Mitigate the tourism-scape: an ANP model to address a conservation and revitalisation strategy for the Tonnara del Secco (San Vito lo Capo, Italy)

The “Tonnara” is intended as a historical architectural complex to support traditional tuna fishing (the “mattanza”) and processing; it is a significant construction that characterizes the Mediterranean and Sicilian coastal landscape and has a high identity value for local communities. Deprived of their original economic function, Sicilian tuna fisheries are mainly used as museums, but also for tourist accommodation or catering activities as they allow to reach financial feasibility, covering the significant maintenance costs. To guarantee the conservation and transmission of the architectural heritage, defining the correct use therefore remains one of the most relevant issues, which can be managed by combining the restoration intervention, aimed at preserving the material testimony, with other analysis tools such as multi-criteria evaluation models. These models support the selection of the refunctionalization proposals, not only according to economic efficiency criteria, but including environmental, social and cultural sustainability ones. The environmental sustainability of the new functions is an essential aim, especially when tuna fisheries take place in fragile natural areas and are under strong anthropic pressure deriving from touristification phenomena, together with the aims of maintaining or re-semantizing the identity values that the architectural asset has for the local community. In this context, the Tonnara del Secco in San Vito Lo Capo (Italy), currently unused, represents an emblematic case study to define an experimental approach to the issues of conservation, reuse and management of the site using an ANP Analytic model Network Process. This study proposes two hypotheses for the revitalisation of the architectural complex, as tourist-accommodation or educational and cultural centre, that are compared by applying a ANP model, structured to analyse the environmental, economic, social and cultural impacts, and to consider the interrelationships between various elements. This model is submitted to some local stakeholders to verify how the two alternatives are perceived by different subjects and to identify areas of potential conflict in a participatory decision-making process.