The great “escape” to the resorts has begun. In total, during the first two weekends of August, twenty-eight million Italians will leave small and large cities. Already last weekend, however, at stations, airports and highways, the traffic was particularly high. Statistics so far tell us that six out of ten Italians will go on vacation. They will spend, on average, eighty-five euros a day while, due to financial constraints, the percentage of citizens who chose to take leave in September, when the overall cost is more moderate, is increasing.

In Italy this year prices in hotels, restaurants and the various tourist infrastructures will increase by 7.9% compared to last year. It is one of the reasons that push more and more tourists to choose destinations outside national borders. And this year Italian tourists prefer Greece, Spain and Albania because of the natural beauty, but also because they benefit more.

A few days ago there were some press reports on the increase in the number of coronavirus cases in Greece, but the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not issue any relevant directive and, at least at this stage, the media is not giving much weight to the whole matter. The relationship of more and more Italians with Greece is unique, experiential, intense like no other, as they tend to say.

Initiative to increase tourism revenue

Italy, of course, knows well how important the income from the tourism sector is for its economy. For this reason, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Rome has just presented a targeted initiative: “il Turismo delle radici”, tourism that discovers the roots. Italians living abroad and foreign citizens of Italian origin will be able to buy discounted air tickets to discover the areas from which their grandparents and great-grandparents immigrated. With this initiative, the Meloni government hopes to increase tourism revenues by up to eight billion euros a year. A prediction based on the finding that foreign citizens of Italian origin worldwide exceed eighty million.