Palermo’s mayor explains it simply: too much sugar spoils the coffee. He worries that central Palermo is turning into what he calls a food village, rather than a living city. Florence has gone even further, banning new restaurant openings on more than fifty streets in its historic center.

This isn’t about Italians suddenly losing their famous love of food. It’s about something deeper. It’s about what happens when tourism becomes so powerful that it starts to destroy the very authenticity that tourists came to experience.

Walk through these historic centers today and you’ll see what residents mean. Women rolling out fresh pasta behind display windows, performing for cameras like animals in a zoo. Carbonara served in huge pans designed specifically for Instagram photos. Endless limoncello shops and tiramisù bars lining streets that once had butchers, bakers, and vegetable sellers.

A social worker in Palermo describes her neighborhood street as an amusement park, not a city. The numbers support her frustration. Rome’s historic center has lost more than a quarter of its residents over the past fifteen years. Venice and Florence have seen their city centers empty out even faster.

The transformation has been quick. In Palermo, the number of restaurants in the historic center has doubled in just ten years. The turning point came in 2015, when UNESCO recognized the city’s beautiful Norman and Arab architecture. Tourist arrivals jumped fifty percent in just five years. Last year alone, more than a million visitors came to Palermo.

You can see the changes everywhere. Bed and breakfast signs fill the entrances of residential buildings. Ten-seater golf carts drive down narrow cobblestone streets. Most visibly, hundreds of new restaurants have opened across Italy’s most visited cities.

Experts have even created a term for this phenomenon: foodification. It’s food-based gentrification, and it’s transforming city centers across the country. The Italian government has welcomed this trend, recently submitting Italian cuisine for UNESCO heritage status. Tourism now represents thirteen percent of Italy’s economy, and food and wine tourism has nearly tripled in the past decade.

However, here’s where the story gets complicated. A tour guide in Palermo captures the contradiction perfectly. Her regular vegetable vendor recently converted his stall into a restaurant. Rising rents have pushed her friends out of the city center. Yet tourism provides her income. She’s caught in it, she says. That’s the struggle.

The Capo food market in Palermo tells this story clearly. It once sold zucchini, peaches, fresh fish, and beef to local residents. Now it mostly offers spiral pasta on sticks, cannoli-shaped marzipan cookies, and deep-fried street food to tourists. A third-generation fruit seller there says that on some days, he barely makes one hundred euros. He’s lost all his customers. Now it’s all fast food, he says.

Palermo’s urban planning official describes the situation directly. It’s as if consumers appeared on the street who were blind, with no taste buds and a stomach made of iron. Businesses took advantage of that opportunity.

Not everyone sees this as completely negative. The city’s top tourism official argues that tourist improvements are making the city center better than it was before. It’s true that many historic centers have become more lively and multicultural.

Despite this, critics point to a deeper problem. They argue the Italian government has done too little to develop other industries. According to a recent ranking by a major Italian consultancy, Italy is behind all other major European economies in innovation. A former university director in Pisa asks the question sharply: Why don’t we try to get a new Galileo instead of just a bunch of excellent chefs?

The head of Italy’s federation of food and tourism businesses acknowledges the shift with surprising honesty. Sometimes the Colosseum is just an excuse for an American between two pasta dishes, he says. Tourists themselves often confirm this. One retired American visitor, trying croquettes at a Palermo food market, is direct about his priorities. It’s about the food and drink and being with friends, he says. He didn’t care much about the history.

The social worker in Palermo finds something almost apocalyptic in the scene. Watching the showy celebration on streets filled with happy hour crowds, in a region still struggling with high youth unemployment and brain drain, she thinks of Pompeii. Before Vesuvius erupted, she notes, people ate and sang.

Palermo officials say they’ll continue promoting tourism while trying to diversify. They’re attracting corporate conferences and providing high-speed internet for digital nomads. The restaurant licensing limits, they hope, will prevent other streets from becoming what one official calls Aperol spritz monocultures.

There’s an irony in that phrase. The Aperol spritz, that bright orange drink that’s become associated with Italian leisure, didn’t even start in Sicily. It comes from northern Italy. Nevertheless, visitors don’t seem to mind the lack of authenticity. A Slovenian college student, sitting on Via Maqueda with his girlfriend, explains his choice simply. He usually drinks beer. But since he’s in Sicily, he figures he should have an Aperol spritz.

And there, perhaps, is the heart of the problem. When the performance of Italian culture becomes more important than the reality of Italian life, when the symbol matters more than the substance, cities risk becoming theme park versions of themselves. The question facing Palermo, Florence, and cities across Italy is whether they can find a balance before the authentic life that attracted tourists in the first place disappears entirely.