Tourism, Italy. Doesn’t tourism’s Faustian pact need a review?.Italy

Italy is the original tourist destination, an open museum for pilgrims, Grand Tourists, foodies, beach bums and church crawlers. The country – the fifth most visited in the world, with almost 47 million visitors spending a total of £32bn a year – is assiduous in promoting tourism. It takes a brave person to turn those kind of gushing taps off. But in some overwhelmed parts of the country, that is what is happening.

This week Italian authorities declared they are going to limit the number of visitors to the Cinque Terre, a collection of five fishing villages in Liguria. Tourist numbers will be capped at 1.5 million (a million less than last year) because these tiny communities are unable to cope with the influx. The announcement follows a ban last year on huge cruise ships entering the Venetian lagoon.

It’s a counter-intuitive move, because most tourist destinations want as many visitors as possible. And it shows up tourism as a Faustian pact: the more visitors you have and the more money you make, the less you are the naive, folkloric, authentic, untouched place of the tourists’ imagination.

The defence of tourism has always been that it “broadens the mind”. We imagine that hanging out with exotic peoples in unusual places will remove from us any petty provincialism. But in an age of mass tourism, the interaction with those peoples and places has lost its depth. Our exchange has become merely commercial.

I remember years ago asking for directions in a package-tour area of Jamaica. A man pointed me in the right direction and, just as I was imagining that he and I had broken down some kind of cultural or racial barrier, he asked me for a dollar in a mildly menacing way. Tourism has become equivalent to a one-night stand, with each side grabbing what they want: the tourist gets a selfie in front of an iconic building and the locals empty visitors’ pockets as thoroughly as possible.

The observer, of course, always affects the observed, and travel can ruin the places we come to see. The nearest tourist attraction to where I live is Glastonbury Tor in Somerset. It’s a lovely, petite hill with views stretching far over the finest county in England. But so many people walk it that the path is now made of concrete, and we’re warned, in a notice at the kissing gate, that we mustn’t stray. It hardly makes for a stroll amidst nature.

That’s why so many tourist destinations are brutally dismissive of those they receive. Every country has a similar term to the West Country’s “grockle” or Spain’s “guiri”: words which express disdain for these gawking, ungainly visitors.

The most painful recent example was the toe-curling story of the couple who went to the Maldives to renew their marriage vows. The hotel charged them £820 for a ceremony in which hotel staff, speaking Dhivehi which they didn’t understand, viciously insulted them. That dreadful story captured the weird world of westerners longing for a paradise, for virginal land; and of locals ripping them off and belittling them.

Some countries address the dilemma with innovation. Bhutan doesn’t limit its number of tourists, but it does force them – through package tours – to spend $250 a day in high season ($200 in low), which apparently funds education, healthcare and so on. Other places, such as Venice, have vastly differing costs for tourist attractions according to whether you are a resident or not. But those measures only underline that the relationship with you really is primarily commercial. Other destinations (like Costa Rica or the Galápagos) encourage tourists to see themselves as eco-benefactors or as witnesses to sustainability. But eco-tourism is a blatant contradiction in terms.

Part of the problem is that our escapism often serves to emphasise the epic inequality in our world. It’s entirely understandable (especially if you’re from northern Europe) to chase sunshine and sandy beaches. But then every year we see those heart-wrenching images of refugees crawling ashore in Lampedusa as Europeans slap on the sun cream. We are those privileged Europeans, whether we’re in that photo or not.

We will keep travelling manically because we’re instinctive wanderers. Curiosity is a good thing, and it really does open the heart and mind as much as it does the wallet. No one wants it to end. If the tourism industry stopped existing tomorrow, the global economy would massively suffer. Tourism accounts for almost a third of the world’s services.

But maybe we should put the sandal on the other foot. If we want the right to go anywhere, we should allow that right to others as well. It can’t just be that only the rich are permitted to visit, buy properties and lay down roots. If we spend our money in their countries, surely we have a duty to allow foreigners to earn it in ours as well. Because until there’s a sense of equality about human movement across the globe, until tourism implies a sense of actually living alongside other people, it will remain just a one-night stand.