Paper short abstract:

Cinque Terre, renowned as a UNESCO World Heritage thanks to their dry-stone terraced landscape on steep hills over the sea, are a major touristic site and the smallest and most populated National Park in Italy, whose policies aim to preserve a deeply anthropized, far from "natural", environment.

Paper long abstract:

The so called “Cinque Terre” are a major touristic site in Italy, renowned since the late 1990s as a UNESCO World Heritage thanks to their dry-stone terraced landscape on steep hills over the sea. This human-made landscape is the result of centuries of terraced agriculture, mainly focused on “heroic” viticulture. The arrival of mass tourism in the 1950s has opened a wide variety of new job opportunities, accelerating the already existing escape towards more desirable jobs and leading, in the following decades, to a massive abandonment of the cultivated land. Tourism might be eventually the end of that same landscape that attracted it. In the same years of the UNESCO nomination, the Cinque Terre National Park and Sea Reserve was established, the smallest and most populated national park in Italy. Its policies aim to preserve a deeply anthropized, far from "natural", environment, shaped by human activities, trying to restore the cultivation of neglected land and the traditional activities that shaped this territory into a terraced landscape, overall viticulture. A significant effort has been made on promoting a sustainable tourism interested in the local traditions and products, such as wine, olive oil, lemons and anchovies, but the goal is still far. Tourism can be both an opportunity and a threat to the Cinque Terre and different agencies struggle with each other in order to manage it, according to their diverse points of view.