The Second-Home Buyers Taking Venice Back From the Tourists
How a new wave of homeownership is helping to revive the city’s residential sector
New Venice resident Tommaso Calabro has a few confessions to make.
At the end of 2023, the 34-year-old art-gallery owner moved into a 14th-century palazzo in Venice’s central San Polo district, but he seldom cooks in his cozy kitchen, restored by a previous owner. And just about the last place he goes is at the top of the list of millions of Venice’s annual visitors—Piazza San Marco, where the traffic of day trippers has all but replaced the square’s once-iconic pigeon flocks.
“I am rarely in San Marco,” says Calabro, who paid $4.38 million in late 2023 for a 5,600-square-foot portion of the palazzo, which he has divided up into a high-ceilinged gallery space and a sprawling upper-floor, two-bedroom apartment. Instead, he says, he prefers Zattere, at the lower edge of the historic center, where the spectacular light reflecting off the wide Giudecca Canal reminds him of classic Venetian paintings. “It’s my favorite part of Venice,” he says of an area that many tourists miss entirely.
Calabro, who currently divides his time between Venice and Milan, where his gallery has another branch, is part of a new wave of second-home buyers reinvigorating historic Venice’s residential sector.
Ordinary daily life in the heart of Venice has taken a major hit over the last several decades. According to statistics from the city of Venice, the historic center’s permanent population has dropped from a post-war high of just under 175,000 in 1951 to just below 50,000 in 2023—the lowest point, by some estimates, since the Middle Ages. Former residents, relocating to less expensive and more convenient homes on the mainland, have been fleeing soaring tourist numbers, high real-estate prices, and mounting threats of periodic flooding, says Jacopo Galli, a professor of architectural design at Università Iuav di Venezia, who is affiliated with the Venice Sustainability Foundation, a public-private initiative researching ways to promote residential growth in the city.
Services that Italians expect in their daily lives, says Galli, such as easy access to ordinary food markets and a variety of specialty shops, are “just no longer present” in parts of the city, he says, citing in particular the area around Piazza San Marco.
Now, longtime Venice watchers are hoping that recent second-home buyers, whose numbers have spiked in the wake of the pandemic, can give their corners of historic Venice a newfound lived-in feeling.
Jane da Mosto moved to Venice from the U.K. in the mid-1990s. She is co-founder and executive director of We Are Here Venice, a local NGO that is trying to protect the city against the economic and environmental onslaughts of mass tourism, and she says the city’s growing numbers of second-home owners “are potentially a really important resource for Venice,” because they are true residents, rather than mere visitors or speculators. Servane Giol, a France-born author who moved to the city 25 years ago, likes to call this conspicuous crop “the new Venetians.”
Venice native Stefano Campostrini is a statistician who has studied demographic trends in and around the historic center. A professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Campostrini says you don’t need to be a full-time resident, let alone a native, to help revive the city’s beleaguered residential situation, which has been harmed by short-term vacation rentals, the proliferation of businesses catering almost exclusively to day tourists, and a high vacancy rate.
Some of the outer areas of the historic city, where more modest worker housing was built, feel almost derelict. Campostrini says that up to 20% of Venetian residential units are likely just sitting empty, with owners either unwilling to renovate or just biding their time while waiting for prices to go even higher. Second-home buyers, though their base may be elsewhere, can help to restore a residential character to certain parts of the city, says Campostrini.
Tommaso Calabro bought his palace complex from the owner of a foundation, who used it for exhibits, and he now makes his home, for at least part of every week, in what was previously a pied-à-terre used intermittently by a foundation officer. “To be Venetian doesn’t mean your family has been here for centuries,” says Campostrini, citing the Venetian Republic’s tradition, nearly unique in Italy, of welcoming resident foreign colonies during its heyday in the 13th and 16th centuries. Over time, these former foreigners became fully incorporated into Venetian life. “You can become Venetian,” he says.
While there are no reliable statistics tracking second-home ownership in Venice, ballooning numbers of second-home sales at local real-estate agencies testify to the trend. Serena Bombassei, owner and managing director of Venice Real Estate/Knight Frank, says that growth in interest from second-home buyers at her agency has increased at a rate of at least 10% annually since 2022. The new arrivals are willing to put up with the exotic hassles of renovating centuries-old homes, often built on wooden piles and accessible only by canal, to fulfill what are typically longstanding dreams of living in the traffic-free city of legendary beauty.
