Le potenzialità turistiche delle aree interne italiane: un’analisi cartografica ottenuta dalle classificazioni ufficiali

Italy’s internal areas have been part of the scientific and political debate for several years. The debate has often focused on the territorial inequalities which are distinctive of these areas and on their unexpressed potential. More recently, the 2014-20 EU programming has brought attention back to these areas through the National Strategy of Inner Areas coordinated by the Agency for Territorial Cohesion. The classification of these areas declines the same territories as “inland”, “remote” or “marginal”, but in any case, not deprived of potential to be expressed with respect to environmental, landscape, social and even tourist resources. This work sets out to investigate the potential of Italy’s internal areas from the tourism point of view. To this end, a recent taxonomy realized by ISTAT during the pandemic period, regarding the tourism classification of Italian municipalities based on tourism density is used. This work, which has the task of highlighting any territorial tourism connection, alongside the identification of the redominant tourism category of each municipality, proposes composite indicators constructed ad hoc on tourism supply and demand. The combination of this information with the mapping of the internal areas allows us to verify how much tourism is actually spread in these areas and consequently to assess their tourism potential. Before illustrating the main empirical evidence obtained, some methodological critical issues related to the two official classifications used here will be made explicit.