Development and sustainable tourism as choice for the future: the city of Venice

The sustainability of development expressly covers the guide principles of the European Union and represents a ground to find solutions to deal with the complexity of the current socioeconomical scenery. This principle is also valid for tourism, which itself becomes one of the key sectors to set up a strategy, leading to a sustainable development of the land. Sustainable tourism is a form of tourism which involves being conscious of the potential environmental, economic, and cultural impacts of tourism. Tourism finds in environmental, artistic and cultural factors of attractiveness the lever of its main competitiveness; the sustainability of its use can represent an extraordinary challenge for the general upgrading of the natural and urban environments on which tourism finds a fertile ground for its development. To reach this target, the correlation between the carrying capacity, which is the natural ability of an ecosystem to produce in a stable manner the necessary resources for the species that inhabit it, and the critical natural capital, which is the minimum necessary level for the biological reproducibility of the ecosystem, the amount of pollution and waste that the planet is able to withstand, should not be neglected . This paper sets as objective the analysis of the most critical aspects related to these topics and the proposal of a concrete model of a sustainable tourism consumption, competitive and upgrading for the territory, assessing the application to a concrete case: the city of Venice.