“We want people to come here because they choose Treviso, not because there are too many people in Venice,” the mayor told me as he stood under an antique map of the city.

Of course he wanted more people to visit Treviso, he said, and he took heart in the 500 people who that very day had taken a 15-minute ride on a new shuttle bus from Treviso’s airport, a hub for low-cost airlines that is often used to service Venice. The city is working to eventually make the shuttle bus part of a package that would include access to Treviso’s museums and a train ticket to Venice. The mayor’s goal, he said, was to use cultural offerings to attract tourists to spend two nights in Treviso.

“It’s a choice that we have made,” the mayor said. “To raise the level of the visitor.”

Rating tourists?

Treviso isn’t the only city agonizing about “the level of the visitor.” In the era of TripAdvisor, where every restaurant, hotel room and view is rated, many cities have started rating tourists, too — how long they stay and how much money they spend. A recent study out of Cambridge found that a tourist traveling by coach bus spends just $5.40 a day on their destination city .

But some cities are becoming increasingly sensitive to how much tourists burnish the image they want to project and how much they damage that image, or the physical city and its monuments.

It makes economic, cultural and civic sense. And yet, there’s something that doesn’t feel right about rating a tourist, which also means rating a person. Just because someone arrives on a cruise ship or a Ryanair flight, because he eats a packed sandwich in the square and buys nothing but a plastic Gondola keychain, because he seems — maybe is! — boorish and uncouth, unsophisticated and uninitiated, does that mean he is any less moved by the light splintering across the Grand Canal, that he has any less right to see it? And what about the loud woman wearing an expression of pure joy as she washes down her wurstel pizza with another Spritz? Try and tell her she’s the problem.

In an age of populism, to disapprove of the mass democratization of tourism is to risk elitism. To travel to mobbed places, is to undergo a moral stress test.