Today and tomorrow a sustainable experience for better tourism in Florence.
What should we expect from a sustainable experience?
It’s simple and complicated at the same time, explaining sustainable tourism.
When you are planning to come to Florence or Cinque Terre or Tuscany you normally dream of yourself in that specific place by yourself.
Our imagination only thinks of ourselves,imagine NOW not being by yourself but surrounded by 12 million tourists.
How does it feel?
Why 12 million tourists, because Florence is visited every year by this amount of tourists. Think for a second the impact of this amount of people in our territory.
It’s massive, affecting everything from sewers to house pricing.
Sustainable experience Florence
My studies at University were in the Social impacts of tourism. The results depend on where tourism is applied. In first world countries like European countries tourism was affecting largely in a positive way instead in poor countries mass tourism has exploited and produced largely negative impacts.
We focused on Florence and Tuscany.
How could we fix this problem?
2 solutions are the largest applied in Florence and Tuscany.
The first one is taxes, here called Tassa di soggiorno. The results are the money collected are used by the Comune not for projects to renovate Florence but only to keep it going on the same line with extra cash to spend on short terms decisions, in fact during Covid the Comune has to face a problem of cash flowing of more than 60 million of euros, due to less tourist tax. These should be extra money for extra projects instead are money used for daily basic things.
The second one is to attract people at different times of the year. It’s complicated because apart from reducing the price of the stay (done automatically by private businesses), people don’t really want to come and enjoy Florence in the cold rain if not because they don’t have any other time to travel. Creating events or fair in the slow tourism season definitely helps but not enough to have a real feeling of something changing.
Neither of them are really working, the first solution is used to make the comune drunk of cash spent wrongly and the second totally uncontrolled by the public.
Are there other solutions?
Yes there are.
Attracting people to different locations.
Read this lovely article about Out of the box Florence:
https://hiddenlemur.com/out-of-the-box-florence-tuscany-wine-tours/
They are trying to support local small businesses focused and small local tourist attractions.
Sustainable tourism solutions
The first solution to have less of an impact in Florence and Tuscany is in your hands. Stay longer in a place and choose locations less demanded. Tuscany is full of wonderful littel towns and churches. Go and stay there where nobody actually lives anymore and you will have a real authentic touch of Tuscany.
Second, do experiences really linked to the territory, visit and experience local things. If you stay in Florence, don’t follow the fashion tourism industry that pushes you to go and visit cinque terre just cause someone told you, go in a river to swim or a tuscan town along the coast less busy than Cinque Terre.
Third, you can’t expect the same standards you have at home. I mean you must have what you paid for it but it should be different from home. Otherwise it is like going to mc donalds. Here in FLorence or in Los Angeles it is the same and the tourism experience should be different from country to country.
Fourth, quite hard to accept but if you come to visit Florence in october you can’t expect to have tomatoes every day cause they are not seasonal. You will have it anyway but try less, Italians do eat vegetables following seasons. Here you can understand that the best time to eat real italian tomatoes is in July or August. Please don’t come all in August or July cause there won’t be any left for us. 🙂
www.outoftheboxflorence.com/experiences/
https://hiddenlemur.com/out-of-the-box-florence-tuscany-wine-tours/
Conclusions on sustainable tourism
There is just one solution or an ultimate solution and if you have other ideas please write to me.
Gradually we have to understand that day by day we are consuming our world that is shrinking on us.
Last to mention, today came out terrible news for all of us. Climate is collapsing and putting our lives to a certain dead end road.
Have a read ad start taking small actions. We are in the rich part of the world so we have to lead the way. Don’t expect poor countries to do the same job. For years we exploited them and now we have to lead the new green revolution.
I recommend you to travel less and travel better.
The future is grey, let’s make it green and sustainable.
More conclusions 🙂
I personally think all the recycling policies and sustainable tourism are little if not tiny actions but it helps to make us more conscious of the problem.
Stop listening to those who still don’t believe climate change, they are a broken disk living with their unsatisfied lives. They are those they keep on saying life before was better when they have no idea that 40 years ago there was no electricity for their phones or air conditioning machines. Technology and science made their lives better but they don’t deserve it.
Best action will be to go back to our grandfather’s lives (without wars) but it is unacceptable by society so we need to sort this out with better, equal and understandable solutions.
Gradually the population is reducing in Europe by itself and from this climate will benefit.
Move less and do it more responsibly.
https://hiddenlemur.com/out-of-the-box-florence-tuscany-wine-tours/
https://hiddenlemur.com/featured-experiences/
