Tourism as resource in managing the valorisation of the urban and territorial heritage within the Mediterranean basin. MOTRIS a proposal of Integrated Relational Tourism.

In this paper, following the issue launched by the Opening Session, I would like to stress the role that some forms of tourism can play as resource to enhance and then to protect the local heritage. A role that can be particularly significant especially in those marginal areas such as the inland territories of the Mediterranean regions. Places often very rich in a widespread and unstated resources “spontaneous system”. In the paper, I present a vision of local development reaching through the application of a kind of tourism, the Integrated Relational Tourism (or IRT), which could be useful to enhance and to protect both urban/territorial heritage and local communities. The same communities that have given origin to that heritage, in the past, and that should be the principal custodian of it, today. I would like to point-out, as premises, one important issues. Not all the kinds of existing tourism can play this role, of course, we cannot think to the massive/industrial touristic offers, that is able only to homologate and to trasform to its own needs the places, the heritages and the people culture itself. Just referring at Sharm_El_Sheik, or one of the others tourism main “attractors” in the world, you can easily understand what I want to mean!