Tourism as a (wide field) “new alliance” of new cultural services

Tourism as an opportunity to experiment with attractive educational methods for young people, based on direct experience and contact with non-standardized skills and knowledge, beyond traditional school programs. These are the first lines of a manifesto for a new kind of tourism, where host and guest dialogue and share experiences. It is not exclusive; rather, it promotes integration between different cultures, encouraging local initiatives at a slow pace, in harmony with nature. This approach emphasizes storytelling, the creation of memories, and the ability to fully enjoy emotions outside the realm of social media.(article by Paolo Castelnovi)

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…

Latin started to be studied from the sixth grade. For me, as a 12-year-old, Latin revealed the hidden game of words. Through etymologies I embarked on imaginary journeys, similar to those that Emilio Salgari or Jules Verne’s worlds gave to me.

Later, growing up, I discovered that philosophers and writers built reflections around etymologies, or elaborated fascinating fictions to enrich their discourses (Emanuele Severino, for example, or Erri DeLuca). Following their example, I sometimes enjoy juxtaposing authentic etymological meanings with invented ones, specifically created to lead the discourse in the chosen direction. It is a cocktail of truth and truthfulness that sometimes opens up unexpected glimpses of understanding on complex or uncomfortable topics.

For example, let’s have a look at what lies behind a “common” sentence that is very appropriate for our difficult times:

«to consider the enemy evil»

• To consider comes from cum-sidera: to think with the help of the stars
• Evil comes from captivus: captured, prisoner
• Enemy comes from nemo: no one, unknown, without identity, faceless.

It does not matter if one of the etymologies is invented when faced with the negative vortex of meaning that the phrase reveals:

We are allowed (by the stars!) to lock up those we do not know,

because they are evil (or prisoners, but don’t want to know that),

and we don’t want to know anything about them, so we can still consider them our enemies.

It was 1970 when the Italian songwriter Mogol gave a poem to the singer Mina:

Sixty years ago, the “new generation” felt ready to face new challenges, with a consciousness that was purified by the horrors of the II World War. The songs of that period celebrate love as an adventure of discovery, a pleasure in an unusual dialogue and a willingness to be surprised.

The unknown person, the stranger, is lovable, and good, until proven otherwise. Today, perhaps due to the bad conscience that has been built up over decades of mistreatment and inequalities, the stranger is seen as a possible enemy, a bad person until proven otherwise.

I would like to explore the part of the sentence above about knowledge and not that about mistrust, because mistrust prevails when knowledge is weak.

And today, unlike 60 years ago, interest in knowledge is at its lowest level.

Knowledge stopped to be considered either as a civic virtue or as a resource for personal fulfilment, unlike in the last two centuries, at least after the French Revolution, until the well-known belief of ‘knowing to choose’, which from Descartes to the publisher Giulio Einaudi laid the foundations of modern democracy.

Those who work in a cultural profession like us, have been dipped in a brine of false consciousness for at least a couple of generations. We are fully aware that culture is an essential tool for living the world. And we recognise that school – an institution meant to provide culture for everyone – has, for many decades, been left to the willingness of teachers, with no real support for the efforts. Thankfully their commitment to preserving the school’s original role as a democratic and integrative service is still widespread. We fully realise that the ethical value, positive or negative, of knowledge lies in its communication, but we do not worry about the grotesque, weird, distortion of reality proposed by media and social media, which now dominate the contents.

The “Empire of Fake”, which was already lively before the affirmation of Artificial Intelligence, will soon crash the entire product of the social media era, where it seemed that everyone could take an active part in creating a new, rule-free, popular culture. This was only partly true, but insecurity (about authors, about truth etc.) related to communication will generate an ever-increasing demand for certified knowledge, orthodoxy and authoritativeness, which tends to subtly manifest itself as authority and propaganda.

And so, we will have lost the brief period of free culture – an illusion that lasted only a couple of decades.

As cultural professionals, we recognise this trend of epochal change and realise the growing need to create cultural tools that are appreciated – or at least not looked upon with suspicion. However, we are still very far from the creation of new cultural services, similar to those that have represented a real boost of vitality in the Western history: from ancient theatre, which brought together entire communities, to the 19^th century opera, from the Universitas of the Italian municipalities, to the nine years of mandatory education for all Prussian citizens, introduced by Frederick the Great, to the Hollywood cinema of the second half of the 20th century, which globally spread the myth of the American Way of Life.

In each of those eras, culture succeeded in consolidating common formae mentis, stories to be shared, unifying legacies of memories.

Today, those who still cling to the fragments of those old inventions now cast aside compared to the new media, which are definitely more dynamic, but oriented to narratives that emphasise conflict and identity isolation, spectacularise the conflict and propose violence as an instant solution to problems, are convinced that they are creating culture.

