Cilento, when marginality tries to become the centre

Tourism is also a flow that impacts places and transforms the territory. It is not just about iconic premium cities. It breaks with and seeks the ecology of places with an ecology of the mind. It is not just a question of digital platforms, nodes and logistical networks, just as it is not just a question of arrivals and presences, of demand and supply of services. Indicators of growth, but not necessarily of sustainable development. Much depends on the emergence of a consciousness of place capable of relating to and governing flows. A consciousness of place that is built over the slow time of the maturation of a space of representation hinged on the social, relational and trusting capital of communities, of their becoming industrious, welcoming and competent, investing in projects of life and enterprise, of quality work, within a collective framework held together by innovative institutional practices. Let us take the case of Campania, an emblematic case due to its location in the South, its excellent tourist performance and the evident fracture between areas with a very high concentration of flows, areas that live off the drip and areas that are completely excluded. Within the various sub-systems of Campania, the Cilento area, a historical-natural area, located at the southern edge of the heart of the Neapolitan tourist platform and the Amalfi extension, represents an emerging context in search of a more structured positioning within the framework of the progressive articulation of Campania's rising tourist offer. The Cilento area, made up of a network of 80 small and micro-municipalities with 150,000 inhabitants and few significant urban centres was historically part of what Manlio Rossi Doria called in his time the 'bone areas' of southern Italy. Cilento's 130 km of coastline have long been the subject of tourism development according to exogenous investment logic, concentrated in a few specific localities. In recent years, this peripheral model has experienced some significant changes in terms of the self-propulsive capacity of the same actors with activities related to the Horeca supply chain and connections with the typical productions of the mountainous hinterland areas, which are still disadvantaged in terms of soft infrastructure, logistic services and rapid access connections from the outside. The demographic difficulties, which are still persistent, although less evident than in the past when great emigrations took place, coexist with paths of qualification of the tourist and eno-gastronomic offer, leveraging the legacies of a marginality that is trying to become a 'centre' by enhancing the vast environmental capital and the multiform cultural capital, supported by new levers of returners who invest in life projects hinged on a renewed industriousness, which is made up of a culture of hospitality, the ability to create a historical-cultural narrative and eno-gastronomic qualification. Accompanying and interpreting this attempt to build a 'territorial tourism factory' guided by a space of collective representation is an informal network of mayors, mountain communities, with the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park assuming its role of functional autonomy of the territory with the University, the Gal network, the Bccs and the voluntary associationism that condenses in the Pro Loco. All together they draw a tourist district in the making, capable of interacting with the strong areas to make a regional and interregional platform on the Naples-Bari axis. An important sign of how territories can 'count', make communities of destiny and not just 'be counted' by algorithms, clicks and megatrends. Years ago, in the face of the closure of the flow of extraordinary intervention in the Mezzogiorno, Territorial Pacts and Development Missions (De Rita-Borgomeo) were developed to reposition the local in the development of the late twentieth century in metamorphosis, starting from the socio-territorial demand. Cilento was already then a territory with a strong consciousness of place. Traces of that experience can still be found today in the age of overtourism from flows. An ancient issue, but still a fundamental one, if the tourist industry is to remain here as a context of civilisation and a vehicle for social, economic and environmental reproduction.