Lifestyles and Consumption of Do-it-Yourself Residential Tourists in Italy

In 1999 the book Il turismo che non appare [The Undetected Tourism] was published and this was probably the first publication in Italy to address specifically the private home tourism (Romita 1999). The book was the result of years of research devoted to the study of tourism, using an approach which, from the sociological point of view, placed at its centre the question of sustainability in tourism. ¹ Indeed, in an attempt to seek an explanation for the impacts on the environment caused by the tourist movement in some areas of southern Italy, the ‘undetected tourism’ was brought to light as very large, complex and widespread tourism practiced for decades through the use of private dwellings in a self-organized and do-it-yourself manner. This social phenomenon had played and continued to play an important role in the development of local communities and in the organization and management of the land, albeit little studied, or not at all, by the Italian scientific community and basically ignored by official statistics.