However, looking closely at the younger generations’ behaviour, several signs emerge, revealing where new cultural needs are developing. It is exactly in these areas that skills, research and the creativity of the cultural professions of the new millennium could be addressed.

For example, the landscape, a category of cultural heritage included in the Italian Constitution but ignored for 50 years, found an enlightening definition in the European Landscape Convention in 2000. This Convention considers strategic to defend not only the right to preserve the physical traces of the transformations made by humans and nature on the territory, but also to support the identity perception that communities have of those traces. This introduces the idea that not only the physical evidence should be preserved, but also the subjectivity of those who perceive them, recognising the importance of the connection between the landscape and the personal and collective identity of those who experience it.

Today, 25 years later, it is clear that the need for the recognition of one’s own perception has massively emerged, not only in relation to the landscape but in many other areas. There is a growing demand for “direct experience”, not only visual, and sensory verification of values, whether cultural or of a different kind.

It is a new and at the same time archaic request for culture the one that emerges in the crisis of traditional references. Local culture is fading away because local communities are disappearing as crucibles of cultural exchange, and apart from these, the media, including the great medium represented by institutional education, are now perceived as unreliable. This leads to a new, anti-modern and unpredictable trust ‘naively’ entrusted to its own senses.

This return-to-experience trend, which leads to biting Olympic medals and coins to check their authenticity, amplifies its reductionist effects, especially in a context where younger people show an increasing difficulty in dealing with complexity.

This creates a “double bind” for the access to the culture (no complexity, only direct experience): this situation creates a kind of collective stalemate and, as Gregory Bateson explains, can lead to major creative changes.

In this context, while on one hand one can witness the ravings of the flat-earther and “anti-vax” groups, on the other hand, thankfully more prevalent, there is a request for culture to provide the fundamental instructions for moving from experience to complex evaluation. This implies, as far as possible, avoiding delegating to others or to external instruments the task of judging.

This attitude of goodwill young people, although shy and confused, is still promising and invites us to commit ourselves to offer cultural services that meet their demand for direct experience and freedom of judgement. It is crucial to support those who try to avoid the traps of self-referential ritual or “tribal” identity without autonomy like social dynamics on mobile phones or in bars, admiration for celebrities or political leaders, sports cheering and group holidays.

However, faced with this pressure to get back to basics, we – cultural professionals – find ourselves displaced, since our main cultural instrumentation is either historicist, based on the narration of events that cannot be verified through direct experience, or scientific method, based on the mathematical reduction of unperceivable realities. When disinterest or systematic doubt prevail in our stories of past times or descriptions of the structure of matter, worlds without traces in living memory, we find it difficult to understand how to appease – through stories and formulas – the thirst for a liveable truth that characterises the most genuine aspirations of young people.

However, not only the European intuition on landscape, but also, and above all, the mobilisation for the environment, should push us to a reflection that goes beyond the simple finding of a generic preference for a direct and emotional cultural acquisition. We should also recognise a growing request for spatial culture, for relations with places: an approach that, unlike historicist culture, offers a wide range of experiential and identity feedback, starting from the fundamental ones related to the sense of protection of one’s own habitat, to those fuelled by curiosity to explore places inhabited by others.

But today’s culture professional is in great difficulty facing space culture.

The subject of living, which is the driving force behind the need to acquire a spatial culture, has been confined within the implicit skills, those that are not explicitly taught because they are naturally acquired, like food and social or affective relations, through the air we breathe in Italy. It is an unforgivable slight by our institutions, the result of a static vision of the world, rooted in the rural world, where the fundamental criterion was to maintain the balance between the individual and the environment. This mindset proposed as an ideal the same relationship with the environment, with the same people and with the time cycle constantly repeating itself.

On the contrary, contemporary living is presented as a puzzle of experiences, characterised by different places and meetings, which we recognise as precious for the quality of our lives. However, we do not exactly know how to share these experiences, and we are constantly tempted to keep them to ourselves, as they represent the only accumulation of identity that our time allows us.

Roy Batty, the android protagonist of Blade Runner, who desperately dies fearing the loss of his experiences – even though they may be artificially grafted – represents a model not only for us, but also for the new generations who might entrust their sense of identity not to the accumulated knowledge, but to the lived experiences, and the knowledge that can come from them.

