An odyssey to IT.A.CÀ, the Festival of Responsible Tourism

Perhaps you remember a scene from Homer where Odysseus is shipwrecked by Poseidon's wrath but manages to swim ashore and sleep? How he wakes up in a boutique hotel, feeling the extra glass of primitivo he drank the night before, and has to face a white-gloved waiter offering a selection of cakes?

It sounds like a trick question. What links the Odyssey and modern tourism? This is the stuff of nightmares; irresolvable mental struggle. "Compare and contrast the legacy of the Trojan War with a one-week Mediterranean holiday."

Yet, because the challenge seems serious, let's take it on. There is apparently nothing toungue-in-cheek about an ongoing, Italy-wide initiative called IT.A.CÀ: migrants and travellers.

Now (like Odysseus) in its tenth year of travel, this festival del turismo responsabile hoists sail for Salento, showcasing fifty-something places, tours and events. It launches with a conference in Lecce, "Travelling to Ithaca: from mass tourism to responsible tourism, voices and stories of migrants and travellers in Salento". This mouthful to be followed by a multiethnic food tasting - how could I refuse?


Dawn comes early with rosy fingers, but the conference goes for an unpretentious 9:30am start at the Università di Salento. The main themes:

• Once a place becomes a popular destination, the locals lose control
• Needed: "wiser, more mindful and responsible" tourism
• We're all already capable of better (travel), we just need to know it
• Migrants & travellers are viewed through arbitrarily positive and negative lenses. Resulting judgements are often a far cry from the facts and numbers
• Disabled hosts and travellers can be integrated
• Slow = good; Disneyfication = bad

Wily Odysseus could hardly have been more succinct; the conference went on all morning, but there you have the principles. Time for multiethnic lunch rolled around, and the number of attendees suddenly swelled. The IT.A.CÀ website promises low food miles, which would seem a tall order for multiethnic cuisine, so I was curious to see what would roll out. The food was by Natale, which is really the name in Lecce catering, and we had all the standard favourites of an Italian buffet lunch.

Delicious, if neither multiethnic nor zero km. Photo by Natale

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Slowly, responsibly, I chew my oily Puglian focaccia, while thinking it all through. There's a lot to digest, and not all of it sits lightly on the stomach.

The festival takes its lead, and its name, from another famous Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy. Indeed, the festival programme quotes the opening lines of Cavafy's poem:

“As you set out for Ithaca
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.”

So the organisers know they're proposing an epic voyage, which seems to me to require an end to locust-style tourism in favour of some totally redefined hosting/migrating/travelling model.

Cavafy, by Nikos Eggonopoulos

The launch doesn't shy away from intellectual difficulty, and the organisations involved clearly understand the fundamental reshaping of attitudes they propose. One speaker, from a lovely walking initiative, talks from personal experience of her long road, while the chairperson pours her out a plastic cup of mineral water. Like the speaker, I've toured Italy the slow way, taking in Alpine environments scarred by the water bottling industry. She smiles, nods, sips a product which was trucked perhaps a thousand miles to Salento.

So the Ith.a.cans are clever, but not quite so "wise, mindful and responsible" in act as in word. I risk sounding merely superior, but I've gone without bottled water for longer than the decade since this festival was thought up. And often to the surprise of well-meaning, generous Italians. Yes, it's a trivial example, in the way that all real-world examples remain trivial... until generalised. Presumably the speakers could explain this more eloquently than I; but their showcase of practical changes - walking and cycling tours - seem grafted onto an ecologically illiterate culture. There is, in short, a gap between theory and behaviour.

"Travelling to Ithaca: from mass tourism to responsible tourism"

The stomach rebels, somewhat. The monoethnic buffet produces a mountain of plastic plates and cutlery. At another festival event, a cycle tour organiser doesn't seem to understand that anyone might cycle to a cycle tour. His clients arrive, unquestionably, by car. Why expect otherwise? People are unwilling to change a product which sells. The whole festival simply shows that there needs to be a limit to mindfulness and responsibility if you're going to get anything done at all.

But does the region expect to conjour better tourists simply by talking about them?

Perhaps, here, the festival has an answer ready. By breaking down the boundary between host and tourist, migrant and traveller, consumer and citizen, it breaks down also the meaningless dichotomy between responsible party and victim.

Because the long road to Ithaca starts at the feet of everyone. And if the hosts won't do it, the guests just might. If you're up to the challenge, it'll cast your holidays in a whole new light.