Let us begin with an anecdote.
Last Saturday, around the Trevi fountain, a fight broke out between two gangs of profiteers who were cheating tourists with the ‘game of the three bells’.
Each of the two factions claimed the exclusive right to fleece the Japanese, Canadians and other unfortunate visitors to Rome’s kitschiest and most cinematic little square.

The crowd, squeezed between the fountain and the turnstiles that have been filtering access to the piazzetta for the past few months, began to flee disorderly, running over two no-longer-young German women who were there having an aperitif. It nearly ended in tragedy.

The anecdote is interesting because it showed in mondovision not only the level of degradation that the centre of Rome has reached, but also the complete impotence of the authorities in curbing it.

The turnstiles were of no use against the gangs of swindlers, and perhaps even counterproductive in ensuring the safety of the two Germans.
All this while the narrow streets of the Campus Martius around there, which do not have turnstiles, are reduced to a permanent human river with no lateral escape routes in case of danger: if some mental patient, after finding exciting statements on Tiktok about the Quran and the triumph of the Sword of Islam against the infidels, decided to stab to death a dozen people crowded in those alleys, he could do so without difficulty.

Charges and defence

Now, one hears complaints against mass tourism all the time: it is accused of disfiguring historic city centres, of driving up the price of houses in the suburbs, of spreading filth and insecurity, of standardising shops, barbarising the cultural offer, reducing the places of childhood and youth of millions of Italians to soulless playgrounds.

These are all well-founded accusations, for goodness sake.
But they are also accusations to which one could retort: ‘In exchange for these inconveniences come billions of induced income, hundreds of thousands of jobs, millions of receipts for the municipalities that are always short of resources’.

Trade associations are tenacious in reiterating these benefits and collecting data to confirm them.
Thus Federalberghi and FIPE record the number of new employees in the tourism sector every year, estimating 200,000 between 2022 and 2025 alone (one fifth of the new employees in the entire Italian economy), while Booking and Airbnb celebrate the more than 300,000 private managers of holiday homes (more than two-thirds of whom are women, average age 53: the true Italian way to female employment, other than upskilling, reskilling, role models and empowerment).

On balance, today 7% of Italian workers are directly absorbed by the tourism sector and another 6% by its allied industries: this is the highest figure in Europe after that of Greece.

On the financial side, the World Travel&Tourism Council counted 12 billion investments in Italian tourism facilities last year alone, to which must be added 1.5 billion a year of ‘public’ investments with the PNRR.

No one disputes this data.
The problem is that these data are not good news.

A shortcut that ends in an abyss

Work in hotels, bars, restaurants and establishments has at least two major flaws: low added value and seasonality.
An hour spent moving dishes from a kitchen to a dining room, however laborious it may be, does not add much value to the raw materials: the owner cannot ask customers to pay too much to receive that service, and therefore cannot pay his employee well.

The numbers in this regard are merciless: gross remuneration in the tourism sector is a mere 22,000 euros ($25.500) per year, compared to the Italian average of 32,000 ($37.200) for employees – which already screams revenge compared to other European countries.
No wonder that undisclosed work, partially undisclosed work and unpaid overtime are rampant.

Added to this is the problem of seasonality: work in tourist facilities is often discontinuous, and in the off months must be supplemented by unemployment benefits, further reducing the cost-benefit ratio for the community.
In some areas of the Italian countryside, moreover, during the months covered by the subsidy, people are supplemented by moonlighting in agriculture, which would not be possible if agriculture was not in turn kept alive with both European and national subsidies.

Needless to turn around: it is not good news that 13% of Italians have to earn a living this way. It is worrying news.
The percentage of people employed in tourism is precisely one of the classic indicators you look at to see whether a country is developing or impoverishing.

The political world should study counter-measures, instead of unburdening itself with compliments such as those recently made by President Meloni, for whom tourism ‘is one of the main tools with which the Italian people speak to the world about their identity, make it known and make it admired’.

(What is left of the ‘identity of the Italian people’ in depopulated historic centres and plasticised villages is quite a mystery).

He should ask himself whether there is an alternative to keeping millions of citizens trapped in jobs that are both tiring and underpaid, instead of allocating 400 million a year to a ‘Ministry of Tourism’ that strives to trap even more.

Tourism is like oil: a curse and a drug

But what is most frightening is that the alternative does not necessarily exist.

Global tourist flows have swelled in the last two decades, thanks to the increase in human population and, above all, the unprecedented spread of wealth outside the West.
A city like Rome has doubled its arrivals since 2000. And thousands of Italian entrepreneurs, rightly so from their point of view, have therefore got the idea that they can live off their income.

The famous Italian metaphore “Tourism is our oil” is actually fine: globalisation has poured an inexhaustible reservoir under Italian cities and towns to be exploited at very low cost and with minimal business risk. All you have to do is drill and something is found.
Barring incredible strokes of bad luck, a hotel in Florence or a restaurant in the Dolomites is bound to have customers.

And so those 12 billion a year investments, which could have transformed Italy into an IT, energy or biomedical power (assuming a high business risk), have instead been prudently parked in tourism.

But what is worse is that this calculation of convenience is not only made by entrepreneurs: it is also made by workers.
A boy bored with school always has the illusion that he can get by by going to work as a lifeguard or a waiter: an apparent ’emergency exit’ which, if it can save some from unfortunate choices such as crime, holds back many others from taking more far-sighted initiatives.

Tourism, in short, is perhaps causing Italy all the damage that oil causes to underdeveloped countries hit by the ‘commodity curse’.
A habit of rent, low-risk investments, corporations blackmailing politics, short-sighted educational and employment choices, abuse of irregular contracts, chronic dependence on wealthy foreigners.

It is perhaps having the effect of a drug on Italy: comforting at first, addictive after a while, crippling in the long run.

Let us look at things for what they are

Adding up the choices of thousands of bona fide entrepreneurs and millions of bona fide workers, we have achieved a catastrophe in large numbers.
This is nobody’s fault. In logic, game theory teaches us that a sum of good intentions often leads to a bad outcome.

But we must be aware of the hidden price that tourism is imposing on our economy, and that goes far beyond the brawls at the Trevi fountain.
We must stop celebrating it as a partial cure when it is one of the symptoms of the disease.

Mass tourism is here to stay.
It has diverted precious resources from the most promising economic sectors. It has subjugated and emptied those poles of creativity and encounter that were once Florence, Venice, Naples, Rome and the other ‘hundred cities’.
It has deluded millions of Italians, anxious to work and improve their standard of living. to have an easy shortcut.

Let us accept all this, but let us stop expecting it to make the country grow.