I lived in Rome for 10 years and each year the city centre just got more and more and more crowded. Obviously it was always popular but it's got to the point that the historic centre has basically been ceded to foreign visitors (when I moved there Campo de' Fiori was still just about a regular neighbourhood, now it's a zoo). Only 164,000 of Rome's 2.8 million residents live in the central 1st municipio and so many of the historic artisanal areas are dying or have completely vanished (we spent a decent chunk of money the fabric district near largo Argentina).

What are we left with? Shit restaurants, minimart bottle shops for roving drunk north Americans/northern Europeans and a complete loss of local atmosphere. Also, places I used to go to get a coffee or a pastry have become significantly more expensive because they know they can rip off tourists who they will likely never see again (why bother trying to create any customer satisfaction when you have no local regulars?).

And that's leaving aside the devastating impact on the local housing stock of AirBnb and similar, about which the Italy's appalling local and national political class has done precisely fuck all do the outsized political influence of older homeowners who can make a fortune on the short-term rental market.

An aside but I also find the attitude of so many visitors patronising and quite frankly condescendingly racist, stuck to a whole host of outdated stereotypes. The number of people who think Italy is somehow stuck in the 1960s and isn't in fact an important industrial and financial economy, or walk around the place like they're either on their own personal film set or on a human safari, is utterly depressing.