As Amazon’s Diego Piacentini heads for Rome to lead PM Matteo Renzi’s digital technology office in Italy @matteorenzi for the next couple of years, a note from the easily connected Serenissima where the cables go through water rather than brick.

Anyone with an imob.venezia travel card and a mobile phone number can register to use the Cittadinanza Digitale Wi-Fi network.

User figures to date are interesting. Nearly 60,000 people have signed up – 44,000 of them residents and 14,500 ‘city users’ – people who come to study or work in Venice.

Of those who login on an average day, they are online for about three or four hours using up about 430GB. There are more men than women using the network and most of them are aged 41 years and upwards. The Centro Storico is where you will find most of them – and in particular Piazzale Roma e Stazione, Piazza San Marco and Accademia. Most people are outdoors when they use the network with its 254 hotspots.

@mcintosh24 – Thursday 11 February 2016