Recently we launched #ilfturonellenostreradici and since then we have received many requests for help and collaboration. So it's time to make some reflections.
You may not know that for years I have been dealing with small municipalities trying to help them find their cultural role that can lead to socio-economic survival / rebirth. I write stories of apparently unimportant towns, today's one has 83 inhabitants and 3 millennia of history in Abruzzo.
I do it together with my group of Discoverplaces.travel which is a portal and a publishing house and we do everything in Italian and English.
I was thinking that for centuries our response to the crises we have faced has been emigration and this will be the first real crisis that we will have to manage at home, with a journey into ourselves and into our history, and we will not have the easy way out of going abroad.
In recent years we have witnessed a real escape of emigrating young ‘brains’ in search of opportunities. As a group that takes care of connecting Italian emigrants of many years ago, with their family members from the towns of origin, we have built many contacts with people who live outside of Italy.
A friend of mine from Perth a year ago asked me what was happening here with us in Italy, because the consulate was invaded by young graduates looking for a new chance. And he made the comparison with when his family had arrived in Australia with cardboard suitcases while those of today are the cultural cream of our country.
Yet we need these young people to build cultural tourism, especially considering that often low-schooled people in micro enterprises work in tourism and this cannot be the catalyst for the development of this sector.
Yet today we have to face something totally new.
This time it's different, we will have to find #ilfturonellenostreradici. We are locked in the house and perhaps for a long time we feel safer to embrace a family member than to go out into the world where we cannot see the dangers and here protect ourselves from fearsome viruses.
We are taking an inner journey in which the real points of reference are our roots, the real certainty on which we can have no doubt. Then slowly we can return to find confidence in other situations.
And this isn't just about my generation.
Perhaps even young people will not think of going immediately to crowded and noisy places as the first thing to do once we reopen our homes. But if I think of how many of young boys and girls that are my daughter's age, have started their work experience from restaurants or clubs, it occurs to me that there is a generation that has to redesign all its entry into adult life.
And they will no longer be able to think of finding a solution by leaving Italy and going to look for better jobs abroad. If they want better pay we will have to fight together to help the country recover and find a solution within the perimeter of our community.
Perhaps by finding and rebuilding ties with some of the many emigrants abroad who still have part of their heart in the towns of origin in Italy. A strong bond if we think that even the powerful Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA, found one afternoon of his life to go and discover Pacentro, the town in Abruzzo where his grandparents left.
Instinctively I know that we will enter the world again in small steps, and in these small steps there will be some of our answers.
A journey into our deepest identity, as we have always said, that identity that is the point from which you must start for a tourism development programme built for a territory.
This probably means that we will have to make many agreements develop relationships: between those who govern and the opposition, but also agreements between generations, agreements between the countryside and the city, agreements between the preservation and use of cultural heritage, agreements between industries and pollution ...
Perhaps all these relationships that we now have to go back to compose can be summarized in the reconciliation between past and future.
What do you think?
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