Over the past few weeks, news of scams against visitors to the city have been ricocheting around the European press, with complaints that tourists’ naïveté and limited language skills have led to them being parted from their money in dishonest if not openly illegal ways. Exhibit A: a recent lunch for four British tourists at a place called Trattoria Casanova, near St. Mark’s Square. After the table was piled with dishes the group claims they didn’t order, the bill ended up coming to €525 ($612). This is taking a liberty, but for a tourist town, it’s sadly a case of so far, so normal. The spin in this familiar tale takes place a little higher up: Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro has waded into the bill dispute—and he’s on the restaurant’s side.
When it comes to general tourist manners, he has a point. You can’t arrive in a city without a single word of the local language and expect everything to run smoothly. You can, nonetheless, hope that your lack of language skills do not make you the target of a scam—and that looks like what we’re discussing here. [...]
Firstly, there’s the bad PR for the city. Implying that language non-proficiency makes you a viable target for price gouging in Venice is a bad message for a city that relies almost entirely on tourism—and it’s also offensive to the vast majority of Venetian traders. The group says that the attitude is a symptom of a wider problem.
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