Aree interne e «transizione turistica»: una riflessione critica

The National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) first and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) then, have considered sustainable tourism as one of the elements for activating local development processes able to invert the depopulation trends that afflict now structurally these territories.The contribution aims to highlight the critical issues of an approach that is aimed at identifying and enhancing the tourist potential of inner areas as a repopulation strategy, in the light of the risks contained in the policies thus prepared.Tourist "monocultures", extra-local management of territorial resources, cultural impoverishment of local communities are just some of the dangers inherent in the promotion of tourism as a main road for development. Additionally,the trend recorded in many Italian inner areas, where often the data relating to the growth of tourist accommodation is not accompanied by demographic data of the same sign, it seems correct to fear a "tourism" without demographic inversion and therefore a places commodification that paradoxically risk devaluing the territories and the communities that inhabit them.