ROME, Sept. 14 (Xinhua) — The final, official tally for Italy’s tourism industry during the pandemic year of 2020 is in, and according to Italy’s National Statistics Institute(ISTAT), the decline sparked by the coronavirus was “drastic.”
According to data released Tuesday by the ISTAT, overnight stays of foreign visitors declined by 54.6 percent last year. Overnight stays of domestic tourists dropped by less, but were still down by 32.2 percent compared to 2019.
All told, ISTAT estimated that foreign tourists spent 23.7 billion euros (28.1 billion U.S. dollars) in Italy last year, around 35 billion euros less compared to the previous year.
The fall-off in tourism last year was alone responsible for around a quarter of the broad drop in added value in 2020.
The coronavirus pandemic started to have wide impacts on Italian tourism in March 2020, meaning the first two months more or less tracked levels from previous years. There was also a slight recovery between June and August, when…