Marty Saggese, executive director of a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization, first visited Venice in 1987, and “it was my favorite place in the world since then.” Now 66, he decided to buy a vacation home here just after the pandemic, and he found an unusual two-bedroom duplex near Zattere, with a massive kitchen custom-built by the previous owner, a professional chef. He paid $626,000 in 2023, and plans to spend an additional $62,000 on a renovation that will replace worn-out wooden floors, expose ceiling beams, and update lighting.
Among his own Venetian-style roadblocks in turning the loft space, likely once a wash house for a nearby palazzo, into a new home: approvals from three separate planning commissions that have postponed closing by well over a year. Saggese’s architect, Venetian native Giovanni Rubin de Cervin Albrizzi, says delays were in part caused by Saggese’s conversion of a previously commercial space into residential use. While waiting to close, Saggese has been renting the unit from the seller.
Saggese’s home is in the district of Dorsoduro, which runs along the bottom of the historic center. At its outer tip, along the Grand Canal, the district has lost many ordinary shops and can resemble a resort more than a city. Deeper into Dorsoduro, there is a residual and even vibrant residential feel, with neighborhood butchers, hardware stores, and fresh produce sold from canal barges—which is Saggese’s favorite way to shop.
Local business owners in the heart of Dorsoduro concur on the uptick of second-home owners. “That side has really picked up since 2021,” says Giuseppe Baldan, owner of Club Delfino, a neighborhood gym, who now counts a growing number of new Venetians working out alongside his native-Venetian regulars.
Local, a one-star Michelin restaurant with a $200 nine-course menu, has begun to notice second-home owners among its recurring clientele. “This is a trend we have definitely noticed since the pandemic,” says owner Benedetta Fullin, adding that “French, English and Americans are the nationalities that we see doing it the most.”
Fortuny is the home-furnishings label based on the island of Giudecca, just across from Zattere. The company’s co-owner and creative director, Mickey Riad, says new second-home owners have helped Fortuny to double Venice-based sales in the last few years.
Venice has six historic districts, or sestieri, and a few in particular are noted for maintaining a strong residential character, including Castello, which extends eastward from San Marco. “It’s still all Venetian here,” says Argentine-American architect Emilio Ambasz, who has used a portion of an 18th-century Castello palazzo as his Venice base since the mid-1980s.
Ambasz has put his four-story, eight-bedroom landmark, totaling nearly 14,000 square feet, on the market, with an asking price of $14.6 million. Venice Sotheby’s International Realty has the listing.
Ambasz says he is considering including the décor in the sale for an additional $8.34 million.
Barbara Da Rin, of Bologna’s Nomisma, an economic-research company that evaluates the real-estate sector, says Venice prices are down somewhat since prepandemic levels. Still, the city is one of Italy’s most expensive, with average premium prices now coming in third, behind Milan and Rome. Real-estate professionals attribute these high prices to investors eager to buy up and convert residential units to short-term vacation rentals, which the Venice city government—unlike those of other major tourist destinations in Europe, such as Amsterdam and Barcelona—has been slow to regulate.
Venice Real Estate/Knight Frank has listed a recently restored duplex, centered on the prime floor, or piano nobile, of a 16th-century palazzo, for $10.23 million. The extravagant two-bedroom, right on the Grand Canal, has a view of the Rialto Bridge—once associated with the city’s local fish market and now a prime spot for selfies.
Even wealthy Venetians are largely priced out of the luxury market in the historic center, says Michelangelo Ravagnan, the agent who sold Calabro his gallery complex. Ravagnan, a native Venetian himself, says Venetians willing to spend more than around $1.5 million are inclined to head to the Lido, the outer island known for its Art Nouveau villas, beaches and car access. He says buyers dedicated to staying in the historic center might opt for a unit in Cannaregio, another sestiere with a residential feel, where his agency has a 2,580-square-foot, three-bedroom triplex listed for $1.2 million.
Staying put in the historic center might come at a price, but it means “living the Venetian life,” says Campostrini.