The dramatist Marco Paolini, who is not actually from Venice proper, has a recurring motif in his "Marco Polo" show where he affirms, "Any idea, even the most stupid, can become successful in the name of Venice." This has been, by and large, the historic Venetian attitude towards periodic plans to modernize the historic center of the city; itself moderated by a bizarre division of interests inside the city. The historic center of Venice, such as it is recognizable in the popular imagination, while home to the city authorities, libraries, museums, and universities, only houses twenty thousand of the city's 250,000 residents. This division was already evident in 1967, when the first proposal was made to improve city mobility since the fascist-era renovations widening the railroad bridge. But the discussion in the 1960s never really considered automobile circulation, and instead centered around the construction of a subway! The plan was meant to better integrate the historic city with the mainland, and its sponsors, collected in a sort of public action committee, could count on a high-profile following including local socialites and politicians active in national politics. In the stated mission of the committee, an underground rapid transit system would neutralize the need to introduce automobile circulation; just to reinforce the Venetians' aversion to "denaturing" their city. Indeed, what's important to note is that the narrative of integration with the mainland was always framed in terms of increased economic prosperity. Mobility in the city, for Venetians, was never perceived as a stand-alone problem since most got around fine on their motorboats. In fact, controlled circulation limited to major roadways (as was already implemented in other Italian cities) could probably be introduced in the westernmost third of the city with minimal modification to the existing street grid, however the city's high-arched bridges would necessarily have to be lowered, inconveniencing locals getting around by boat (and in more recent discussions, even with Venice's reduced population, those subsets of residents who don't get around by boat —typically the elderly and university students— have revealed themselves opposed to modernizing the city center too).

But there is a fundamental issue with any and all proposals to change anything in Venice, beyond the conservatism of the city's residents. The city is already dependent on special grants and subsidies from Rome just to maintain existing infrastructure, so implementing any sort of massive mobility plan would require a broad consensus to bring a proposal in front of the national government; something that Venice, with its deep internal divisions, has seldom been able to do. As early as 1956, a special law was passed by parliament offering a combination of grants and loans to Venice, and the city's development plan, specially approved by parliament in 1959, has been subject to continuous changes as various activists and political actors entered and exited the scene: the first changes were approved in 1961, additional funding granted in 1966, a new special law for Venice passed in 1972, and a new regional development plan adopted in 1975, with all a manner of international conservation grants (mainly through UNESCO) and feasibility studies for vehicle circulation occurring in-between (although the most prominent of these studies, published in 1972, only ever proposed a sort of ring-road, never modifying the internal street grid).

The issues surrounding Venice and its proposed modernization largely stem from the fact that the city was already subject to depopulation long before the automobile. In fact, a depopulation like that experienced in Venice's city center has no precedent in Italy. Once the Republic of Venice was amalgamated into Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy, and later handed off to the Austrian Empire's constituent Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, people had fewer and fewer reasons to live in the city: the apparatus of government moved to Milan, other ports were better suited to handle modern passenger and cargo traffic, and local entrepreneurs found increasingly few reasons to visit the city from their estates and manufactures in places like Treviso, Vicenza, and Verona. There were attempts to revitalize the city by connecting it to the mainland via rail, and by 1848 Venice was the eastern terminus of the Verona-Vicenza-Padua railway; however most Venetians of means had already moved elsewhere, and the railroad didn't impact the city's economy much. Once Italy was unified, there were murmurs at the high levels of the new government that something should be done to to stop the city's moribund trajectory: the recently founded Università Ca'Foscari was awarded a "consular" department meant to train the Italian Kingdom's diplomatic corps, and with Venice designated the capital of the surrounding administrative region, an influx of public administrators, and notably railroad workers, stabilized the city's population at just under 150,000 inhabitants. But Venice was never large enough or important enough to warrant the extensive renovation of the street grid as other major Italian cities had been over the course the second half of the 19th century, when major Italian cities broadened prominent boulevards for sanitary and modernization purposes, making the introduction of automobile traffic much easier (I wrote about urban planning in major Italian cities here, and also discussed Venice's population decline after the Republic here).

A second moment of automobile-friendly infrastructure construction occurred in Italy after the second world war. However, it was precisely in this period that the historic city of Venice experienced its most dramatic depopulation, steadily dropping from 150,000 to 50,000 residents over the course of 50 years. Comprehensively though, the city's economy was healthy: just across the lagoon a large port complex, petrochemical refinery, and other industries sprung up. However, while these new industrial developments brought new jobs to an area technically administered as part of the city of Venice, with so many new employment opportunities just across the lagoon the historic center only depopulated even more rapidly, moving transportation reform in the city farther and farther away from the authorities' agenda.