Il ruolo dell’albergo diffuso nello sviluppo turistico dei territori montani: l’esperienza italiana tra tradizione e innovazione

[Machine translation] In recent years, the Italian accommodation offer has been experimenting with new forms of accommodation aimed at enhancing rural and mountain areas in all their environmental and cultural specificities; these are the models of widespread hospitality, which come with different denominations and management formulas. These include the “widespread hotel” which can be, in short, defined as a “horizontal” hotel designed to offer guests the experience of living in a historic center or an inhabited village, being able to count on all hotel services by staying in houses and rooms located in different buildings, albeit close to each other. In mountain contexts, the reuse of structures present in the area, otherwise left in disrepair, favors the strengthening of accommodation with low environmental impact, contributes to the enhancement of local resources and typicality, generates processes of territorial redevelopment and revitalization and provides significant support to the socio-economic recovery programs of communities that are still broken. Seen in this perspective, a “widespread hotel” is therefore an innovative proposal, It is original in hospitality, but at the same time it represents an interesting model of local, sustainable, endogenous and integrated tourism development., Starting from these considerations, the contribution aims to provide a framework of knowledge of the phenomenon in Italy, from a more general point of view, of the rules and definitions, and then proceed to analyze the different territorial declinations and organizational formulas of the widespread hotels, present in numerous mountain centers and villages, sometimes located outside the traditional tourist circuits, and to tell, finally, of some successful cases in which the construction of this unique hotel “what is there but cannot be seen” has proved to be an important driving force in sustainable development processes, even from disadvantaged or marginal mountain areas.