Globalized tourism and local development: an apparent contradiction? A test in Lignano Sabbiadoro, Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, Italy

The tourist economy is assuming a growing relevance in the actual reality, possibly becoming the most important and even the driving factor for cultural and territorial systems. The opening of markets at a global scale would possibly accelerate such scenario, since the greater is the market, presumably, the stronger it is expected to be the standardization pressure on the local scale. The Mediterranean space, in its different articulations, shows a possible counter/tendency in this process, evidencing a resistance to standardization (which the macro data describe as something more than a culturalist “common place”); it continues to represent the culture of the “slow”, of the uniqueness, of authenticity, based upon traditions and communitarian belonging, with typical natural and agricultural resources, style of life and social-cultural habits, in contrast with massification and industrialization of tourist activities. A circumstance in which it is possible to observe a contradiction, since the attention for the “small” and for the “slow” could be in contrast with the necessities of corporate and global business, which at the contrary relies on scale economics; a contradiction which needs to find, at least in part, a solution in order to assure to Mediterranean systems the necessary efficiency, at the same time preserving the authenticity of traditional cultures. In order to focus to such question – which is possibly one of the structural causes of the stagnation affecting several Mediterranean economies -, we did a test on the tourist place of Lignano, region Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG), on the Upper Adriatic coast.