How overtourism is transforming Naples.
The city's popularity translates into a boom in visitors storming the historic downtown. That gets rid of residents: more profitable bed & breakfasts. And it becomes a kind of Disney. But is it really an unstoppable process?
Naples gold. Golden is the moment for the city, among the most sought-after tourist destinations in the world: 14 million visitors in 2023, 2 million more than in 2022. A continuous, seamless flow that fuels disturbing questions about the future, near future, of a city that has always been iconic, recognizable, unique. And which today finds itself perilously poised between the temptation to make tourism its gold and the romantically unrenounceable vision of those who would prefer that the wave-sometimes barbaric-do not pay attention to its identity.
The point is that, exalted by the international media and by fictions, which here more than elsewhere become popular, as if a spell (admittedly Neapolitan) is blowing on their success, Naples is indeed experiencing a renaissance. And of "rebirth" has, not coincidentally, written in recent months Time, indicating it in the top 50 places to visit worldwide. "With a hint of emphasis, Naples feels like the capital of world tourism," admits with pride the City of Naples Councillor for Tourism, Teresa Armato. "A city taken by storm by international flows and by young people, with numbers that assign us a great responsibility: to prevent the boom from being temporary." But there is another one, of responsibility, that Naples feels today more than ever: defending itself from globalization.
Can it, this city of a thousand faces, run the risk not only of denouncing an infrastructural gap only partly mitigated by the (too slow) growth of metropolitan transport service but above all of being disoriented byovertourism, bending to the commercial logic of a disordered flow of millions of hit-and-run visitors?
There is increasing talk of a disneyalization of the city, that is, a posturing for the use and consumption of tourists-consumers, in line with similar processes denounced in cities such as Barcelona and Paris, but also in "our" Florence and Venice. And the real risk is the transformation of the historic center into a huge playground offering tourists what they are looking for, with a fast track for the pizza and mandolin cliché, with the ever-popular variant of fried food (and the disappearance of art stores). Not to mention the profound transformations of its internal geography, which is affected by the (inexorable?) transformation of apartments into bel and breakfasts, undoubtedly more profitable. At the expense, however, of residents. Who are, precisely, part of the wealth - expressive, cultural, anthropological - of the place. And who, fatally, are disappearing from the city's cultural places. How, then, can this be curbed?
Theentire report is published in issue 1 of Grand Tour
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