Dreaming of Remoteness,Coping with Emptiness in Post-Lockdown (Under)Tourism Scenarios for the Inner Areas of Southern Italy: aFieldwork Based Reflection

ce the neo-liberal shift of the 1970s in world politics and economics, Italian inner areas have faced a seemingly endless crisis in terms of both economic weakness and social fragility. However, the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis and its related travel restrictions could provoke an unexpected U-turn. Under new conditions, the physical and social remoteness of inner areas might attract people in search of places that boast COVID-19 safety measures, such as outdoor experiences and relatively vacant sites, as well as authentic experiences in food, nature and cultural heritage–places outside the standard tourist offer that stand apart from more popular and busier destinations and partake in a sort of “under-tourism”. However, the “imagined remoteness” that drives the public and academic conversation towards the tourist seduction of inner areas has often been idealised and affected by a sort of “Arcadic imagination projection”. Not many people know what it really means to live in a remote area, where social and physical distances are huge and the basicservices scarce. Thus, the success of post-lockdown tourism strategies centered on inner areas would depend on the positive matching between the needs of “new” tourism business and the ones of “new” destinations. In this article, we propose a possible interpretation of this challenge, based on the elaboration of data collected during a three-month fieldwork conducted in fourteen small towns of the Basilicata and Calabria regions that reside in Gallipoli Cognato -Piccole Dolomiti Lucane Regional Park and Pollino National Park. Our analysis aims to give a more realistic picture of the notions of emptiness and remoteness by assessing the degree of compatibility and the semantic distance between the expectation of the tourism business and the needs of residents in these inner areas.