Cruise Tourism, Risk Perception and Public Narratives in Syracuse, Italy

In the last few years, the interest in risk-related issues has grown in all social sciences, confirming that individual and collective behaviors and intervention policies are connected to certain perceptions of disasters. Communities are often the starting point as well as the recipients of such studies. In the tourism industry, the issue of safety and risk plays a fundamental role in the dynamics of hospitality and opens up many inquiries. Indeed, one of the risks connected to tourism is the environmental one: the sustainability of tourist flows in destinations or, even better, in host communities is often what determines the success or failure of certain types of tourism. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the ways in which a community, as a destination, perceives specific forms of risk linked to a type of tourism, here specifically the cruise tourism. Therefore, the case of Syracuse, Italy is taken into account, where (precisely near the historic center of Ortigia) in 2020, two cruise ships remained idle for four months, for a long technical stopover. The presence of the ships caused a controversy within the community, among those who considered the ships a potential danger for the environmental pollution and disfigurement of the landscape; and those who, on the other hand, saw opportunities for economic development even in the long term. This study, from a cultural geographical perspective, considered the public narratives produced by some local online newspapers, by analyzing a selection of significant articles about this controversy. The primary goal is to observe the ways in which those narratives are organized, as their “forms” show the (re)production of complex cultural dynamics.