INTERNATIONAL PRESSSicily’s ‘scattered hotels’ offer new hope to the city’s hospitality industry
“There’s this building, the one behind it and the one with the balcony over there,” says Michele Bitetti, standing on a terrazza in the Sicilian town of Ragusa. He’s pointing out various parts of his hotel, the Giardino sul Duomo, to monocle – which might not sound like a particularly challenging task, except that this is an albergo diffuso (“scattered hotel”). That means the hotel’s 16 rooms are dotted around this beautiful neighbourhood. Ten years ago, the buildings that now house them were abandoned, symptoms of a depopulation trend that has hollowed out communities across the Bel Paese – a consequence of mass emigration, declining work opportunities and a plummeting birth rate.
In Sicily, these factors have dramatically converged and entire villages in the interior of the Mediterranean’s largest island have been boarded up. In the region’s more prosperous coastal areas, piecemeal losses have led to scatterings of abandoned buildings, giving towns a gap-toothed look. This was the case in Ragusa, many of whose citizens had left the old town (known as Ibla) either for the new suburbs that climb vertiginously up the opposite hill or for a new life across the ocean. At around the same time that Giancarlo dall’Ara, a young hospitality consultant from northwestern Italy, devised the albergo diffuso concept as a way of reviving tourism in the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region, the regional government passed a law that provided funding and tax breaks to anyone starting a business in Ragusa or Siracusa.
articolo QUI