FLORENCE, ITALY - Goldsmith Tommaso Pestelli was evicted from his historic Florence workshop to make way for a luxury hotel, the umpteenth victim of a mass tourism critics say is ravaging the Italian city. Calls for urgent action to protect the city centre, a UNESCO site, intensified last month after a museum director said “hit and run” tourism had transformed Florence into a “prostitute”. Some 1.5 million tourists flocked to the city last summer, up 6.6 percent on the previous year, while an increasing number of independent shops and residential apartments are being transformed into fast food outlets and holiday lets. “We’ve been open since 1908. If you get rid of us, and many others like us, you take away part of the city’s spirit,” said Pestelli, whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather were goldsmiths before him. Pestelli, 55, managed to find another little workshop nearby, but says many fellow artisans have not been so lucky. The average cost of monthly residential rents leapt 42 percent between 2016 and 2023, while the number of apartments listed on Airbnb jumped from some 6,000 to nearly 15,000, official figures show.