There seemed to be no end to the sprawl of Italian delicacies. Deep-fried arancine rice balls, cannoli and fluorescent Aperol spritzes spilled across the red-and-green checkered tablecloths of the 31 restaurants packed in a single street in Palermo, feeding a polyglot and ecstatic crowd.
“This stretch here is magnificent, it is — bang! Just restaurant after restaurant,” said Mark Smith, 55, an Australian tourist sipping an Aperol spritz on the street, Via Maqueda.
For Palermo’s mayor, that was one spritz too many. He banned the opening of new eateries on Via Maqueda and surrounding streets this year, conceding that even the holy Italian grail of food had reached its saturation point.
“Too much sugar spoils the coffee,” said the mayor, Roberto Lagalla, occasionally chewing on an unlit cigar during an interview in a palazzo inside the historic center of Palermo, Sicily’s capital. Central Palermo “must not turn into a food village,” he said.
Although Italians are rabid fans of their national cuisine, many now fear it is swamping their city centers, drowning out local stores and everyday life in favor of the tourist trade. In Bologna, Florence, Rome and Turin, streets have been turned into what critics see as endless open-air restaurants serving carbonara in Instagrammable pans as women roll out tagliatelle behind display windows, in zoo-like simulations of Italian grandmothers.
Italians’ concerns are not simply a snub at tourists or an aesthetic quibble, but an issue that officials are taking seriously. The authorities in Florence have also banned the opening of new restaurants on over 50 streets. While food is central to Italy’s identity and economy, some officials and residents worry that too much of it could undermine the very authenticity it celebrates, turning parts of Italy into a caricatured and anachronistic version of itself.
“It’s an amusement park, not a city,” Karen Basile, a social worker and a resident of Palermo, said of Via Maqueda.
Over the past decade, increasing tourism has transformed the historic centers of Italian cities. Some have become livelier and more multicultural. Some have started to hollow out from within. Rome’s center lost over a quarter of its residents in the past 15 years, and populations fell in the centers of both Venice and Florence at much faster rates than elsewhere in those cities. Italian cities increasingly rely on tourism, which represents 13 percent of the country’s economy, and food and wine tourism nearly tripled in the past decade, according to the national tourism agency.
The shift is visible in bed-and-breakfasts nameplates crowding the entryways of residential apartment buildings, and in fleets of minivans, 10-seater golf carts and extra-large suitcases bumping along cobblestones in narrow alleys. And one of the most pervasive urban manifestations of the tourism age is an explosion of limoncello stores, tiramisù bars and ubiquitous bowls of spaghetti that have overwhelmed central streets.
Hundreds of new restaurants have opened in the largest and most visited urban destinations over the past decade, as well as in stops that were once less popular.
Tourism alone is not responsible for the closure of traditional shops or market stalls. Italians often shop at supermarkets, at malls or online. Yet for many food vendors, selling a stereotypical lineup of Italian cuisine to high-spending, easy-to-please crowds descending from cruise ships has proved more profitable than eking out a living from a fruit or fish stand that caters to a dwindling local clientele.
“It’s as if on a street appeared consumers who were blind, with no taste buds and a stomach made of iron,” said Maurizio Carta, Palermo’s official in charge of urban planning. “Businesses took advantage.”
In Palermo, where tourism accounts for nearly 10 percent of the economy, the number of central city restaurants has doubled in the past 10 years, according to Fipe, the Italian federation of food and tourism businesses. After UNESCO recognized Palermo’s Norman and Arab architecture in 2015, visitors began to increase. Last year, over one million arrived, a 50 percent jump from five years earlier.
One day last month, some visitors marveled at the city’s opulent cathedral and opera house or the magnolias in its botanical garden. For others, it was more about the arancine.
“It’s about the food and drink and being with friends,” said Jack McAuley, 71, a retired Air Force air traffic controller from Florida, said at a food market in central Palermo between croquette tastings. “I did not care much about the history.”
Experts say that a global food frenzy has contributed to what they call “foodification,” or food-based gentrification. The Italian government has embraced the culinary obsession, recently submitting a UNESCO heritage bid for its varied and flavorful cuisine.
“Sometimes the Colosseum is an excuse for an American between a cacio e pepe and an amatriciana,” said Roberto Calugi, the director general of Fipe, referring to some of Italy’s most popular pasta dishes.
Instead of blaming the tourists, the Italian anti-pasta agitators say the government has done too little to develop other industries.
According to a recent ranking by The European House-Ambrosetti, an Italian consultancy, Italy lags in innovation, scoring below all major European economies.
“Why don’t we try to get a new Galileo instead of just a bunch of excellent chefs?” asked Salvatore Settis, the former director of Italy’s Normale university college in Pisa.
Ms. Basile, the social worker, was disturbed by the ostentatious glee of Palermo’s happy hour streets while the region continued to struggle with high youth unemployment, low productivity and a brain drain.
“It’s like the last days in Pompeii,” she said. “Before Vesuvius erupted, people ate and sang.”
At the same time, tourism provides a key employment lifeline for many.
At an industry conference in Rome in September, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called tourism an “extraordinary generator of wealth and well-being.” Officials in Palermo said that refurbishments aimed at attracting tourists enhanced an area that was dilapidated and dangerous until the early 2000s, still bearing the scars of World War II bombings and a history of Mafia killings.
The tourist upgrades are “making the city center better than it was before,” said Alessandro Anello, Palermo’s top tourism official.
Valeria Vitrano, a tour guide in Palermo, complained that her go-to vegetable vendor recently converted his stall into a restaurant and that rising rents had pushed her friends out of the city center. Still, she acknowledged that tourism offered her a job.
“I’m in it,” she said. “That’s the struggle.”
On a recent Wednesday, visitors to Palermo strolled past the few vegetable and fish stands left in Palermo’s Capo food market. The market, which used to sell zucchini, peaches, fish and beef to local residents, now mostly offers spiral pasta on a stick, cannoli-shaped marzipan cookies and deep-fried street food to tourists.
One stopped to ask a fruit seller if he would give her a large, round chestnut from his stall as she wielded a selfie stick. Paolo di Carlo, 67, a third-generation fruit seller, said that on some days, he barely cleared 100 euros, or about $117.
“We lost all our customers,” Mr. Di Carlo said. “Now it’s all fast food here.”
Officials in Palermo said the local administration would continue to promote tourism while also seeking to attract corporate conferences and providing high-speed internet for digital nomads. Limiting new restaurant licenses, Mr. Carta said, would also prevent other streets from becoming Aperol spritz monocultures. The drink, as it happens, originated not in Sicily, but in Italy’s north.
The visitors on a recent weeknight did not mind.
“Usually I drink beer,” said Gasper Bervar, 20, a college student from Slovenia, sitting on Via Maqueda with his girlfriend. “But since I am in Sicily, I should take an Aperol spritz.”
Emma Bubola is a Times reporter based in Rome.
Motoko Rich is the Times bureau chief in Rome, where she covers Italy, the Vatican and Greece.
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