2.1. An Overview of Cultural Tourism
Cultural tourism has been recognised as one of the largest and fastest-growing tourism sectors, at least until early 2020 when the pandemic was declared. Tourism is a social phenomenon that puts the economy, environment, culture, and politics into a complex and interrelated system. Over time, scholars and policy makers have developed actions of various nature and scope regarding tourism, its organisation, management, and planning. Local stakeholders, namely host communities and local entrepreneurs, have different concerns regarding the tourism industry because it represents both a source of wealth and a potential cause of cultural change. Nowadays, the most shared perspective, in which the development of such a complex social and economic activity can be thought, is the paradigm of sustainability with its contradictions and rhetoric [
18,
19,
20,
21].
It is very difficult to define cultural tourism because the notion of culture is always directly related to the perspective of time and space. Reference is generally made to visiting the cultural resources of a place, region or country. To preliminarily define it, cultural tourism seems to be one of the earliest forms of mobility for expressive and communicative purposes, and not just for instrumental ones. Interest in the cultures, habits, customs, and artefacts of others, together with a general desire to push the boundaries of knowledge, are traits coexisting in humanity itself [
22].
Cultural tourism manages to combine not only different resources for tourists’ attractions but also different activities to entertain them [
23]. Therefore, tangible and intangible heritage, landscape, traditional knowledge and crafts are all motivations for tourists, while host communities work on their own legacies and practices to present themselves on the “glocal” tourist market [
24].
Examining its historical development, the emergence of a cultural tourism emphasises different values over time. Representations of the high culture, arts, and history characterised Italian attractiveness in the early times of travels and tourism. More recently, the interest for the natural and the authentic can be related both to the incessant urbanisation, which involves all Western countries, and a sort of progressive sophistication that leads from the proximity to nature and pre-industrial culture to the actual post-industrial societies [
25].
In the current European societies, the urban and rural contexts are equally considered cultural tourism destinations, especially since attention to experiences and the active role of tourists has progressively differentiated the tourism supply and demand process [
26]. Rural environment through landscape attractiveness [
27,
28] and its related products meet the postmodern tourist’s search for food and gastronomy [
29,
30].
Therefore, the sociological understanding of cultural tourism is complex, so much so that it can be categorised on the basis of both the activities undertaken and the motivation that drives the tourist to carry them out. As Du Cros and McKercher and [
31] underline, when tourism is analysed from multiple points of view, a sort of circularity emerges. If a technical definition of cultural tourism takes into account all the movements of people towards cultural attractions, a conceptual definition instead privileges the cognitive traits of this shift, highlighting the travellers’ intention to collect new information and experiences to satisfy their own cultural needs [
32].
Culture is promoted to attract travellers to a certain location or to offer particular experiences: impacts of tourism on culture and cultural reproduction are widely discussed, especially when specific identity traits enter the consumer circuit and cause various impacts on the cultural characteristics of the host communities [
33]. Today, cultural tourism focuses on the attractions, activities and experiences that become the main motivating factors for travel, even if their practices receive growing and crucial attention [
34]. Nonetheless, classifying the forms of cultural tourism is always a partial exercise: it can take into account the cultural products of the present or the past offered to or enjoyed by tourists. For this reason, it can relate to the past with its traditions and its objects: the interest in history is expanding enormously, especially with its transformation into heritage. Yet as Holtorf argues [
35], looking at heritage futures, it is less important to know what cultural heritage is than what it does.
Heritage seems omnipresent today and operates as a constant process that involves cultural resources and operates massively through social and institutional arrangements at different international, national and local levels [
36]. Among these, non-governmental organisations focusing on the peaceful expansion of knowledge and education, such as UNESCO, have a very particular role in the taxonomy of cultural tourism and the activities that are undertaken locally. The participatory processes of an inscription on the World Heritage List are an aspect of cultural tourism with an ever-wider impact [
37], including in Italy [
38].
