Tourism in the Mediterranean area, between fragility, crisis and new frontiers of development: comparison of practises

The restrictive measures necessarily adopted to contain the spread of the Covid-19 virus immediately showed the weaknesses of the tourism sector. This event underlined the structural difficulties within the sector, which have been so far hidden by fully positive economic benefits that, on an ongoing basis, made the perverse relationship between the economic advantage of few stakeholders and the conquest and progressive consumption of the places of destination a secondary aspect. This condition has urged the need to consider taking a new direction as well as the importance of revising some planning and governance processes of the territory, with a greater attention to the issues of sustainability, authenticity and experience, especially in those places affected by over tourism, such as some areas of the Mediterranean basin. The aim of the study is related to those territories of the Mediterranean basin area, where at times the tourist development was managed by an exogenous matrix that has effectively caused the creation of a landscape image as a mere cultural projection outside the reference context. The methodological approach is focused on the analysis of the pre-Covid period and the subsequent comparison of good tourist practices, whose effectiveness in terms of sustainable territorial development, is evidenced by obvious results that have become, in this paper, good practices. The expected outcomes reflect the possibility of gradually adding diversified forms of tourism to homologating ones, as an alternative that could place the interest of the host community, determining alternative and in many ways innovative development paths, as has been shown to exemplify in the section dedicated to case studies.