LOCAL POLICE AGAINST THE ILLEGAL HAWKERS: CONFISCATIONS AND FINES IN THE ST MARK’S AREA

The local lagoon police acted yesterday in St Mark’s Square and its surrounds, as always crowded with numerous illegal hawkers, after many complaints made by the local press and the Associazione Piazza San Marco. The officers, as reported today in an article in the Gazzettino, stopped and identified ten foreign citizens, most of them from Bangladesh. Seven of them were fined 5000 euros each. Other foreigners were identified and fined. Numerous goods were confiscated in the St Mark’s area by the officers: selfie sticks, roses, grain ready to be sold in St Mark’s Square, stress relief balls and various other materials. A signal has thus finally been given by the forces of order against the illegal hawkers, who have become a real scourge in the city, as has been reported in a dossier by the Associazione Piazza San Marco that will soon be presented and sent to the mayor of Venice. In the photo the San Marco Guardians who, as noted in the Associazione Piazza San Marco’s dossier, will no longer be in service in the coming months and so will no longer be able to work to defend the decorum of the ‘most beautiful drawing room in the world’.