Many passengers who are headed to a cruise departing from Venice will have a different experience within four years, now that large cruise ships have been banned from using the city's terminal.
An interagency committee of the Italian government decided that the current voluntary limit on large ships entering the Venetian Lagoon through the Lido inlet and proceeding through central Venice should become a requirement.
The Comitatone, as the panel is known, decided that all cruise ships over 55,000 tons should use a new route to get through the Lagoon and dock in the industrial port of Marghera, just outside Venice proper.
Passengers would take buses, taxis or watercraft into the historic tourist city.
The decision is at least a partial victory for activists who have been protesting for five years about grandi navi (big ships) ruining the ambiance and threatening the foundations of centuries-old Venetian buildings.
But the compromise also represents a win for the cruise industry in its efforts to keep Venice as an important turnaround port for cruises in the Adriatic Sea and much of the eastern Mediterranean.
CLIA said the decision "meets our twin goals of the long-term protection of Venice's heritage and an assured future for the valuable cruise economy of Venice and the Adriatic."
CLIA's statement added: "We are very happy that the authorities have confirmed our long-held belief in the viability of the Vittorio Emanuele channel, which will enable larger ships to avoid the San Marco entry and also the longer-term Marghera solution."
The approved plan will route larger ships through the Malamocco Lagoon inlet south of Venice proper, then through a cut called the "Petroleum Channel" which was built to get oil tankers to the tank farms in Marghera.
The plan allows four years for the new arrangement to be final, including construction of terminal facilities in Marghera, which now has seven commercial terminals. CLIA-member cruise lines have since 2015 been voluntarily observing a ban on ships larger than 96,000 tons sailing to Venice. It isn't clear how those limits would be affected in the interim.
According to Italian media, the Comitatone endorsed the idea of midsize ships using the Vittorio Emanuele channel between Marghera and the Venice Passenger Terminal if an environmental impact assessment finds it is viable.
In 2016, 1.6 million passengers entered or left Venice by cruise ship. Although it is the third-busiest cruise port in the Mediterranean, after Barcelona and Civitavecchia, the port closest to Rome, by one estimate only about a third of those getting on or off a ship in Venice visit the city or stay overnight.
Still, cruise passengers are partly blamed by residents and others for the flood of visitors to the city, which draws about 24 million tourists annually, a majority during the warmer months from April to October.
One idea, to spread the tourist influx among a greater number of destinations in Italy, was recently implemented by Costa Cruises, which announced a program of walking excursions in 10 less-visited Italian villages, all near ports visited by Costa ships.
The tours, planned in partnership with the Associazione de I Borghi piu belli d'Italia (Most Beautiful Italian Towns Association), began this month.
In Venice, the Costa program takes passengers to Arqua Petrarca, a medieval town of less than 2,000 people west of Venice that was once home to the poet Petrarch and is part of a Unesco World Heritage site.
"You can enter the studio where [Petrarch] composed his works and sonnets," said Fiorello Primi, president of the towns association. "And this can only be done in Arqua."
Primi said there's no doubt the program will relieve congestion in tourist destinations that "are already saturated beyond all limits."
Other towns in the program are Seborga and Montemarcello in Liguria, Orvieto in Umbria, Civita di Bagnoregio in Lazio, Locorotondo in Puglia, Atrani in Campania and Castiglione di Sicilia, Montalbano Elicona and Salemi in Sicily.