Two figures from the day to talk about touristification without demagoguery

Two figures from the day lead us to talk about tourism again. In Milan, the flow of foreigners arriving in the city (April over April) increased by 25 per cent in one year and in the first four months of 1923 arrivals rose to the record figure of 2.5 million people, well above the numbers of 2019 considered at the time the eldorado of Ambrosian tourism. According to a Ministry of Labour/Bank of Italy/Anpal report, 100,000 new jobs were created in March and April, 40,000 of which in tourism alone. Now we know very well that the travel economy has never been taken seriously enough by scientists of the subject, it has almost always been considered as the least noble portion of the service sector. After all, economists have always remained of the opinion that tourism was in its entirety a hit-and-run activity, its benefits were no longer that long-lasting and it was not worthwhile to fussily investigate its performance and its structural effects (there will be too!). Then there was Covid, the traumatic interruption of travel and in sequence the resumption of mobility. Which, as far as our country is concerned, has been twofold: on the one hand, foreign tourists have gradually returned and now also Americans and Chinese in large numbers, on the other, mobility has climbed the hierarchy of primary values ​​and essential consumption and we have recorded a constant internal flow of compatriots who perhaps take the right step to visit for the first time the medium-sized cities of the peninsula (Trieste and Bergamo are two classic cases) which they had culpably neglected in the past. In addition, the demand for tourism has greatly accentuated its segmentation: people no longer move only for the monuments, museums and city skylines but they move to play golf, to visit cellars, to compete with the mountain bike, for a weekend dedicated to gastronomy. And this is true both for foreign demand and for Italians on a trip.