No. 1/2 (2018)

The Report on Italian Tourism, published over thirty years ago, is the most continuous and longest-running document on tourism economics and policy. First produced in 1984 from an idea by Piero Barucci and Emilio Becheri, it has been and continues to be a point of reference for all those involved in the sector thanks to the contribution it makes to the development and rooting of a tourism culture in Italy.

Today tourism is perceived as a social need of primary importance, source of knowledge and discovery of the reality that surrounds us. It is necessary, therefore, to be able to make it accessible to all the people who are in special conditions. In this article we will analyze the stages of the evolution - even of the normative - of accessible tourism and of the reference market, for which the relative demand represents a great opportunity for the development of a tourist destination. Finally, a Sicilian city worthy of note will be analyzed for the realization of initiatives and projects in the field of tourist accessibility: a best practice that can be an example for other Italian realities in order to make truly accessible all the wonders that our country offers.

To fully understand the touristic phenomenon, its characteristics and the evolutionary of a territory we have to study the visitors' arrivals and the overnight presences it's important to consider them in relation to the lenght of the journey with low granularity: the monthly attendance distribution is useful for identifying the possible existence and dimension of the seasonality. The seasonality is the systematic concentration of the tourist visitors in a territory and in a defined period of time, usually a season: we know that if this phenomenon is clear can create negative effects on the local economy. The Public Adiministrations are doing many efforts to promote their territories all the year long, but to obtain some result can be reached only by a different cultural approach in relation to specific territory watching to the different possible tourists.

The Adriatic region is a border area and is imagined in different ways and for different purposes. In fact, the Adriatic region maintains an ambivalent combination of unity and diversity in both the ecological and socio-cultural sense. Consequently, the cultural memories and civilised heritage of the Adriatic are exploited at different scales and levels by contemporary institutions. Nation-states, regions, cities of the Adriatic largely refer to an 'Adriatic imaginary' often within the general European framework. These efforts of institutional imagination are generally linked to certain expectations of development, particularly in certain fields such as ecology, cultural policies, sustainable mobility, fisheries and, last but not least, tourism. However, this Adriatic identity does not work for transnational development, as some might expect. Frictions, misunderstandings and political marginality too often influence the idea of the Adriatic as a European lake. In this article, I have a different point of view and try to explore the social construction of the Adriatic from another perspective: that of the people who cross the borders of the Adriatic for tourism. My hypothesis is that an alternative and perhaps more realistic view of the contemporary 'Adriatic seascape' can be obtained by understanding the behaviour, values and expectations of people who move across and around the Adriatic basin for leisure purposes. I base my analysis on a number of quantitative and qualitative data collected among tourists sailing across the Adriatic in 2009-2010, as well as another set of data collected among sailors participating in the 'Barcolana' regatta in 2012.

Italy, as is well known, is endowed with the largest cultural heritage in the world, located not only in large cities but throughout the territory. Frequently, therefore, local development projects pursue the objective of increasing tourism through the enhancement of the cultural heritage of the territory, mostly little known, but often of undisputed historical and artistic quality. The limit that is generally found in Italian local development projects is in the organization of the implementation of actions to promote the growth of the territory, which often see the public part play a dominant but self-referential role. This work aims to propose a governance model that provides for the structured organization of the public part and the active and broad participation of private partnerships; the model was developed through the principles of horizontal subsidiarity and social responsibility expressed in art. 118 of the Constitution.

Over the last 15 years, Sardinian international tourism has increased in an alternating but significant way, accompanied by profound changes in the sources and methods of access to the island and driving the positive development of the general movement. The purpose of this work is to verify to what extent the driving role of foreign flows translates into a positive impact on tourists' spending in hotels and similar accommodation facilities. The results underline the high value of per capita spending achieved, especially when compared with different accommodation solutions rather than geographical scales. However, in the long run it has followed an irregular and minor growth path compared to other hospitality choices, which have benefited to a greater extent from a growth trend increasingly associated with a medium-low customer profile through choice and per capita spending.

The paper highlights some of the historical difficulties of Calabria, a region with great not utilized potential. It is the most seasonal of all Italian regions with the maximum ratio between the month with the maximum attendance and the one with the minimum (30.8), also has a reduced incidence of foreigners, only one in two hundred of those who come in Italy reaches Calabria. Foreign tourists in the region are about 22% compared to about 50,5% for the whole of Italy. To promote the development the two editors propose the further enhancement of seaside tourism together forms of slow tourism. The potentialities are really exceptional if it is true that Calabria with 703 km of bathing coast in 2016 sees 5.320m million overnight stays of foreigners, while Emilia Romagna, with only 108 km of swimming coast about 25 million, that is 6.6 more times. The social and economic context of the two regions is very different but the comparison seems useful.

The sixth area of the Apulia region is called BAT (Barletta Andria Trani) and it is not important in comparison in its historical and gastronomic traditions. The overnight visitors and the arrivals is around the 2-3%, so this numbers is excepted to grow in the next years. The area was created in 2004 and activated in 2009, and it has many cultural identies and various caratteristica so it is very difficult to integrate each other. The BAT area is made by many municipality administrated by different politicians and this fact complicates the development of one strategic plan to increase tourism because each town runs in its own without know where. In this article we have studied the identities of different municipalities to try to find organic features and to give strategic system to develop potential tourism.