We have heard it for decades, repeatedly, like a mantra: “tourism is our crude oil”. The slogan, today, raises eyebrows; and not only because oil, on an image level, has fallen out of favor, put on the index by the drawing rooms that matter, but also because tourism itself, and with it the countries that have decided to survive on it, has changed a great deal over the past few decades.
A new enemy: the tourist
Is it possible to die of tourism? This seems to be the question hovering over the Old Continent. Seamlessly, until last year, the mainstream media were beating, on or near an all-network basis, the “personal” button. We all remember the typically summery articles about staffing shortages endangering the tourist seasons, a phenomenon to which industry players blamed the citizenship income and the low “desire to work” of young Italians. In short, until last year tourism had to be saved at all costs, this year, on the contrary, the narrative seems to have changed, tourism is an enemy.
A growing phenomenon
The trend, to tell the truth, is not new, albeit, as usual, landing in the Belpaese a few years behind the rest of Western Europe. The phenomenon of tourism finds itself today, a victim of its own success, or rather its democratization, at the center of cross-accusations. Each, from his or her political perspective, can attack tourism as he or she sees fit, and so the radical left will lash out against the phenomenon of short rentals, which artificially raises the cost of living for out-of-town students and immigrants, while conservatives will protest in defense of the identities of the places victimized by tourism, which for the most part decay to the status of amusement parks, while in turn environmentalists may be outraged at small towns like Venice polluted like Asian megacities and small mountain roads flooded like metropolitan superhighways. This is the phenomenon of so-called overtourism, which causes more tourists to pour into a given place than that same place can accommodate without deteriorating the quality of life of its inhabitants and environmental integrity.
Powerful numbers for fragile places
Italy, given its high concentration of tourist destinations, both in terms of cities of art (Rome, Venice, Florence, etc.) and natural attractions (Dolomites, Costa Smeralda, pre-Alpine lakes, etc.) is, not as of today, a favorite victim of overtourism, which in places with reduced accommodation capacity such as Venice or the Dolomites is a phenomenon several decades old now. The difference from past decades is that many places such as those mentioned, but not only, are transitioning from the state of “overtourism” to that of total unlivable. The factors that have led to this situation are many and would require separate treatments for each of them, but a few can be mentioned, first and foremost the lowering of passenger transportation costs, thanks to the spread of carriers such as Ryanair in the field of flights and Flixbus in the field of road transportation. This new condition has disproportionately increased the ability of the European population to travel within the continent: whereas travel to Italy was once an expensive “trip of a lifetime” for many, today a weekend in the Peninsula has become within the reach of almost anyone. At the same time, outside the West, billions of people have emerged from poverty and new rich and new middle classes are entering the tourism market, which almost always sees Europe as the preferred destination. For territories such as the Dolomites, already struggling with the abnormal amount of “internal” Italian and Northern European tourists, the influx of new wealthy East-Europeans, Russians, Caucasians, Chinese, Filipinos and from the Indian subcontinent has sent a fragile ecosystem into a tailspin, forcing it to go on the defensive, a victim of its own success. The same can be said of locations outside Italy, perhaps made famous by TV series or successful products of the entertainment industry, see for example the case of the charming Austrian village of Hallstatt (population 800) in the heart of the Salzkammergut region, which became unfortunate famous for inspiring the cartoon Frozen, and has since been invaded by some 1.5 million tourists a year.
“I saw it on TV!”
The reference to Frozen should not pass as an innocuous anecdote: media exposure and the phenomenon of overtourism are in fact interrelated in double-strand. It is not uncommon, in fact, for little-known places to suddenly fill up with tourists, more or less “hit and run,” after passing for even a few seconds on television or Netflix screens. This is what happened, for example, to Lake Braies, located in the municipality of the same name in Val Pusteria (650 inhabitants), which suddenly became famous “thanks” to the Rai 1 TV drama “One Step from Heaven” with Terence Hill, and since then has been the victim of a baleful overtourism, so much so that the location has become a must-see even for Indian tourists and Arabs from the Gulf countries.
The weight of social media
But it is not only TV series and the entertainment industry that contribute to the phenomenon; social media are also part of the problem, with Instagram taking the lion's share. They know something about it in Lavertezzo, a small village in Canton Ticino that sits on the crystal-clear waters of the Verzasca stream: having become famous “thanks” to a well-known video entitled “The Maldives two hours from Milan,” the small Swiss village of 1. 300 inhabitants found itself invaded by hordes of hit-and-run vacationers ready to jump into the crystal-clear waters of the stream, often throwing themselves off the balustrade of the main bridge, not to mention the case, little known in Europe, of the Joffre Lakes, remote bodies of water located more than 200 km northeast of Vancouver in Canada, which became famous after a photograph with a log poised on the water's surface and has since been invaded by hundreds of thousands of tourists, day-trippers, families and newlyweds hunting for a photo for social media, becoming a popular destination for ceremonies as well; a bustle so problematic that it forced Canadian authorities to close the access road to the site to prevent destruction of the lakes.
If it belongs to everyone, why can't I go there?
It is at this point that, once again, we run into one of the many short-circuits of today's liberal-democracies: can and should the need for the preservation of certain places, which are ostensibly everyone's, dictate, despite the fact that they belong to the community, that they be closed? How, if at all, can this be reconciled with the sacrosanct freedom of movement (especially within one's own state) of individuals? [1 - continued]
Photo © Jörgens.mi / CC BY-SA 3.0
Research fellow at the Machiavelli Center. A philosophy scholar, he has been working for years on the topic of the revaluation of nihilism and the great German Romantic philosophy.
Italiano 
English
Scrivi un commento