Travel Reference
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Fig. 9.16.
The B&B boom.
Conclusions
through their tourist gaze on Levanto, recognize
and suggest to strangers. Regarding this theme,
we can quote an interviewee when saying:
'tourists like the same things I like'.
Another result of this work could be the
usefulness of the visual method applied to
research on territorial identity and tourism. In
fact, places and their representation are images
- iconic but also narrative - evoking concrete
experiences lived by those who live every day in
that place but also by those who discover it for
the fi rst time. Images, especially in the photo-
graphic form, let us reconstruct a story, an expe-
rience, a memory. They make it possible to
share ideas, visions, to communicate the life-
experience of that place.
Then in this sense, the visual research could
be a model particularly suitable for a visually
remarkable phenomenon as the tourist experi-
ence of a place.
This research enabled us to construct Levanto's
image through its inhabitants' images and
narratives and especially recognize a style and
a character of this territory that we can call
'slow'. Images and stories produced by inhab-
itants - i.e. the memory of a place and its
cultural heritage, its authentic character but
also its generosity, the need for thinking about
economic development without leaving its
own nature - make us understand that the
word 'slow' is not a label, an advertising slo-
gan but an important element of Levanto's
identity.
'Slow' is a way of attracting the kind of
tourist expressing this type of vocation: a tourist
style connected to good living, to trekking, to
the sight of the sunset on the sea, to good dishes,
to good wine. All elements that the inhabitants,
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