About the useless red carpets that are invading Liguria

I wonder if Giovanni Toti, the governor of the Liguria region, has ever read that excellent book by La Spezia journalist Marco Ferrari entitled Mare verticale (Vertical Sea). It is a sort of initiation rite for the fine traveler who wants to venture into the strip of coast enclosed between Levanto and Bocca di Magra, but also for the inhabitant who wants to get to know his own land better: and like any self-respecting initiation rite, Marco Ferrari’s also starts from the deepest abysses that the initiate can touch (and which in the book, fortunately, last a short time), and then slowly progresses and rises to the lofty heights of arts and letters. The abysses, in Mare verticale, are simply the Cinque Terre, which have sold their souls to the massified tourism of Americans who wander around with Rick Steves’ guidebook in their pocket, looking for those places for a “perfect summer getaway” advocated by the Huffington Post, but which they will be forced to share with thousands of other compatriots guilty of turning the Via Fegina promenade into a sort of Fifth Avenue away to Monterosso al Mare. A tiny strip of coastline, twenty kilometers long at best, but traversed every day by vociferous, noisy, sweaty crowds, storming the regional trains that shuttle between Spezia and Levanto and driving the locals to find refuge elsewhere: in the nearby beaches of Levanto and Bonassola for those who want to enjoy a bit of sea, in the center of Spezia for those who (paradoxically, one would think) want to keep away from the chaos.

But perhaps Giovanni Toti did not read the above book and must have been thinking of the average massified tourist, just like the one who wanders around backpacking and camera around his neck among the alleys of Vernazza or Riomaggiore, when he thought the new initiative to promote tourism in the cities of Liguria was interesting: kilometers of red carpets, laid in the focal points of some of the most relevant villages of the region, in order to “welcome visitors with an exceptional catwalk.” We read about the aims of the project in the new regional tourism promotion website, lamialiguria.it: a portal that, with third-rate gossip magazine phrasing (some headlines from the home page: “the secret beaches,” “the most scenic beaches,” “the Ligurian diet for the summer,” “ten itineraries in dreamy villages,” “the ten must-see food experiences in Genoa”), devotes a special section to the locations crossed by the vermilion red carpets. Or rather: by the "red carpets," as the promotional campaign identifies them. Because we certainly did not want to forgo the obvious trashy anglicism that evokes cinematic atmospheres.

The red carpet in Montemarcello (La Spezia). Photo: Windows on Art

Far from deeming, as some have ventured, the installation of red carpets in Ligurian towns a “disfigurement” (although in Portovenere, damage to the pavement in front of the church of San Pietro has been detected due to the nails by which the carpet was fixed, and the Superintendence has already thundered against the initiative), it is nonetheless necessary to oppose some considerations. Starting with the fact that red carpets do not add anything to the villages that host them, especially if designed for the purpose of making “welcome.” They are other priorities that the region should keep in mind, when it comes to hospitality: in the 2016 report of the Liguria Tourism Observatory, commissioned by Unioncamere Liguria to the National Institute of Tourism Research, the least exciting results in terms of travelers’ judgment of their stay concerned the presence of free wi-fi connections in the area, prices in marinas, the courtesy and hospitality of the people and the availability of tourist information in the area. Thus, it is not clear how a red carpet can guarantee a better welcome, if tourists then have difficulty finding information (and it would be enough to take a look at the opening hours of many tourist information and reception offices to get an idea) or do not find the hospitality of the locals exhilarating.

Again: rolling out red carpets is a move that fosters that transformation of the area into a tourist amusement park against which attempts are being made from many quarters to curb. The villages run the risk of being reduced even more to locations, and not to living cities, to places where the inhabitants perform the function of masks that respond exclusively to the needs of the tourist, and not that of citizens who fully live the territory. And what’s more, it is a move accompanied by the dreadful cafonal message that promises to “give star emotions” to the tourist: a very bad operation of that vacuous, banal, stale marketing, poor in ideas, capable only of speaking to the most boorish instincts, outdated and not even taken into consideration by the most up-to-date debates, and that above all one would never want to see applied to one’s own land, all the more so if it is a land that needs a true valorization.

Take, for example, one of the latest “red carpets” installed in the region, that of Montemarcello, inaugurated last Sunday. A carpet that, one can still read on “lamialiguria.it,” aspires to “enhance the history of the village and its architectural heritage, such as the circular tower of 1286 and the 17th-century church, up to the limits of the inhabited center where the view opens onto one of the most evocative panoramas of the territory.” One might think how it is possible to enhance the specificities of Montemarcello if the red carpet almost completely covers the typical terracotta pavement that runs through the streets of the village, in some places even obscuring it altogether, but there is more. In fact, while the alleys of this village clinging to the top of the Caprione promontory are being spread with useless and caustic red carpets, in the halls of institutions there are discussions around a proposal of the regional councillor for the environment, namely, theabolition of the Montemarcello-Magra-Vara Regional Natural Park, a protected area of more than four thousand hectares, established in 1982 and then extended in 1985 and 1995, with the aim of safeguarding the unique environment of the Val di Magra and Val di Vara, whose main characteristic is the extreme richness of its microclimates thanks to which, Legambiente assures, the valleys of the Magra and Vara rivers, which stretch from the Apennines to the sea, have developed a “reservoir of biodiversity twice as high as the average of national rivers.” But that’s not all: the Park has always performed a fundamental function as a guard against the aggression of building speculation and overbuilding. First of all, the proposal to abolish the Park is not based on any scientific assumptions, but only on bureaucratic reasons (however, it is not by abolishing the Park that its problems will be solved: if anything, a serious reform is needed), and then it appears in blatant contradiction with the desire to “enhance” a village that is an integral part of that Park, so much so that it is included in its name.

One wonders, therefore, what is the point of red carpet “valorization” if it then diminishes the protection of the territory, if it is not accompanied by targeted actions (such as the simple installation of explanatory panels illustrating the history of the hamlet), if serious initiatives are not undertaken to improve usability, reception and accessibility of the places to be valorized, and if no thought is given to the fact that our cities, even before being attractions for tourists, are places where other people have to spend entire existences. Rather than organizing spot initiatives, ephemeral, scarcely effective and good only to waste a little ink on some complacent scribbler inclined to “get excited” on command simply by reading a press release, let us therefore think about improving what really interests tourists. And which also often coincides with what locals are interested in.

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