Preface by Maria Ferrara
Cover by Luigi Maione
Sezione ricerche
This book addresses the complexity of the tourism systems built around underwater cultural heritage.
This book focuses on the importance – often overlooked – of underwater cultural heritage as a potential driver of economic development, especially through tourism.
This book identifies key actors in underwater cultural heritage tourism systems, the networks and coordination mechanisms that they implement as part of their activities, and the various technological options in the process.
The focus of this book is an analysis of underwater cultural heritage tourism through interdisciplinary contributions, each analysing a specific part of a broad system together with its overall organizational profile.
The lens used in this exploratory investigation combines several authors’ points of view and perspectives, integrating organizational aspects with the vision of archaeologists, biologists, and business and organization scholars. It includes a comparison on an international level, with a detailed look at the creation process of the Underwater Archaeological Park of Baia in Italy and the Xlendi Underwater Park in Malta.
We suggest reading this book to whoever is interested in underwater cultural heritage as a shared heritage with immense intrinsic value. This heritage can act as a driving force for territorial development, based on respectful and sustainable use of the cultural heritage and the marine environments in which it is found.
This book is recommended for those fascinated by the creation of a ‘heritage community’ as defined by the Faro Convention: “a group of people who value specific aspects of cultural heritage, and who wish, within the framework of public action, to support and transmit them to future generations” (The Council of Europe, 2005).
Readers are encouraged to approach this book with curiosity – to discover underwater cultural heritage and the remains of ancient civilizations hidden under the ocean, and to cultivate a sense of belonging to a cultural identity which links countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea