Turismo culturale in Langhe, Monferrato e Roero: paesaggio, enogastronomia e letteratura in Turistica. Italian Journal of Tourism

SPOT is a three-year project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 program between January 2020 and December 2022. It aimed to develop a new approach to understanding and addressing cultural tourism in fifteen case studies in Europe and Israel, improving the development of disadvantaged areas and planning strategies aimed at a balance in more developed areas. The Italian case study is the Langhe, Monferrato and Roero area where cultural tourism has experienced strong development at a multidimensional level over the past decades. The main cultural resources are food and wine experiences, tangible cultural heritage and the hilly landscape.

This paper aims to illustrate the representations of cultural tourism that the local community has developed. Thus, we ask about ways of understanding cultural tourism and how it can be a vector of resilience for the area and engagement in the promotion and enhancement of the tourism destination in the post-Covid phase. Although the research found very traditional and static semantic representations of the area's cultural tourism resources in the local community, residents consider places more desirable and worthy of interest to a guest to be those that are more connected to the landscape and its visual value.