Maria Dina Lombardi
Rural landscape and countryside: promotion opportunity and tourism development. An example from Apulia and Basilicata
Abstract: Audiovisual products can be an important mean of communication and territorial promotion. The representation of the localities within the audiovisual products contributes to placing them in the collective imaginary, often loading them with a deep symbolic-emotional signifi cance. It can generate the desire to visit the scene location in the member of the audience, promoting the tourism development of the localities absorbed in the audiovisual project. This share plans to analyse the effects of the audiovisual productions, especially cinematographic ones, on the promotion and the exploitation of the rural areas, and on their transformation into tourist destinations of excellence. It coincides with the recent drift, spreads in the new global economic order, to consider the “soft” territorial elements such as authenticity and local identity, like source of competitive advantage. Although the attention of the audiovisual production towards the country landscape was signifi cant over the years (there are several fi lms of thirties which relate the country landscape in order to spread the Fascist idea of modernization), there isn’t a copious literature about the cinematographic use of the rural character and about the effects of this use on the territory, and yet the countryside is the background of many feature fi lms, videos and documentaries. Therefore it can be particularly interesting to analyse some of those audiovisual products, which making the countryside their leit motiv and carrying out precise politics of territorial marketing and systemic strategies of destination management, can contribute or have just made a contribution to promotion and touristic development of the rural areas.
Keywords: Rural landscape, Audiovisual products, Tourism development.
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