ENIT and the Basilicata region launch Roots-in, the national workshop for roots tourism
PRESS RELEASE
ENIT AND THE BASILICATA REGION LAUNCH ROOTS-IN, THE NATIONAL WORKSHOP FOR ROOTS TOURISM
“Roots-in”, the first international exchange on roots tourism, has come to an end. The project organised by the Region and APT Basilicata in collaboration with ENIT and the Directorate General for Italians Abroad of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is becoming an annual event.
Over 500 participants, international tourism stakeholders and operators, gathered at the UnaHotel MH conference centre in Borgo Venusio.
“We wanted to create,” explains the Director of APT Basilicata, Antonio Nicoletti, “an international event dedicated to a kind of tourism that has always existed, but which is still too little-known and undervalued, such as roots tourism. This was an intuition born within the framework of our strategic tourism marketing plan and implemented with the fundamental support of ENIT and MAECI. The institutional cooperation and the results we have achieved show that the willingness to work together on issues of national importance can bring significant results to operators and have a major impact on the positioning of our great little region.”
Dialogue between the public and private sectors was the focus of the speech by Sandro Pappalardo, Representative of the State-Regions Conference on the Board of ENIT. “Italy is among the top dream destinations in the world,” he says. “We must strengthen Italy’s strategic positioning in order to translate that not only into an increasingly high-performing and customisable offer that can appeal to different target markets, but also to implement the travel purchase of the Italian brand and allow Italy to always be a top international travel choice. We will also strengthen this approach to tourism in the Year of Roots, 2024. A way to distribute the travel flow across the whole year (with a small peak in August), especially involving young people who want to rediscover their heritage.”
"The descendants of Italians living abroad represent a great opportunity for emotional tourism, but we must consider them not as an economic asset, but rather as an extraordinary heritage of relationships, history, and identity. As part of the NRRP project dedicated to roots tourism, we want to launch a series of services, such as a Roots Passport, with incentives to come to Italy, or the digitisation of municipal registry offices, and much more,” says Giovanni Maria de Vita, Head of Roots Tourism DGIT MAECI.
Angelantonio Orlando, Director General for the implementation of the NRRP of the Ministry of Culture, spoke on the opportunities opened up by the NRRP for the revitalisation of villages, focusing in particular on the approved projects in Basilicata: “Basilicata responded more than other regions to the NRRP call for proposals involving villages. Out of around 40 projects submitted, 18 were selected for a total investment of 30 million euros. We are thinking of adding a significant share of resources under the FSC 2021 - 2027 to run down the list of municipalities.”
Francesca Cicatelli
ENIT Press Office
Phone: (+39) 392.9225216
e-mail: francesca.cicatelli@enit.it