It is precisely because of the breadth and temporal rootedness of the relationship between society and culture, on the one hand, and tourism, on the other, that the great “container” of cultural tourism could be attributed to entertainment and holidays, the experience of food and wine, and visiting cultural heritage sites and buildings. Likewise, the enjoyment of the geographical features, the environment, and the ways of life of the inhabitants of a certain region, as well as its historical sites, significant attractions, and its ritual customs, are a cultural experience.
2.2. Defining Cultural Tourism in Italy
Italy is a privileged destination for cultural tourism in the world. It still benefits from a sort of historical and touristic stratification. Some scholars trace the matrix of today’s cultural tourism to the practice of the Grand Tour historically developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries [
39]. Through the rediscovery of ancient Roman civilization, the two centuries of the Grand Tour certainly represented one of the first historical moments in which it was possible to experience a peaceful cosmopolitanism. However, it was reserved for a small group of travellers, mainly aristocrats coming from the Northern regions of Europe. Within the Grand Tour, the Italian peninsula and its culture is recognised as having a central role in inspiring the changes in the European social space through the spread of Renaissance ideas [
40].
Protecting and safeguarding cultural heritage is an opportunity to motivate today’s tourists to visit Italian heritage, and it arises in the wake of the past, such as in the past the Grand Tourists came to the Italian peninsula. Historical heritage and the development of a heritage consciousness in the Italian pre-Unitarian states were realised in a chronological parallel of the Grand Tour practices. According to art historians, the Italian peninsula was at the forefront in the protection of its historical and artistic heritage in the pre-Unitarian and pre-republican periods [
41].
In their contribution to pioneering work in the study of cultural tourism, van der Borg and Costa [
42] considered cultural heritage connected to the listed and protected conservation areas officially recognised by the Italian Ministry of Culture and Tourism. A definition of cultural tourism for Italy, starting from the official statistics compiled by the Italian Institute of Statistics [
43], takes into account its restriction to the sphere of cultural heritage, especially historical and artistic sites and monuments. Nevertheless, as pointed out in the periodic report on Italian tourism (
Rapporto sul turismo italiano), it is important to shift from the “Site and monument approach to the experience approach” in the field of tourism and cultural consumption [
44]. Nowadays, the role of tourist attractions is granted to Italian cultural resources as a whole: in other words, the visitor and the tourist are consumers of Italian culture [
45], in its broadest sense. Culture and tourism have a virtuous relationship because they may cover a spectrum of Italian cultural activities that extend from museums to cities and places of art in a growing combination of creative industries and the growth of tourism that also considers the landscape as an element of great interest [
46].
2.3. Research Questions for the Italian Case Study
In the multidisciplinary field of tourism studies, tourism planning is that set of analyses and practices that aim to develop tourism in a controlled and integrated manner in order to maximise its positive impacts and minimise the negative ones (Edgell et al., 2013).
Concluding his historical overview on tourism and social sciences, Holden (2005) argues: “destinations that we view as desirable to visit are highly influenced by cultural perceptions” (p. 37). Those are both produced in the destination area and in the tourists’ homes. This is why the local community’s representations of cultural resources for tourism is an interesting issue to question not only the renowned tourist attractions but also residents’ most meaningful heritage. Rural tourism is considered a strong lever for the case study area, above all in its rooting into the multiple dimensions of intangible heritage and resources for the tourist attraction [
9,
47].
The coronavirus pandemic has completely overturned all the terms of tourism space interrelations planning and objectives; actors and governance; stakes, motivations and behaviour, and the tourist consumption of individuals and groups. However, the situation in which we are still immersed (as of writing this article in February 2021) also has the burden of making us reflect deeply and for a long time on many aspects that affect the most recent past, the present, and above all, the future of tourism not only at the regional and national level but worldwide. If in other aspects of social life, the consequences of the pandemic are still developing, in tourist mobility, they have had immediate and disruptive visibility, forcing us to think in a completely changed context in terms of economic system, social distancing and ecological concerns [
48,
49,
50,
51,
52].