ABSTRACT
The Cinque Terre, one of the best-known Italian destinations, are famous for their terraced landscape, their wines, and their little seaside villages. In the 1990s, this area was added to the UNESCO heritage list and a National Park has been instituted to protect the agricultural landscape and balance the development of tourism. At present, the outcomes of this process are problematic: while mass and fast tourism increase, those huge visitor flows have not created the agricultural revitalization that this project had anticipated when it was first launched. Building on local history, environmental history, and critical anthropological literature on heritagization and conservation, and based on ethnographic surveys, this chapter analyses images of the past conveyed in this heritagization process, to highlight which historical and environmental knowledges they conceal, and which visions of the future and practices of the present they support – or not.
