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!