Migration is inextricably linked with Humanity and human civilization. Long before we created passports, Visas, scary border police, and coined terms like “diaspora”, people were already moving searching a better life. Three millenia ago In the Mediterranean, Phoenicians and Greeks created a network of homelands where citizens identities, loyalties and memories mixed and overlapped. That layered...Migration is inextricably linked with Humanity and human civilization. Long before we created passports, Visas, scary border police, and coined terms like “diaspora”, people were already moving searching a better life. Three millenia ago In the Mediterranean, Phoenicians and Greeks created a network of homelands where citizens identities, loyalties and memories mixed and overlapped. That layered sense of belonging is not so far from those who today feel equally “from” Melbourne and Messinia, Toronto and Tinos or Lagos and Athens (like the famous Antetokounmpo family). Migrants and their descendants preserve memories in the form of smells, recipes, lullabies, family jokes and old photographs. Today, academics use the term “Roots Tourism” (and synonyms such as Ancestral, Genealogy, Heritage, Diaspora, Nostalgia, Homecoming, Legacy, Ethnic and Sentimental Tourism) tourism to describe trips taken to places linked to one’s own or one’s family’s past, usually for emotional reasons rather than pure sightseeing. People may travel to find the house a grandparent left behind, the church where someone married, or the port where a distant relative boarded a ship for America or Australia. In doing so, they try to reconnect threads that were cut, by war, poverty, politics or simply by time. The visit can quietly change both sides: the visitor who finally sees where their story started, and the community that sees itself through the eyes of someone who belongs and does not belong at the same time. Italy and other European countries are now moving to formalize, better organize and support Roots Tourism also for the benefit of remote rural communities. The ECOCLUB Team is happy and honoured to participate as a Partner in a project co-funded by the European Union, called "Foster Competencies on Roots Tourism in VET Schools to Promote Sustainable Tourism and Destinations in Europe" and we will be regularly sharing progress updates of this exciting and - we believe - meaningful endeavour. Show more

ROOTS Tourism

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