary. It should not be added to, or compared with, the yearbook figures.

Housing rules and a new mayor

The policy setting changed in 2026. Simone Venturini won the mayoral election in the first round on 24 and 25 May with 51.03% of the vote, against 39.21% for Andrea Martella, the centre-left candidate (LaPresse, final figures; Il Post, 26 May 2026). Venturini had been the outgoing administration's assessore with responsibility for tourism and residence policies. His programme promised an agency for housing, funded with three million euros over three years (Il Post, 22 May 2026). We found no measure on residents or short lets adopted by his administration by 31 October 2026.

The regulation of short lets in the historic centre remains unfinished on the evidence found. The previous administration presented it on 24 October 2024 (Agenzia Dire). Owners letting homes in the Città Antica to tourists for more than 120 days a year would need to register, file a certified notice of activity and meet conditions that include in-person check-in, on a trial basis to 31 December 2026 (proposal 2024/1061 of 16 September 2024). On 25 November 2025 three council committees (IX, V and VII), meeting jointly, were still examining it, alongside a separate proposal for a moratorium on new tourist lets, and examination was adjourned to a later session without a vote. We found no record of final approval. A host guide published by a booking platform describes the scheme as operating, without a date or a deliberation number, and we do not rely on it. Florence took a different route with a cap on new short lets in its UNESCO area, covered in the Florence short-term rental article in this series.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers visiting Venice, Italy, are sharing the historic centre with far more non-residents than residents during the day. On the same mobile-phone estimate, about 223,000 people are present on an average day against about 48,000 residents at night, with presences peaking around the Redentore weekend in July and falling to their lowest on Christmas Day. Evenings are quieter, because most of that daytime crowd leaves. Staying overnight in the centre is the simplest way to see the city with fewer people, and a hotel or apartment on the mainland counts as Venice in the official statistics but not in the historic centre. Fee days for day-trippers are covered in the access fee article linked above. Our Venice travel guide covers where to stay and how to arrive, and our list of things to do in Venice includes the quieter sestieri.

Tourism businesses and investors should treat the counters as indicators and the yearbook as the record. The official record says the historic centre takes 72.0% of the Comune's registered nights, that non-hotel accommodation takes 48.4% of the centre's nights and tourist lets 32.2%, and that the Comune counted 8,001 tourist-let units in 2023. The binding constraint for anyone underwriting short-let supply is regulatory. A rule on lets above 120 days a year has been drafted with a trial running to 31 December 2026, a new mayor took office in May 2026, and we found no final vote. A common error is to treat the OCIO bed count as official supply, or to apply Comune-wide figures to the historic centre. The thresholds that would change the assessment are a council vote on the short-let rules, publication of the 2024 yearbook with readable bed tables, and publication of the VSF presences report with its method.

Journalists and analysts can cite these with their scope: 47,625 historic-centre residents in 2025 and 55,589 in 2015 (Comune registry table, reference day not stated); 48,489 at the end of 2024 (Comune statistics office, as reported by Il Post); a natural balance of minus 6,013 over 2015–2025; 9,091,691 registered nights in the historic centre and 12,628,079 in the Comune in 2023 (Annuario); 50.5 registered nights per resident for the Comune in 2023 (derived, same scope and year). These should not be repeated without qualification: "Venice has fewer than 48,000 residents" without saying it is the historic centre and which source; counter readings presented as official counts; "tourist beds outnumber residents" as an official finding; "a million people use Venice every day"; and the VITA figures of 56,165 residents and 60,638 beds for September 2023. The finding this article adds to the series is the measurement gap seen in the Trevi Fountain ticket analysis and elsewhere: rules, fees and activist counters are public, while the measure that would settle the argument, a count of day visitors, is not. National totals for 2026 are tracked in our Italy tourism record watch.