A mild rural gentrification driven by tourism and second homes. Cases from Italy

The article intends to describe the social evolution of Italian countryside through the lenses of eco-gentrification. The term was born in urban contexts, but can also be fruitful for the study of processes in rural areas. Although there is a large international literature on rural gentrification, the combination with the eco suffix is less frequent. For this reason it seems necessary to identify the specific features and the semantic boundaries of this concept. We will try to problematize the concept in the first part of the article. Next, we will focus on the different waves of urbanization of the countryside, in order to frame the specificity of the Italian situation. At last, three cases have been selected and commented. The main result is that tourism and search for a second home has been the driver of limited ecological gentrification of Italian rural areas. The rural gentrification has become in the last years also a policy target, whose aim is to cope with depopulation.