The Roots Tourism Promotion Project, included in Mission 1, component 3, Investment 2.1 of Next Generation EU (PNRR) foresees a financing of 20 million euros. It aims at increasing the demand for tourist services by Italian descendants throughout the world (about 80 million people), including those of the new generation, by creating a targeted and structured tourist offer, far from the traditional destinations of Italian tourism, conceived of to satisfy the requests and expectations of roots travelers. It is therefore a great opportunity for the enhancement of small hamlets and those internal areas subject in the past, as well as today, to depopulation caused by outgoing migratory flows.
Roots tourism is therefore a resource because it does not burden areas where tourism already has a significant impact but puts lesser-known territories at the center of tourist circuits.
By implementing the guidelines of the European Union, the initiatives that MAECI intends to promote with the Roots Tourism Project are inspired by eco-sustainability, digitization and support for youth employment, aiming in particular at creating a new recognized professionalism of operators specialized in roots tourism.
The offer that will be structured for roots travelers tends to go beyond the assumption on the basis of which the Italians abroad are essentially promoters of Made in Italy. Instead, we believe we can take advantage of the extraordinary possibilities offered by this initiative to create a strengthened relationship between Italy and its communities abroad, based on mutual understanding. This is what happens when roots travelers visit the communities and places from which their ancestors came, and which in this way allows the rift produced between those who left and those who stayed behind to be mended, from a historical, social and cultural point of view, as the anthropologist Vito Teti would say. Roots Tourism is therefore to be considered important in terms of enhancing the national cultural wealth as an opportunity to rediscover a common heritage, shared by a huge community of people scattered all over the world and who are linked by common traditions, culture and historical events.
SPEAKERS
Giovanni De Vita
Ministro degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale Responsabile progetto PNRR sul Turismo delle Radici
