Venice is stepping up a crusade against dirt, litter and bad manners with a winter campaign of advertising aimed at residents and visitors to the storied lagoon city.
Large bilingual posters at key locations will invite all-comers in Italian and English to Tenere La Citta' Pulita (Keep The City Clean).
The messages, measuring 2 by 1.4 metres, will also be posted on Grand Canal waterbuses, Public Decorum Councillor Augusto Salvadori said Tuesday.
Salvadori, who has rid St Mark's Square and other famous landmarks of monument-defacing pigeons, says he also aims to distribute 66,000 'pooper scoopers' for picking up doggie-do by the end of the month.
On the manners front, waterbus users will be urged to give up their seats for the elderly, pregnant women and other needy persons.
Backpackers must make sure they get their packs off their backs and into their hands before boarding or risk being repulsed, Salvadori said.
The decorum pointman is also targeting people who hop onto boats without paying and is thinking of setting up turnstiles.
The clean-up czar has scored a string of victories in his battle to burnish Venice.
He recently said most people were obeying new orders not to stop and snack in St Mark's Square, after six city cops were deployed to enforce the 'anti-bivouac' ordinance.
Multi-lingual signs have gone up to point people to better places for a picnic, such as the Royal Gardens.
Salvadori has also taken aim at the graffiti despoiling palazzi and monuments, announcing plans to install scores of new surveillance cameras and seek compensation from the 'writers'.
Venice authorities have launched an international competition for other schemes to lessen the impact of mass tourism on the city.
Venice launched its decorum drive two years ago to fight a modern wave of scruffiness and lax behaviour it said was dragging its image down.
'CITY ANGELS' SPREAD MESSAGE.
Among other things, it has employed so-called 'City Angels', a band of young women, to tell tourists to put their shirts back on, stop putting their feet in fountains and have their beer and sandwiches away from the most popular sites.
The city managed to rid St Mark's of the pigeons many people associate with it by banning feed vendors and taking other moves to shoo the birds away.
Authorities recently said the anti-pigeon measures were proving ''an unqualified success''.
The square's pigeon population was down from its historic levels of 20,000 to a bare thousand.
''Just a few months after the feed ban most of the square is free of the animals who have moved off to find food on the islands,'' said Venice Artistic Superintendent Renata Codello.
She said the birds had ''almost completely disappeared'' from the logge on Palazzo Ducale (the Doge's Palace), once their favourite gathering spot.
The animals, which have been judged a health hazard as well as a threat to city monuments, had also decamped from St Mark's Basilica, allowing the historic church's facade to be cleaned.
