Making Sense of CH as a Dynamic Entity: Observing Venice Through the Lenses of Its Erratic Heritage

The increasing touristic pressure in Venice makes challenging to enjoy some areas of the city for residents, threatening the gradual loss of their identity. A possible way to combine tourism and Venetian social-cultural life is to accompany people along new and alternative routes where minor “erratic” heritage, representing the history of Venice, can tell the city’s transformations— both in negative and positive ways—related to environmental factors and anthropogenic activities. Within the framework of CREST Project—Cultural Resources for sustainable tourism—and thanks to the collaboration with the volunteers of the “Nucleo Tutela Beni Culturali” of Venice Civil Protection, we accessed a repository of more than 600 erratic assets (sculptures, decorative and architectural elements, religious shrines, etc.) distributed in the sestiere of Cannaregio, and we compared recent and archive photographs to describe their physical transformation upon time and to design walking routes marked by the presence of this legacy. Describing the history of these objects and their physical transformations will help to make known different areas of the city, create a memory, develop an attachment to this heritage, raise awareness, and enhance a willingness to preserve it. In fact, despite the rising number of publications and documents regarding the impact of climate change on cultural heritage and the importance of cultural heritage as tools to communicate information regarding climate change, we are still facing a lack of awareness on the broader society, especially if we consider gradual climate change effects. Adopting our proposed walking tour as a new tourist route, we could make sense of the effects of climate change on cultural heritage integrating it in the narrative on the city.