Venice faces a museum tax hike: €35 to visit the Doge's Palace.

In Venice, they've dealt a new blow to the city, its image, and its social fabric: a record, indiscriminate, unjustified, and senseless increase in prices for museums in the area managed by the municipal administration. Specifically, starting January 1, 2026, the entrance fee to the Doge's Palace has increased. at 35 euros (the previous year it was 30 euros: + 16,7 percent!) and the new rates apply to all civic museums in the city (the Correr Museum, the National Archaeological Museum and the Monumental Rooms of the Marciana Library). At this point Venice, in its downward slide, has achieved another record: it has the most expensive museums in Italy.

The Civic Museums of Venice are managed by the Civic Museums Foundation of Venice (MUVE), which in turn is controlled by the municipality, which, to explain such an inappropriate and wasteful decision, has, as usual, used the magic word: sustainability. Claiming that it's a "price adjustment" (imagine what would happen if all the shops where you shop made a "price adjustment" of 16,7 percent...) linked to phantom “new exhibition, sustainability and cultural dissemination projects”.

So, we understood that in Venice, after the usual blows For coffee and mineral water (€43 if you want to drink it sitting down at a café in Piazza San Marco) or for dinner at a "typical local trattoria" (with constant complaints from the foreign press, which even reported a €1.100 bill served at a Venetian osteria, after wine and steak, to the usual pair of Japanese tourists who were being fleeced), now comes the "museum sting" as well. In a period, among other things, in which everyone is trying to tighten their belts and everyone is demanding lower prices prices to combat an unsustainable cost of living.

The justification that "museums are expensive abroad, too" is simply false. Abroad, the cost of museum tickets is generally proportionate to the average income of the working population, and therefore these are misplaced comparisons. as well as not true since museums in the most developed and culturally rich world (from the United Kingdom to France) are often even free.

The truth is that, by conquering the primacy of the most expensive museums in Italy, the municipal administrators of Venice have demonstrated that they are consistent with the current idea of ​​commodifying the city (as long as it lasts...), with a “robbery tourism”, completely unsustainable, which certainly distances us from cultural spaces rather than bringing us closer.

It is no coincidence that the only real criticisms of the 35 euro ticket to visit the Doge's Palace in Venice have come from the most authoritative and informed sites in the art world, such as Artribune, which explicitly speaks of "a blow", thanks to which "entering a museum is increasingly expensive." And visitors are increasingly reduced to lemons to be squeezed, like tourists.