Well, there is sewage to think about.
Pay the government...they're nuts and I'm sure it's illegal.
Wife and I went there a few years ago, it’s highly overrated, crowded, etc. I wouldn’t go back.
Venice police won’t give me no peace.
Now there’s a city that’s ahead of its time in city planning. It combined it sewage system with its transportation system. Genuis! Just Genuis!
Especially in a place like Venice (physically small location where virtually all travel is by foot), the experience of the tourists who are paying to stay there is diminished by the chaos of the cruisers. By definition they've come for a broader experience and resent the disruption by people who only came so they could brag that they'd once been there. Then they post their dissatisfaction on Trip Advisor and hotel bookings drop 10%.
Not everybody benefits from the cruisers. Business in low-end restaurants and shops selling tourist kitsch booms but it negatively impacts the people who have made the biggest investments: hoteliers and owners of upscale businesses. It limits the job opportunities for young people, so they move elsewhere. Which over time materially changes the culture and the place looses what it was that once attracted people to come there.
Islands are by nature expensive places to live in and with dwindling good-paying jobs, Venice is hemorrhaging residents. Demographers predict that by 2030 there will be ZERO full-time residents remaining. The only inhabitants will be like migrant field hands, coming in to work during the cruise ship season, warehoused 20 to an apartment, then moving to some other location when the season ends.
"Wife and I went there a few years ago, it’s highly overrated, crowded, etc. I wouldn’t go back."
You were unprepared. Venice is like Place du Tertre in Paris or the Roman Colosseum or Tombstone, Arizona. Tourists don't flock there because of what it is, they go there because of what it once was. A trip to Tombstone likely will be meaningless to you if you don't know who Doc Holliday was or what the Gunfight at the OK Corral was about. Similarly, if you look around Venice and don't see the grandeur, the history, the colossus of art that the place once was, you didn't do your homework.
Not my favorite place to visit although it’s been 31 years since I’ve been. Wish more historic cities would do this - the global tourism boom has had some negative consequences and makes sense to charge a fee to maintain historic areas.
Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin & Sammy Davis, Jr. - We Open in Venice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvMU3LkwRA4