Overtourism can be governed with visions shared by communities

"More tourism for everyone?" is a high-level dialogue. On the one hand is Paolo Verri, general director of the Mondadori Foundation, former director of the Book Fair and coordinator of Matera's successful bid for European Capital of Culture; on the other is Edoardo Colombo, an expert in digital tourism. The two converse (precisely) as we are used to doing today in our confused world; and thus raise a large number of interesting questions, which inevitably tend to remain open. At the same time, however, this very circumstance shows well how multifaceted and complex contemporary tourism is. What's new, you might say: complexity is the watchword of our time. True, but this is what is so special about tourism, that it often comes across deceptively, as an easy and fun activity.

After all, tourism is also the figure disguised as a centurion in front of the Colosseum, the fresh coconut seller on the beach, the stall selling unlikely souvenirs made in the Orient. And yet, despite this light and deceptive appearance, with around 10% of the world's GDP (and employment), tourism is a decidedly heavy industry, with an impact different but not inferior to sectors such as petrochemicals, cars, and construction. Above all, tourism is incredibly complicated, ramified, ubiquitous. When they wrote the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, they found that tourism, uniquely, was present in all seventeen of the goals: poverty reduction, stimulating employment, promoting health, education and so on. Indeed, tourism could be the culmination of global capitalism because of its ability to mix commodity, consumption, mobility, desire, experience, identity, pleasure, culture, leisure and God knows what else. Long invoked and celebrated as an opportunity for development and employment, many grey areas of contemporary tourism have emerged in recent decades: its devastating environmental impact, especially in times of climate crisis (half of all planes carry international tourists), and above all its paradoxical inclination to distort places for too much love. Moreover, in an interesting and well-documented book (Il turismo che non paga, Edizioni Ambiente), journalist Cristina Nadotti has shown how the benefits and gains of tourism are often more apparent than real. When you understand this, you start to defend yourself. A good example is Barcelona. After having long been a model of tourism development driven by major events (the 1992 Olympics), the Catalan city plunged into the abyss of overtourism. That is why its citizens started an all-out war on mass tourism, in the immediate term by firing water pistols at hapless visitors, in the long term by electing administrators opposed to the tourist monoculture.

Returning to our book, Colombo and Verri are instead inclined to defend tourism (sometimes with excessive confidence, perhaps misplaced, for example in the case of Expo 2015). As the title More tourism for all?, explains, the two authors do not fear the growth of tourism, of which they emphasise the democratic and inclusive nature. Their point of view remains that of two technocrats who grew up professionally in the season of Destination Management, at the beginning of our millennium, when through a new vision and a specific professional figure, the aim was to coordinate all the activities of a destination. 'I am convinced that the problem is not the excess of tourism, but its mismanagement,' writes Colombo, for example. Many hopes have meanwhile vanished on contact with a viscous reality, but in their eyes the solution remains a strategic vision shared by all players, starting with the local community, and supported by new digital tools and artificial intelligence. And indeed some good models exist. Abroad, Amsterdam contains and channels overtourism without the iconoclastic fury of Barcelona, while Copenhagen experiments with a new idea of tourism where visitors become 'temporary citizens', with rights and duties. But with a few exceptions (Trentino-Alto Adige, Langhe and Roero) these examples seem beyond the reach of a country like ours, vital but anarchic, which cannot manage a condominium meeting; so that this book, so passionate about innovation, seemed to me rather the belated manifesto of a missed revolution.

Edoardo Colombo, Paolo Verri, Più turismo per tutti?, Egea, pp. 160, € 17.50