Italy, the importance of the Recovery Plan for tourist areas such as Cavallino-Treporti

As part of the day dedicated by Il Sole 24 Ore to “Recovery Plan – PNRR: challenges and opportunities for the Italian system”, which was held on 29 April, Paolo Bertolini, President of the Cavallino-Treporti Tourist Park, and Roberta Nesto, mayor of the Venetian town, spoke. Cavallino-Treporti is considered by many to be the European capital of outdoor tourism, and for this reason it can have a certain say when it comes to how to exploit the resources of the Recovery Plan for the tourism system.

But more than the resources, also fundamental for the Italian relaunch of the sector, which count even more in the context of a hypothetical structural reform, are the rules. This was underlined by Bertolini, who has been involved in this sector for over 30 years. “Unfortunately, in this long period we are not saying that our requests have never been listened to, but there have always been great difficulties in carrying them out,” he said. “Today I followed all the interventions with interest, but there has always been talk of large systems. Ours are quite small, but they are the ones who rule Italy. If today I have to ask for a building permit, which is the mother of all problems and which does not concern us alone, 21 practices and 8 different opinions are needed. These 21 practices include a mountain of documents and the 8 opinions too. If we want to talk about a restart, we have to look at this: it is useless for a tide of billions to arrive if it then takes two or three years just to get a project started”.

Limited municipal leverage

Mayor Nesto is on the same wavelength. “The municipal tools that we can use are unfortunately limited, because we are talking about national regulations,” she stressed. “For us mayors this is a fundamental moment, because if the State fails to set new rules, we will struggle to win the post-pandemic challenge. We need new tools for construction and urban planning and tools to spend this money well, as well as resources for our local administrations. We must respond to the citizens and we must work with a simpler set of rules”.

Among other things, everything becomes enormously more complicated for all those places where the tourist flow is limited to the season. “Personally, I asked for a simplification for the ‘accordion cities’, with the recognition of the status of a seaside city,” says Nesto. “We manage a community of 13,500 inhabitants that with guests become 100,000 in the summer. We need answers in terms of bathing concessions and directly applicable measures on sustainability. The reforms we are asking for are not only related to money, even if we need it, but instead we need administrative paths. Then you need money to invest in infrastructure. We may also have the most beautiful campsites in Europe, and here we have them, but if the tourist does not find tidy roads and adequate infrastructure, he runs away. We need a combination of territory and accommodation facilities, otherwise we risk that our guests will no longer reward us as in the past”.

Extend the season

For Cavallino-Treporti, as for many other tourist areas, the problem is about trying to ensure that the period of “productivity” extends beyond the three classic summer months. “For years we have been looking for strategies that are able to extend the season, to offer new opportunities to professions that in the past have never been highly regarded, but which today are very important,” Bertolini says. “These places were born for a type of seaside tourism, but the concept of vacation has changed over the years. Before, we did not leave the campsite very often: we are 40 minutes from Venice, but only 5% of our guests went to visit the city, and mostly on days of bad weather. The lengthening of the season foresees that the territory becomes more protagonist. It is important to create the conditions for the tourist, leaving the accommodation facilities, to find things that make him feel good. This is why we have launched initiatives such as the Via dei Forti, we want to promote cycling and we would like to have sports halls as other elements of attraction. Seaside tourism, tourism for the territory and sports tourism are the three pillars on which we want to build this enlargement”.

To achieve these objectives, therefore, simplification of rules and investments are needed, but what kind of investments? “We define ourselves as a ‘blue and green’ territory and these are the investments we would like to attract, guided by clean energy and a privileged relationship with the water,” Mayor Nesto says. “Companies that want to experiment are welcome. We want to establish a governance open to all interested parties and with spontaneous adhesion, which allows us to be a ‘blue and green economy’. Our territory is the gateway to Venice and in this way it will be able to better interpret the stimuli that come from the new generations”.