Communities and Cruise Ship Tourism. A Geographical Perspective on the Cases of Palermo and Siracusa, Sicily

The ways in which a community (re)produces specific images of cruise ship tourism include cultural and physical (urban) landscapes, conflicts, strategies of resilience that semantize peculiar spaces through private (and public) narrations. The relationship between the host communities and the hosted tourists can be potentially conflictual or find forms of peaceful and/or constructive coexistence. The peculiar (re)production of private and public narratives that reflect ways of thinking and perceptions of spaces, Identity and Otherness is of great importance in this process. By using a cultural geographical approach, this book aims to investigate this dynamic. Starting from fieldwork conducted using participant observation and including some interviews this work aims to analyze the ways in which the communities of two cruise destinations in Sicily (Italy), Palermo and Siracusa, perceive the cruise tourism and the passengers who disembark as tourists, especially in the period of crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Both of the two communities are exposed to cruises with a different maturity. The perceptions of the host communities and their narratives are here reconstructed through the contextualization of cruise tourism in the two Sicilian destinations.