Therefore, we are in a very complex historical situation for traditional culture. On one hand, there is a need to make structural changes to the communication process and to recover the image and meaning that young people give to the culture, who are victims of a fragmentary, simplified model of communication that pays little attention to relationships and complexity. On the other hand, it is clear that there is a growing demand for regaining a sense of reality, for valuing direct experiences and the importance of sensibility. All these aspects could certainly be satisfied by culture-particularly through the education of artistic sensibility and scientific curiosity, if properly renewed to adapt to the ‘new’ world. In this way, culture could become not only a gym and a field of experimentation, but also a ‘commonplace’ for new generations, making it easier the relationship between the individual and the habitat.

In this critical context of developments of our culture, there is now an opportunity offered by the growing interest in tourism. This phenomenon certainly requires investment in infrastructures and logistics but, in our opinion, it also implies a necessary cultural innovation in the way territories are presented, and their resources are offered both to the visitors (and to the inhabitants as well).

Some universities recognise the importance of this topic, also thanks to a new focus on the Third Mission – that dedicated to disclosure and valorisation – which supports the educational and research missions. This finally pushes the academy to spread the accumulated knowledge in appropriate ways, making it available to real cases and contexts.

The potential of this topic, which needs a systematic experimental attitude, currently absent in the institutions, is still too often reduced. In this way, reductionism prevails, and those who wish to study tourism are frequently only given the opportunity to acquire new professional skills or to reorganise modules of already existing specialised knowledge. It does not matter if these relate to agricultural production, art history, anthropology, IT logistics services, and so on. The new social demand of young people poses a challenge to us: how to support and enhance the experiences of those who, even in a naive way, try to live better, not only in a local dimension but also by enjoying the experience of diversity instead of fearing it.

However, even among local administrators, improvisation prevails concerning the prospects for the integration of tourism, often seen as an undifferentiated mass phenomenon. This vision makes it very difficult to promote a balanced development of local economies. It is increasingly evident that this topic cannot be simply governed by acting from the perspective of supply, limiting to define the destinations.

Without an intervention on the demand side, there is a risk of only ineffective interventions, which could even worsen the situation trying to deal with dynamics that are now uncontrollable. It is essential to start a preliminary cultural action, able to distinguish and understand the different reasons that drive visitors.

Now, big cities and popular tourist destinations, which have been enjoying a growing success for decades, are now facing profound imbalances due to mass tourism. The influx of visitors, who often have little interest in the culture or history of places, is mainly motivated by the desire to conform to a kind of ‘identity fashion’, like being part of those who can say they spent a week in a particular location or took part in an exclusive event. This type of experiential consumerism, related to mass tourism, ends up ‘consuming’ the destinations, altering their economy and compromising their usability. The result is that even the locals, who benefit economically from the influx of tourists, take to the streets to protest against the overcrowding and call for the introduction of a limited number of visitors. This happens in Barcelona as much as in San Gimignano, in Venice as much as in Pompeii, and creates the perverse temptation to select visitors by their wealth. In this way, there is an attempt to control the access to the places in order to promote an ‘exclusive’ experience, sold for a high price and perceived as low impact, but accessible only to few.

Even small towns, as well as rural and mountain areas with their villages and unspoilt landscapes, are struggling to manage a balanced relationship with tourism. These local communities, already weakened by abandonment and depopulation, struggle to develop effective strategies to welcome visitors without further compromising their social and environmental fabric.

Many mayors of less known places, who struggled for years to ensure that their territories could take part in the (apparent) ‘banquet’ of mass tourism, are now beginning to reckon with the results of festivals and fairs organised in order to bring attention to their squares, even for just one day a year. The result is unanimous: there are more wastepaper and cans to be thrown away than the economic and social benefits.

Only in few places a local community, even a small one, capable of offering authentic pieces of everyday life and ways of appreciating places that sensitive visitors can experience unfiltered, can be found. These tourists, moved by a respectful and non-consumptive curiosity, represent a balanced and collaborative demand for tourism. More or less consciously, they are looking for an experience that will bring them closer to a form of ‘living differently’, far from the models of mass tourism.

To give a few representative examples, these include the collective recovery of entire abandoned alpine villages, the collaborative reconstruction of dry-stone walls on terraces, and activities like dialect translation exercises, educational explorations of the landscape, stays in ‘art parks’ and theme paths on the trail of mythical stories.

The analysis of these virtuous experiences, often located in mountain contexts or in protected areas, makes it possible to identify some operational criteria for developing innovative projects able to respond to the new tourism and cultural demand. These initiatives can be launched even without a strong and active local community, an increasingly rare resource that will become even harder to find in the following years.

These traces need to be critically taken up and experimentally reinvented in the new tourism enterprises, which, according to the hypothesis presented until now, can represent one of the most easily activatable services to satisfy the new cultural demand. They can become a true infrastructure of collective interest, accessible and capable of offering a sensory experience of aspects, spaces and relationships that are considered meaningful.

