Criteria for housing stock appraisal in minor historical centers for the recovery and enhancement of root TOURISM

Minor historic centers, regardless of the presence or absence of monumental assets, due to their architectural, landscape and anthropic characteristics, as well as documenting historical memory and collective identity, have all the potential to become the driving elements of the territory global transformation. In Italy, and especially in the South, minor historical centers have been crossed by the migration phenomenon which has strongly encouraged the unstoppable and progressive depletion of the population and the abandonment of housing, and the consequent structural degradation. Several houses in the historic centers are owned by emigrated people who sometimes still return as holiday tourists. This form of tourism, the so-called root tourism, represents a rarely fully understood opportunity for local development. In this context, and with specific reference to homeowners, the involvement of this type of tourist in the recovery of the housing heritage is an inevitable passage for the purposes of tourism development focused on the recovery and enhancement of the historical identity of a place.. In any case, and in very general terms, nowadays there is a widespread awareness that the recovery and re-functionalization of minor historical centers can open new strategic perspectives in systemic infrastructural policies, in the building sector and in the tourism and agritourism ones, in information and communication technologies, and in the environmental industry that must specialize in landscape restoration and conservation activities. Historic centers become a real field of investment, in which all actors are really encouraged to invest their resources and interact to give a global response to the problems inherent in the requalification of cultural and architectural heritage. The renewed interest in the recovery policies of smaller historic centers can also be reported to the pressures exerted by the real estate market, which has seized the potential of an economic capital that can be used for speculative purposes. It is therefore important to have tools able to appraise the economic profitability of these transformations even before the social and cultural added value of valorisation. This paper intends to provide objective appraisal criteria useful for valuating and measuring the profitability of investment in minor historic centers transformation in order to allow the integration of the socio-economic vision with the historical-cultural one.