Tour-Adrion Metamorphosis

This is a conclusive chapter of the collection of scientific reports of the Tour-Adrion project. It desribes the theoretical and methodological assumptions that has driven the work of the Tour-Adrion project; also, it illustrates the way the research activities led to the goal: mapping the Adrion region for sustainable tourism purpouses. According to the author of the text, at the time of the project start up, there was neither much awareness of the kind of work carried on, nor agreement about shared methodologies. However, one thing was somewhat evident, that is to say the need of sociological immagination and creativity to picture out the «Map of Adrion» The results, after three years, convinced the participants to the research group that it was not so important to provide a frozen picture of the Adriatic-Ionian cultures or a taxonomy of customs and objects. On the contrary, the Map of Adrion appeared as an innovative tool to produce suggestions, proposals and stages for permanent cultural confrontation between the people living on the Adriatic – and all the others interestd in the topic. The Adriatic-Ionian region is here understood as a trasfrontier territory to be progressively integrated in the European Union as a Euro-Region. Such region includes different social and territorial situations, among with: cities, harbours, islands, religious and monastic communities, coastal towns, inland villages, mountains, lakes, rivers Therefore, the final goal of the Tour-Adrion project changed slightly with time. Firstly, the research group wanted both to shed light on the too often unknown Adriatic-Ionian cultural heritage and to engender the realisation of projects aimed at bridging and connecting through tourism the multiple micro-cosmos of the Adriatic. Later, the overarching target of the project emerged eventually in terms of promotion of good practices in the field of tourism and hospitality through cultural exchanges, transfer of knowledge and participating observation. It goes without sayng that such target is far from being achieved completely; but the end of the first part of the Tour-Adrion project has framed two possible direction to be pursued in the shrt term future. One is the multy-city of hospitality and mobility, as a new for of urbanity connected to the evolution of tourism in the Adriatic Ionian basin; the second is the role of the Islands of Adrion between imagination and reality.