Le forme della lentezza

Many conditions and individual social position determine different ways to take experience of the reality. But there are some objective situations that impose a total way in placing in front of the reality: among these the rhythm of industrial work condition besides the productive activity as well all the social activity.
Still today, the time is determined by the production rhythm, so the time becomes planed, measured and organized, and the time which remains out of the productive activity is empty time, it is vacuum, it frightens because it is threatened by boredom and idleness.
Because of this horror vacui, the industrial culture organizes the free time imposing, according Horkheimer and Adorno, the relaxation forms and the rest look like more and more to the work.
Nevertheless other ways exist for human activities and the slowness can becomes a resource, not an obstacle. The slowness is the possibility to live with different speed and to enjoy with the whole of the body the crossed ground.
The “mass tourist” corresponds to the “mass worker”: he is a passive consumer of good and services, which must be consumed speedy for a speed return to the real place, the place in the productive system.
The meaning of the voyage is lost. Once the voyage was an opportunity to live new experiences, to make new encounters, now it is an tiring and annoying transfer from the residence to the holiday place. The voyage is lost time.
In the last time there are some new tourism forms which show the possibility of a slow tourism, attentive to the visited reality, respectful to the environment and to the cultures, capable to grasp the meaning of the local knowledge.
Agritourism, cultural tourism and social tourism can represent a few of this forms.