Hello and welcome to the Red Box Politics Podcast and The Times I'm Matt Surely.

What does the future look like? How does life outside the lockdown evolve? Well on today's

episode we're going to speak to a man from the future or at least our future is

actually a man in Venice which is an impossibly glamorous

probably the most glamorous that anyone's ever appeared on the podcast from

Tom Kington Italy correspondent of the Times

welcome to the podcast tell us what you can see right now in Venice.

Well I've just got off the train and so I'm standing outside the station and there's a bit of traffic on the canal, not much.

There's a water bus going past right now. It's I think almost entirely empty and the

piazza here is also very sparsely populated which is pretty incredible because I'm used to getting off the train here and finding

mobs of tourists, groups led by people holding flags in the air, just gangs of Chinese

tourists all with headphones in so they can they can understand where they are.

This is not Rome. This is this is this is this is not Florence. This is Venice. I'm going to plunge into the town in a minute

because I'm going to go and meet Venetians to talk about how they have experienced lockdown.

And I think it's going to be a fairly extraordinary experience because those alleyways, which are usually just a river of people will be empty.

Venice has come out of its lockdown but the tourists haven't come back yet and given that there

are on any normal day as many tourists here as

residents that's that's making all the difference.

Anyone who's ever been to Venice will know just how busy it is, particularly about that bit when you step off the train and just get met by hordes of people.

How are Venetians feeling about this? Because obviously for some time now they've been complaining

about having too many tourists about having you know the big cruise ships and

causing problems and the streets overrun with people are they now having a rethink now they got what they wanted

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