Giovanni Attili's 'Civita' Examines Overtourism and the Death of a Borgo

Giovanni Attili, professor of Urban Planning at Sapienza University of Rome, has published 'Civita. Senza aggettivi e senza altre specificazioni' (Quodlibet, 2020), a book that uses the tiny Italian hilltown of Civita di Bagnoregio as a case study for the devastating effects of overtourism. With only 11 permanent residents, Civita received 1 million day-trippers in 2019, transforming it into a 'postcard city' and a 'tanatoscopic' tourist attraction where visitors come to see the spectacle of a dying town. Attili traces the town's history from a co-evolutionary relationship between community and fragile territory, through forced depopulation in the 1960s, to the arrival of Latvian-born architect Astra Zarina in 1963. Zarina initiated the Hilltowns Program, a summer school for American architecture students that fostered community-based restoration and co-design, revitalizing the town for three decades. Today, Attili argues, that spirit of care and imagination is lost, replaced by a predatory, extractive tourism monoculture. He warns that the town's UNESCO candidacy, submitted in January, risks becoming another marketing tool to attract even more visitors, rather than a means of preservation. The book includes a preface by Giorgio Agamben, who poses the question 'What does it mean to inhabit?'