Every moralist with a Wi-Fi connection spent last week clutching their pearls over a video from the Venetian lagoon. A couple decided that a water taxi offered too much privacy, skipped the gondola romance, and opted for a very public, very active exhibition inside a glass cabin while stunned tourists stared through the pane like children at an aquarium exhibit.
The internet did what the internet does. The outrage machine whirred into motion. Pundits wailed about the death of public decency, the desecration of a historic city, and the absolute degradation of modern tourism. For an alternative perspective, consider: this related article.
They are missing the point entirely.
Venice does not have a public indecency crisis. It has an authenticity crisis. Millions of visitors descend upon the sinking city every year wearing matching athleisure, dragging four-wheel spinner suitcases over sixteenth-century bridges, and eating frozen lasagna at tourist traps while complaining that the locals look grumpy. They want a sanitized theme park where the gondoliers sing on cue and nobody actually lives, breathes, or has sex. Similar coverage on the subject has been published by AFAR.
That couple on the water taxi gave Venice more genuine life than ten million cruise ship passengers buying plastic masks made in Shenzhen.
The Hypocrisy of the Sanitized Tourist Trap
Let us look at the mechanics of modern travel outrage. We demand that historic cities become living museums, yet we throw tantrums when actual humans behave like, well, actual humans.
Venice has spent centuries as a playground for hedonism, debauchery, and theatrical excess. Casanova did not build his reputation by quietly whispering sweet nothings in a designated quiet zone. The Carnival of Venice was invented precisely to shatter social norms, mask identities, and let base impulses run wild under the gaze of the Republic. Yet today, tourists expect a quiet, church-like silence across an entire urban center because they paid for a budget airline ticket and a three-star Airbnb.
When a pair of locals or adventurous travelers treats the lagoon like their private bedroom, the pearl-clutchers scream that tourism is out of control. No. Tourism is functioning exactly as it always has. Wealthy and mobile humans have been treating foreign cities as moral free zones since the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century. The only difference now is that everyone carries a pocket-sized high-definition surveillance device and sells their outrage to social media algorithms for digital validation.
If you are visiting a city that survives entirely on mass consumption and spectacle, you forfeit the right to be shocked when spectacles happen right in front of you.
The Economics of Outrage and the Myth of Decency
Let us run the numbers on what actually offends a city like Venice.
Is it two people caught in an intimate moment on a boat? Or is it thirty thousand day-trippers who step off a cruise liner, buy a single bottled water, litter the Rialto bridge, and contribute precisely zero euros to local housing, artisans, or independent grocers while driving real estate prices past the point of human endurance?
The moral panic over public intimacy is a convenient distraction. It lets city administrators point at a viral video and pretend they are fighting a war on bad behavior, while quietly cashing the checks of an over-tourism model that is actively hollowing out the lagoon.
Nobody cares about public decency. They care about aesthetics. They want their vacation photos to look clean, empty, and devoid of messy human realities. They want the romantic backdrop of the Grand Canal without the grit of the people who actually inhabit it.
Imagine a scenario where cities banned bad behavior based on actual societal harm rather than viral optics. Every souvenir shop selling plastic gondolas made in East Asia would be shuttered for crimes against culture. Every floating cruise behemoth that blocks the skyline would be turned away at the mouth of the Adriatic. Every landlord turning residential palazzos into lockbox short-term rentals would face actual municipal exile.
Instead, we focus our collective fury on two consenting adults who forgot that glass is transparent. It is an absurd disproportion of energy.
Stop Sanitizing the World
Travel used to mean encountering the unexpected, the raw, and the uncurated. Now, it means flying across an ocean just to stay in an apartment decorated with grey minimalist furniture from a multinational home goods chain, eating at a restaurant recommended by an algorithm, and taking photos designed to mimic an influencer's ad.
We have turned exploration into a checklist of safe, predictable experiences. When something chaotic and primal punctures that plastic bubble, we panic because it reminds us that the world is still wild, messy, and entirely indifferent to our comfort.
The couple on the boat were exhibitionists, sure. But the real performance art belongs to the millions of tourists pretending that Venice is a pristine outdoor museum built exclusively for their family-friendly Instagram grids.
Stop demanding that ancient cities wear a straitjacket. If you want a sterile environment where nobody offends your delicate sensibilities, stay home and watch a documentary. If you go to Venice, accept that the city belongs to the living, the loud, and the occasionally reckless.
Next time you see someone breaking the rules in a historic city, ask yourself whether you are actually upset about public morality, or if you are just mad that they are having a more memorable trip than you are.