Manifesto for a ‘new’ tourism

These represent the first lines of a manifesto for a new tourism, where the host and guest can dialogue and share experiences. A non-exclusive tourism, but rather a promoter of integration between different cultures, encouraging local experiments and slow rhythms inspired by nature, that pays attention to storytelling, memory formation and the ability to appreciate the emotions outside social media, encouraging active participation and acting as a call to action.

1. The most deep and emotional and cultural involvement of visitors occurs when the guest, in turn, becomes in some way also a receiver (it is not a coincidence that in Italian there is only one word for both roles involved in the event of the visit). The distance between the host and the visitor must be reduced to the minimum, to the point of becoming almost interchangeable. This allows the visitor to interact with the territory as a resident would, following at least part of the daily activities, and at the same time, gives dignity to the visitor’s experience narration. This will open up new horizons for the local community, while local experiences will offer visitors a new way of perceiving everyday life. In this way, Ulysses thanks the hospitality of Alcinoo, Nausica’s father, by sharing the story of his journey and his knowledge, while listening to the stories of his kingdom. It is a practical experience of cultural exchange, where, initially, it does not matter much if what takes place is a simplified version of authentic practices or a dissemination of complex knowledge. What is important is that it is effective and engaging for both sides, perceived as a reciprocal gift, overcoming the unequal dynamics imposed by capitalism and colonialism, which have affected relationships between different places for centuries (we are referring to Baudrillard’s idea of gift).
2. It is necessary to overturn the logic of ‘exclusive’ performance, which only allows the appreciation of some physical aspects of the heritage, and instead adopt an inclusive approach. This should allow the visitor to systematically get in touch with the ‘active landscape’, made up by those who, for institutional, voluntary or professional reasons, take care of the territory, its products, its memories and its management. In this way, it will be possible to present completely different and unexpected aspects and points of view of the places.

It is one of the most effective ways to promote the understanding of complexity, which has to be seen as a co-presence of heritage items and activities that support the territory. This approach encourages a synthesis to be reassembled like a Lego, without following a rigid model, allowing everyone to assemble the pieces of a reality that is difficult to grab at one stroke. In this sense, the ‘exclusive’ service fails to offer the same richness as the inclusive and shared ones: for the visitor, it is expensive and only helps to confirm their expectations, robbing the user of the pleasure of discovery and serendipity.

3. Inclusive supply is slow by definition: it takes time, which allows experiences to settle, gives space to questions and allows for trials. Only in this way meetings with the ‘active landscape’ can activate a fundamental competence: cultural curiosity, which means the desire to deepen, following the classical research method to explore complexity. In this context, the coexistence of knowledge, ranging from the oral to the specialised ones derived from scientific investigations, contributes to outlining an overall image and meaning of the places. Everyone should feel free to define this image according to their own contributions, aware of participating in a great work in progress, open to new explorations leading to new discoveries.
4. At the beginning, the scale of exploration must be accessible to the senses and small projects, because it is much easier to share aspects of places, activities and stories when they are proportionate to the capacity for vision and action. It gradually comes to share and be moved by complex landscapes and long-term projects, which are often unattractive, despite being the most significant for the area. At first, the new visitor looks for elements he/she can identify with, which are within his/her reach. So, at the beginning of the new tourism, the favourite destinations are not the centre of Paris or St. Peter’s, but rather the vineyard replanted with historical cultivars discovered by chance, the flood-damaged path opened again thanks to everyone’s voluntary work, and the chapel restored using a technique discovered by a local craftsman.
5. The narrative techniques and, in general, then construction of places’ memory should be open and allow for personal and subjective interaction. Images are more powerful than words, fragmentation and the art of patchwork prevail over the systematic fresco, and surprise is more important than preparatory information. It starts with the idea that the new tourist likes to feed on culture but prefers to enjoy small portions rather than follow a fixed menu.

It is fundamental to make both host and guest responsible for the narration of the place, dedicating time and space to ‘didactic’ experiments to justify, also from an ethical point of view, the interpretative subjectivity that characterises the relationship between gesture and register, experience and narration, emotion and rationality.

It is necessary to train visitors to listen and locals to tell stories through ‘conscious storytelling’ performances, once the impossibility of a documentary restitution of places without a subjective and emotional vision has been recognised. This approach emphasises and gives explicit meaning to interpretative aspects, qualifying experience as a privileged space of knowledge and judgement, not only personal, but also for others, who are interested in comparing different kinds of subjectivity.

In summary, the approach to unknown areas – whether tourist or migratory – should be active, local, slow, curious and cooperative between host and guest. This not only represents a source of qualified local development, but also represents an inclusive and pacifying form of knowledge, which is finally desirable and can also be shared by the new generations of inhabitants of the planet.