The street that tech built
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The city of Florence is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. But are new technologies and hyper-tourism changing it forever? Writer Kamin Mohammadi tells the story of how one road - the Via Di San Niccolo - has changed. Kamin lived there when she first moved to the city 16 years ago, and she has seen the changes first-hand.
She speaks to friends who still live on the street, business owners who have experienced the changes, about whether the character of the city has been forever altered.
But Kamin’s story, like many she knows in Florence, is complicated. The book she wrote about the city’s lifestyle encouraged many of her readers to travel there and experience it for themselves. Many others – from bar owners to cookery writers – similarly depend on tourism. She asks all of them what the city can do to retain the character that residents – and tourists – love.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:07.0 | I am Carmen Mahamadhi and I'm here in the Italian city of Florence, one of the world's most popular tourist destinations and my home. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm sitting in the sun outside a cafe in Via de San Niccolo, a small street just outside the city centre. |
| 0:25.3 | I'm here to tell the story of how new technologies and hyper-tourism together have profoundly changed the character of this street over the last 10 years or so, and to find out what we might do about it. |
| 0:40.2 | That's why we've called this episode |
| 0:42.6 | The Street that Tech Built. |
| 0:47.5 | It was like being part of an amazing sculpture. |
| 0:51.0 | People really have this fear of missing out. What changed was that Google Maps sent them that way. |
| 1:00.1 | I've lived in Florence for 16 years now and when I first moved here, this cafe was just across the |
| 1:06.7 | street from my apartment. And it was here that I would sit every morning and I would work |
| 1:12.6 | on my first book and I would watch local life unfold around me. I met all of the street's |
| 1:19.7 | characters and this is where I too started to become a part of the fabric of the street. But now, |
| 1:31.9 | all I can see and what you can hear are literally thousands of tourists. In the morning, like at three o'clock, I used to wake up and walk in the streets, |
| 1:40.9 | and it was like being part of an amazing sculpture. It was amazing. It was such a beautiful thing. |
| 1:47.8 | This is my friend and neighbour Giuseppe. He was born and raised in Florence, |
| 1:52.6 | then went away to university in the States and when he returned, |
| 1:55.8 | he found himself marvelling in new, not just at the city's beauty, |
| 2:01.4 | but at its rather special creative magic. |
| 2:04.9 | For an artist, every shape, every form, |
| 2:08.4 | somehow was talking to you in a total silence. |
| 2:12.4 | That was probably the best Florence that I ever experienced in my life. |
| 2:16.8 | It just was extraordinarily stimulating to the imagination. |
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