Misurare il turismo a Venezia, 1914-2024

The article explores the last hundred years of history of tourism statistics on the city of Venice. The main tourism-related statistical publications of the last century about the city, produced at local or national level, and the internal communication of provincial and municipal bureaus administering tourism, provide the material on which a retrospective narrative of the evolution of tourism statistics is built. The evolution of the statistical categories and the statistical system itself is analysed in relationship with the development of the tourism industry. The article explores the different configurations of statistical representations of tourism through time, and by being informed by the social studies of quantification, it aims at uncovering the influence that specific historical, political, and economic circumstances have been exerting on tourism quantification processes, or the making of tourism statistics, in and on the city of Venice.