Displacements and dislocations in the Adriatic multi-city. The ambivalent images of tourism and the perspectives for trans-national cooperation

This paper drafts the main hypothetis for an ongoing research project on the relations between tourism, territorial identities and institutional transformation in the Adriatic region. The research goals and the theoretical framework rely on a number of investigations that took place within several research teams and networks in the last eight years. I have been part of such initiatives, both as researcher and head of the research team and I have been progressively convinced that tourism has a deep impact on the way space is socially and culturally represented in the Adriatic region. Particularly, I believe that institution building strategies and long term migration patterns of the region shaped the Adriatic region as a space of ambiguity, where material or immaterial displacements and dislocations can influence the way cultural identities are perceived and promoted. From this standpoint, the Adriatic imaginery contemporarly belongs to two great set of narratives, which are the maritime Mediterranean tradition and the South-East European continental one[...]