Quale mobilità, quali città

Tourism is always mobility, but not every mobility is tourism and also in the tourism it is possible identify different kinds of mobility. These kinds depend by the motivation of the travel, by the structure of the trip, by the destination places.
The attention on these differences can attenuate the weight of the crisis of the tourism, which derives in the first instance from the economic crisis, but also from the fact that the tourism is an exhaustible resource.
The motivations of the travel can be very many, according the income, the cultural values, the group of reference, the personal attitudes, and, last but not least, the idea that the traveler has on the place to go to visit. The motivation of the travel determines however different types of tourism: from the instruction tourism to the tourism of avventure or pure loisir.
From the point of view of the trip structure, this differs because of the type of organization (“self made tourist” or tourist through agency) because of the choice of means of transport, because of the type and the dimension of the group, the chosen destination, the type of accommodation.
Based on these elements it is possible to identify various types of tourists, and everyone lives the touristic experience in various and personal way. Thus also the visited or crossed cities are lived in various ways, but beside the subjective elements, objective elements of the same cities exist which differentiate the tourist perception of the towns.
In this sense, we can identify three kind of cities which are interested by the touristic phenomena. First we find the properly said tourist cities: artistic cities, historical cities, interesting cities because of their environmental context. The accidentally touristic towns exist then: these don’t have attractive details, but they are near some touristic place, and they are visited only during the bad weather. A last type is constituted by the “hybrid” towns: those which are crossed fast by the tourists in order to get the vacation localities, an emblematic case is represented by the harbour towns.
How are placed in this context the Mediterranean cities? I think that it is necessary to leave the stereotypes and considerate that the Mediterranean cities, so all the towns, are different each other and that the type of Mediterranean city exist only in the falsification of touristic brochures. The risk to avoid is that, in order to answer to the Mediterranean imaginary created by the tour operators, the same reality of places is deformed to be like that the tourists want to find.