Gondolas and water taxis will never again have to vie with big cruise ships for space in front of Venice’s St Mark’s Square, an Italian governmental committee has decided.

Venetian residents and environmentalists have long voiced concerns about floating pleasure palaces sailing close to the fragile city, dwarfing its Gothic and Byzantine churches.

Under the new rules, which follow a temporary limit imposed three years ago, the largest ships weighing 100,000 tonnes or more will take a less glamorous route to the industrial port of Marghera, far from the Grand Canal.

Almost 99% of the 18,000 Venetians who voted in an unofficial referendum in June supported the ban.

The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, hailed the plan as answering the requirements of residents, the lucrative tourism business, and conservation groups who have raised the alarm about damage to the shallow lagoon and canals.

“We want it to be clear to Unesco [the United Nations cultural agency] and the whole world that we have a solution,” Brugnaro said after the meeting of the governmental committee charged with saving Venice.

“This takes into account all the jobs created by the cruise industry, which we absolutely couldn’t afford to lose, and we can start to work seriously on planning cruises.”

However, the news has failed to appease those who have long campaigned for cruise ships to be banned from the lagoon.

Work needs to be done on the new route, which will open within four years, according to infrastructure and transport minister Graziano Delrio. But many do not believe it is achievable in the timeframe.

“The declaration means nothing,” Tommasso Cacciari, from the No Grandi Navi (No Big Ships) protest group, which organised theJune referendum, told the Guardian.



“They haven’t found a solution, there is no plan – basically, nothing will change. They say the largest ships will go to Marghera – but where will they put them?

“They say all of this will be done within four years, but even projects in Dubai do not get completed in that space of time.”



Cacciari also fears the plan will do little to allay environmental concerns.



“The pollution problem will still be there,” he said.



Ships weighing more than 96,000 tonnes were banned from the Giudecca canal in 2013, while the number of smaller ships using the waterway was limited to five a day, but that legislation was overturned at the end of 2015.

Work on the new route will involve dredging canals, which Marco Gasparinetti, the founder of Veneziamiafuturo (Venice, My Future), an activist group for residents, believes is the only silver lining of the move.



“If you consider the work we need to do to keep Venice afloat, including stretching the canals and restoring buildings, we now have a guarantee that for the next few years we’ll have money for this,” he said.



“When you dredge a canal you also carry out a kind of fitness check of the buildings, so you can intervene before they collapse – this is part of the ordinary maintenance that is crucial for Venice but which has been neglected for years.”

