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The rediscovery of the medieval routes of Norman origin in Sicily readvocates a system of interconnection between small villages, towns and cities which can be compared to the circulation system: ancient paths and roads are like veins and arteries which are ready to reanimate a body in need of resilience and exciting experiences. The slow tourism of historical routes in a new ecology of tourism currently contributes with increasing significance to the creation of green sustainable tourism, compatible with the territory and respectful of local identities.

This chapter aims to highlight the potential of the slow tourism of the historical routes in order to revive the internal areas from an economic and social point of view. The analysis is focused in particular on the Magna Via Francigena: this route links Palermo and Agrigento through the rural heart of Sicily touching 18 small towns inland. The creation of this route has rewoven broken territorial wefts, restoring dialogue and collaboration between the towns involved. It has revitalized the place consciousness of the territories. It has also encouraged place-based production chains and micro-economies, boosting new income. This route makes a definite contribution to placing marginalized area, towns and territories on the geographical map again.

Therefore the historical routes outline new ways of endogenous development based on the recovery and enhancement of identity assets and local resources.

La politica del turismo, intesa come sistema di direttive e di norme per gli operatori turistici e come atteggiamento degli organi statali, parastatali e privati nei riguardi dei problemi sorgenti dal movimento dei forestieri, significa organizzazione e disciplina delle attività del turismo e dell'ospitalità, sia per spontanea consapevolezza degli interessati, sia per riconosciuta esigenza di tutela delle manifestazioni individuali e collettive derivanti dai rapporti turistici.

Because of the expansion of the internet and Web 2.0 phenomenon, new challenges are emerging in the disclosure practises adopted by organisations in the public-sector. This study aims to examine local governments’ (LGOs) use of social media (SM) in disclosing environmental actions/plans/information as a new way to improve accountability to citizens to obtain organisational legitimacy and the related sentiment of citizens’ judgements.

This paper analyses the content of 39 Italian LGOs’ public pages on Facebook. After the distinction between five classes of environmental issues (air, water, energy, waste and territory), an initial study is performed to detect possible sub-topics applying latent Dirichlet allocation. Having a list of posts related to specific environmental themes, the researchers computed the sentiment of citizens’ comments. To measure sentiment, two different approaches were implemented: one based on a lexicon dictionary and the other based on convolutional neural networks.

Facebook is used by LGOs to disclose environmental issues, focussing on their main interest in obtaining organisational legitimacy, and the analysis shows an increasing impact of Web 2.0 in the direct interaction of LGOs with citizens. On the other hand, there is a clear divergence of interest on environmental topics between LGOs and citizens in a dialogic accountability framework.

Sentiment analysis (SA) could be used by politicians, but also by managers/entrepreneurs in the business sector, to analyse stakeholders’ judgements of their communications/actions and plans on corporate social responsibility. This tool gives a result on time (i.e. not months or years after, as for the reporting system). It is cheaper than a survey and allows a first “photograph” of stakeholders’ sentiment. It can also be a useful tool for supporting, developing and improving environmental reporting.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first to apply SA to environmental disclosure via SM in the public sphere. The study links modern techniques in natural language processing and machine learning with the important aspects of environmental communication between LGOs and citizens.