Overturism

The project explores the phenomenon of mass tourism in some of the main art cities of Italy. Through a process of digital elaboration, these images show the relationship between historical and architectural identity and the dynamics of global tourism. This ever-changing and continuous flow of passersby creates a tourism demographic that alters the perception and morphology of these places, opening up a reflection on their meaning and role in our society. According to the World Tourism Organization, around 1.4 billion tourists travel the world each year, with about half choosing Europe as their destination. Italy, with over 60 million tourists in 2018 (WTO), ranked as the 5th country in the world by number of visitors, attracted to the "Bel Paese" by numerous art cities such as Rome, Florence, and Venice. With their countless masterpieces of art, they are among the most visited places in the world. This indistinct mass of people that floods the urban space every day brings with it and triggers a series of issues and dynamics characteristic of our contemporary world, making these places symbols of the relationship between defined space and global society. But what makes these places so attractive? Their fame is certainly due to their historical and artistic peculiarities, but also to a specific marketing plan, more or less conscious and structured, that promotes these places and their imagery worldwide, making their image a simulacrum of their monumentality. The global attraction capacity is indeed directly proportional to the ability of these places to be reproduced in the media, both by institutional bodies and tourists themselves. According to the sightmaps.com platform by Google, which allows the visualization of the most photographed places in the world through the analysis of billions of geotagged images on the web, the places of global tourism turn out to be the most photographed and geotagged in the world. This very scenico-mediatic characteristic makes these places preferred destinations in the eyes of tourists, not only because of their cultural significance but also because they are easily accessible and “familiar.” Conversely, and not by chance, tourist sites such as institutional locations, airports, train stations, and subway stations are among the most controlled and monitored by security agencies, as they are considered potential targets of terrorist acts. It is precisely this stratification of dynamics and symbols, both manifest and hidden, that makes these spaces the modern frontiers of globalization, where everything intersects and overlaps in a collective movement where the boundaries between market dynamics, control, sociopolitical factors, and hypermediation hybridize and intertwine in a single organic flow of people. Building on these reflections and with an apparent objective and detached approach-almost as if giving it a presumed documentary value-the goal is to develop a new way of viewing urban space to offer a subjective representation that allows for the interpretation and portrayal of the overlap of all the social dynamics that traverse these places. 

Alessandro Toscano