Apennines in Transitions: Between Tourism Monoculture, Depopulation and Emerging Community-Based Practices

This paper examines, through the lens of degrowth, the tensions currently reshaping tourism in the Apennines, a mountain system marked by uneven and polarised trajectories. On the one hand, tourist flows are increasingly concentrated in a limited number of highly infrastructure-intensive hubs, predominantly oriented toward winter sports and developed according to market-driven logics. On the other hand, vast out-of-the-loop areas remain largely invisible within tourism circuits, experiencing long-term decline driven by demographic shrinkage, population ageing, and the erosion of local functions. Tourist colonisation and abandonment are thus interpreted as two interrelated outcomes of the same growth-oriented paradigm, whose structural limits are further exacerbated by climate change and persistent socio-demographic fragilities. Alongside these dominant trajectories, a ‘third way’ is emerging in specific contexts, grounded in slow, relational and community-based tourism practices. These initiatives can be read as territorially embedded experiments that challenge the structural lock-in of growth-dependent tourism models.The paper pursues three main objectives: (a) to map the morphological, socio-demographic, and functional discontinuities shaping the Apennine ridge; (b) to analyse the (un)sustainable trajectories of Apennine tourism, highlighting the coexistence of high-intensity extractive models and emerging place- and community-based practices; and (c) to examine, through a case study in the Monti Picentini, the transformative potential of these practices.The findings highlight the uneven emergence of territorial micro-innovations even in the most fragile contexts of the southern Apennines, while showing that such slow and uncertain processes can contribute to regeneration only when community-led initiatives are supported by sustained institutional commitment, thereby preventing forms of involuntary or recessionary degrowth.