Addressing long-standing concerns that large cruise ships in Venice’s lagoon are both environmentally damaging and unsightly, the Italian government has announced plans to create a new docking port outside the protected waters of the lagoon.

Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said the decree addresses longstanding UNESCO concerns and establishes that cargo and cruise ships bigger than 40,000 tons must dock outside the lagoon.

While it’s not articulated in the decree, the temporary plan would have big ships use the Marghera Port on the Italian mainland until a definitive solution is found and implemented – a potentially years-long process.

“Whoever has been to Venice in recent years, either an Italian or foreigner, has been upset seeing these ships – hundreds of metres long and high as a condo – pass by such fragile places as the Giudecca Canal or in front of St. Mark’s Square,” Franceschini said.

He called the decree a “very important” way to come up with a definitive new solution.

Critics, however, say the measure isn’t enough, stating that the Marghera Port is still part of the Venetian lagoon and therefore must be rejected even as a temporary solution.

The new route envisaged would take ships past the tail of the Lido and then hug the Italian mainland via the Oil Canal, away from Venice’s historic centre but still into the lagoon and up to Marghera.

The issue has simmered in Venice for years. The fragile Italian canal city depends on tourism, even though the coronavirus pandemic has dealt a blow to that industry in the last year. But opponents of cruise ship tourism say the ships are out-of-scale for Venice, cause pollution, threaten the lagoon’s ecosystem, and are a danger. To back up their claims, they cite the 2019 crash of a cruise ship on Venice’s main Giudecca Canal that injured five people.