The ‘Diffuse Hotel’: An Italian New Model of Sustainable Hospitality

The “albergo diffuso” is defined as a hotel located in a single town, consisting of many buildings close to one another, with a unified management that can provide standard services to all guests. The objective is to offer a more friendly, authentic and sustainable form of tourism hospitality. These types of hotels are located in old houses and apartments of ancient villages, closer to local communities and their “back region”. This form of hospitality allows bringing back to life historical abandoned buildings in rural and mountain villages often depopulated since the end of the 19th century, due to industrialization and urbanization. At the same time the “albergo diffuso” allows the tourists to experience their holidays closely with the local community, since the buildings that compose it are distributed in various areas of the village and the visitor is not confined to a hotel, in an artificial tourist space. The tourist experience is then more complete, because it is not only cultural, culinary, etc. but it is also a spatial experience. The paper presents an overview of the topic of the “albergo diffuso”, focusing on the most virtuous cases and those most interesting from the tourist point of view.