Italy´s vs Greece´s Heritage strategies – some ideas

A few days ago I attended a lecture of the Heritage Management MA (University of Kent and Athens University of Economics and Business) in Elefsina. No, I´m not doing an MA in Greece. Yes, I sometimes attend lessons for fun (learning is one of life´s greatest adventures!). It was so interesting it made me miss being a university student. Not for long though. This gap year I´m doing at the moment is one of the best decisions I have ever made. There is just so much to discover about life and oneself outside a classroom!

The lecture was about the underlying problems of Rome´s Heritage and Tourism strategies and Athens´ case was used as comparison. Since I have visited both, here are some thoughts on the topic.

First of all, the marketing strategies behind mass tourism and its consequences are BAD! They are bad because they are not sustainable – tourists usually only stay in a city for a couple of nights (an average of 2.4 nights in Rome, for example) and so this does not produce huge economic revenue for a country; mass tourism does not value local traditions and culture, but only a very small number of the iconic cultural elements, present in any typical tourist guide (I´m not saying one shouldn´t visit them – the first thing I did in Athens was visit the Acropolis. I´m just saying Athens isn´t the Acropolis as Lisbon isn´t the Castelo de S. Jorge); also mass tourism constitutes a real threat to material heritage – you can only start to imagine the consequences of thousands of tourists (about 600.000 tourists in the Acropolis every year, for example) walking about sites and monuments each year.

Something I love about Athens is that History and Archaeology are embedded in the present´s everyday life – near monuments and archaeological sites you can find coffee shops and restaurants, houses, grocers, etc. where locals live in, work and socialize at. And they are very much aware and PROUD of their own heritage. Many Metro stations in Athens have archaeological objects on display and Greek people frequently stop to look at them. Whereas in Rome, the most famous monuments (like the Colosseum, for example) have been isolated and “monumentalized” by past authorities, in order to make them stand out from the rest of the city, to glorify and in a way to legitimize certain political agendas (Mussolini´s political and imperialist propaganda strategy is a very good example). But this leads to the monuments´ and the past´s artificial detachment from present-day Rome – discovering the past of Rome becomes a separate adventure from discovering the culture and traditions of modern-day Italy. And because the areas around the iconic monuments and places of Rome are isolated from the locals´ life, everything (the same tourist “package” you can find in any Western capital) is extremely expensive in those areas and (even worse) people don´t get to know the authentic Rome.

In conclusion, when I visited Rome I felt that I mainly discovered its monuments and History, and not much about Italy´s traditions and culture. While in Athens, I feel that authentic Greek life is everywhere!