Family storytelling and local development

It has been evident for many years now that the economic and social development of urban areas, whether small or large, has been closely linked to the presence of the tourist phenomenon diffusive. Indeed, there is an intense international competition. For example, more than thirty years ago, the Fordiste Italian cities in crisis, in order to recover, had identified in the tourist phenomenon the sector in which to invest and, therefore, started processes of urban regeneration that also included the conversion, reorganization and reuse of abandoned urban areas, along former industrial sites (a known case is the one of Genoa; Gazzola, 2005). In this context, therefore, the awareness that competition is now played at a transmedia and global level (Jenkins, 2007), also throughout the design of projects that, will offer services and solutions that add value to the quality of local life (Nuvolati, 1998) and the promise of the ‘tourist experience’ (Augé, 1999). The need to intervene with a public governance is even more stringent now specially in cases where urban areas have lost relevance, due to an economic and social structure that has not been able to adapt promptly to the changes experienced by society (Harvey, 2010). In these cases, it has been experienced the issue of the public governance reorganization that aims to recover centrality and/or visibility to the place, in the increasingly widespread belief that it is useful to implement place branding processes, also useful for strengthening the sense of belonging and territorial identity of people (Rizzi et al., 2018). In this context, place destinations that intend to compete on the tourist market, national and international, understood that at the traditional actions must necessarily add those aimed to the construction of what is usually called place branding. Indeed, they must activate a public governance mechanism capable of bringing out the emotional and experiential qualities of places, which can be summarized in a system of values with a well-identifiable meaning (ie brand identity). In this paper, we will work with a “tool” that we consider unique for building the brand image of the place, which is called a “family storytelling”. Initially, we intend to highlight the relevance that “family storytelling” plays, or could play, in the formation of place branding and then consequently how worked in the local development of the destinations through the so-called “roots tourism”. We will take in consideration a specific study case of this particular type of tourist demand that regards an Italian-Americans family who travel to the places of its family origins.