What went wrong? A retrospective analysis of destination policies in overtouristed hotspots

Programma di finanziamento: PRIN 2022

Ente finanziatore: MUR

Responsabile scientifico: Federico Paolini

Ruolo UniMC: partner

Durata: 24 mesi

In the last decade, "overtourism", identified as an unbearable massification of tourism concentrated on some "hotspots", has emerged as urgent in the debate on tourist policies. Earliest studies suggested that this idea resulted from the perception of the inhabitants rather than from empirical analyses. However, more refined quantitative indicators and statistical arguments have grown later in support of an overflow of tourists in some specific destinations.What made this evolution of tourism, and its side effects, happen in some places rather than in others? Previous research has questioned the role of destination policies aimed at capturing the interest of the global tourist industry, but a detailed analysis is still missing on which specific strategies created the conditions for overtourism in some destinations and for abandonment in others. A retrospective study of political and technical discussions on tourism is essential to understand which interpretive frames underpinned the choice of specific measures and actions. This project identifies three different case studies to be compared as representative of extreme conditions of tourism, in the context of the evolution of the national tourist policies. Venice is the most renown city suffering from tourism overflow and monoculture. Its history as a tourist destination marks a turn in 1980 with the sudden and sustained expansion of Winter tourism. The in-depthstudy of the public debate in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s focuses on the role of the seasonal volatility of arrivals and the distinction between "proper" tourists and excursionists in framing destination policies. The case of the Cinque Terre concerns a coastal cluster of five villages located along the East coast ofLiguria, which has become one of the most popular Italian tourist destinations worldwide. However, due to the rapid growth of tourism flows, concentrated in a limited and fragile territory, this destination has reached a saturation level, with a relevant problem of overtourism. The research will focus on exploring the destination policies that transformed the villages into successful tourist attractions and led them to  over exploitation. The new National Parks established during the 1990s contrast with the previous destinations because of the opposite effect of cultural and "green" tourist policies, which did not attain the expected economic results, starting a depopulation trend. The research aims to verify whether the Park of the Foreste Casentinesi and the historic villages that persist in the area are 'victims' of the narratives of mass tourism: the area, in fact, intercepts a deadly fraction of the flows attracted by Florence (56 km away) and Siena (98 km) and ongoing policies seem unable to change the situation. The result of the historical analyses will be useful to assess the appropriateness of present-day interpretive models of tourism and their time- and place-related limiting scope conditions.