As one of Europe’s leading cultural tourism destinations, Venice records over 13 million overnight stays and anestimated 34,5 million visitors annually, generating substantial economic value while intensifying pressures onspace, identity, and perceived quality of life. Frequently portrayed as the global archetype of overtourism andurban fragility, Venice is often framed through a narrative of excess and decadence. This paper challenges sucha view by reinterpreting Venice as a long-standing laboratory of resilience and innovation, where overtourism isaddressed not merely as a quantitative issue, but as a relational and governance problem shaped by spatial andtemporal concentration and by the coexistence of heterogeneous city users. Drawing on e-tourism anddata-informed approaches, the study integrates official and passive mobile data (PMD) to define the actual cityusers: visitors account for less than half of the more than 200.000 daily city users in the historic city, within abroader civitas shaped by commuters, students, workers and proximity users across a metropolitan system offifteen municipalities, redefining the functional boundaries of the destination, highlighting the need to evolve fromtourism success toward smart and sustainable destination governance.