Can Edinburgh survive this tsunami of visitors?

Instead, I told them they’d seen nothing yet. Within a few days, as the festivals crank into gear, the centre, and the Royal Mile especially, will be jam-packed, people squeezed together as tightly as jigsaw pieces.

There will be throngs of street performers, gaggles of festival- and fringe-goers soaking up the atmosphere, and the strains of bagpipes and drums from the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo on the castle esplanade, whose closing fireworks light up the sky every night.

Having lost my tolerance of crowds and my patience with jostlers and dawdlers, I find Edinburgh in August a little trying. It’ll be even worse this year if the bin strikes go ahead and we have to dodge stinking overflows and sidestep scavenging seagulls as well as the madding hordes.

Get ready for a lot of this kind of thing (Image: Colin Hattersley)

That cavil apart, Edinburgh is booming, and set to become even more buoyant. News that the old Edinburgh Royal High School is to become a national music centre is a boon for the arts, as is the forthcoming Dunard Centre, a 1000-capacity concert hall off St Andrew Square.

It won’t be too long either before the revamped Jenners store transforms its boarded up premises into a glitzy shopping destination. This will help revive the fortunes of Princes Street, although lately these seem to have been improving, in part because of the arrival of the Japanese clothing store Uniqlo, which attracts tourists and locals like filings to a magnet. Not far away, a branch of Gucci will soon be opening: what better indicator of success?

Edinburgh’s ever-rising popularity is a tribute to a city that has withstood centuries of change and emerged, despite its innately Calvinist soul, as the biggest and most glittering festival venue in the world. This year marks its 900th anniversary, and there will be a slew of celebrations in the autumn to mark this momentous occasion.

Such dates are arbitrary, of course, since people have lived on the rock where the castle now stands since the iron age, and possibly earlier. It was in 1124, however, that David I granted Edinburgh the status of a royal burgh, after which formal recognition it flourished.

That process continues, the numbers flocking here growing exponentially. One hotelier recently told me that the development of new hotels in the next couple of years will provide an additional 3000 beds. Will there be any problem filling them? Do children prefer biscuits to broccoli? Added to this ceaseless expansion is the vexed issue of Airbnb, which has grown so acute in recent years that the council has introduced new licensing laws for such accommodation in the centre.

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It’s a problem familiar to tourist hotspots across the world, among them Florence in Tuscany, with which Edinburgh is twinned. So would it not be a good idea to take advantage of this liaison, to the benefit of both cities? Now surely is the time to make this a meaningful and productive relationship.

Edinburgh is twinned or ‘sistered’ with several international cities, among them San Diego in California, Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province in China, Dunedin in New Zealand, Krakow in Poland and Kyiv in Ukraine.

There are similarities with almost all the places linked to Edinburgh: with Munich it shares a history of brewing; with Aalberg in Denmark, its renown as a festival venue; with Vancouver a reputation for a healthy life-work balance.

With none, however, does it have more in common than Florence. Home of the Renaissance, this exquisite medieval city was once known as “the Athens of the Middle Ages”, whilst in the 18th century Edinburgh was dubbed “the Athens of the North”, partly for its architecture but also as the crucible of the Enlightenment.

Both cities are small, self-contained, walkable, and rich in history and culture. Both, too, are suffering from a tsunami of visitors, to the detriment of the environment and residents. In particular, the centro historico of Florence has been so swamped that locals either don’t want, or cannot afford, to live there.

Sound familiar to anyone who lives in the Grassmarket or Royal Mile? To combat the flight of Florentines to the outskirts, new initiatives are being introduced to coax them back, which might be worth considering here. By the same token, the Tuscans could perhaps learn from us how to manage a surfeit of Airbnbs, while sharing their strategies for preserving Florence as a prime tourist destination without ruining it for everyone else.

Krakow in Poland (Image: Getty Images)

Like many places in Europe, they were years ahead of Edinburgh in banning cars from the centre and introducing trams and fleets of electric taxis. Their far-sighted awareness of climate change – with which we’re thankfully catching up – shows an imaginative response to the need to future-proof their priceless but vulnerable assets. But as well as sharing solutions to problems, there would be other gains from a closer association. Given its abundance of world-class art, it must surely be possible to broker a deal to bring regular exhibitions to Edinburgh.

I’m not talking Michelangelo’s David but some of the more transportable works of genius, by Piero della Francesca, say, or Botticelli. Nor would this be a one-way transaction. There are more than enough Scottish masterpieces in Edinburgh’s galleries to do an exchange. Italians might appreciate this, since the people of Tuscany have an abiding affection for Scotland after we helped liberate them from the Germans towards the end of the Second World War.

Whether it’s Florence, or any other of its twins and sisters, Edinburgh should be capitalising on what can be shared between them, to everyone’s benefit. If we take this opportunity to draw on their experience and resources, while sharing ours, then Edinburgh’s 1000th birthday really will be something to shout about.