Rigenerazione e turismo di prossimità. Interventi sostenibili per rilanciare i borghi con gli Alberghi Diffusi Rigeneration and proximity tourism. Sustainable actions to revive historical hamlets with Alberghi Diffusi

The health emergency and the consequent reduction of people’s mobility require a rethinking of tourist destinations receiving many visitors. There is an opportunity to redistribute tourist flows towards places with a lower anthropic pressure. This entails a proximity tourism addressing historical hamlets, which today’s great architects consider as the “places for future living”; they are available and numerous. New forms of tourism based on alternative itineraries and networks connecting attractive but less-known places, providing authentic and unusual experiences. In this context, actions to relaunch and promote historical hamlets create community networks that can became tools for dynamic and synergic regeneration, through ‘quality’ recovery and optimization of collective benefits, in terms of identity and territorial heritage, to meet “new community needs”. The Albergo Diffuso (AD) as an accommodation model is perfectly coherent with the European Commission initiative towards a sustainable and resilient European tourist ecosystem. This paper addresses how and to what extent the AD can affect regeneration of hamlets, by illustrating the results of a ‘field’ study conducted in cooperation with the Associazione Nazionale Alberghi Diffusi (after about 25 years since the first experiments). The attention towards energy-efficient solutions with a low impact on building features, using appropriate upcycling principles as well as natural local materials, has underpinned most operations, transforming recovery, reuse, and enhancement actions into actual laboratories for innovation and experimentation.