Chapter Tourism of Italians in Italy through crisis and development: the last 15 years, region by region

Tourism is a very important economic activity for many nations and Italy is among those that particularly benefit from it. In fact, even during the period of pandemic, despite the crisis, tourism in Italy proved to be a particularly resilient sector: among all European countries, Italy is the one that recorded the highest number of total tourist nights-spent. However, tourism statistics are not yet exhaustive in describing a highly variable phenomenon at the territorial level. Even the tourism satellite accounts, so useful for sectoral planning at regional level, are compiled for the whole country. Instead, the territories do not always know themselves, while the enhancement of landscape resources is one of the major issues that has not always been adequately analyzed; also in the recently approved Italian PNRR/Next Generation EU. In this article, we aim to examine the trend of the tourism phenomenon in the various Italian regions over the past 15 years; a period marked by crises of different origins (economic, political, health) which slowed down the economic development of the third millennium. In particular, given the problems mentioned above, we decided to start the research by considering the arrivals in hotels and non-hotel establishments by Italian tourists. The hospitality business is in fact an important part of the tourism industry. We expect domestic tourism to have greater stability, being less affected by international problems. We then examined the tourism of Italians in Italy, in the various regions, from 2006 to 2020. This analysis allowed us to observe the tourism phenomenon in Italy from a different perspective, observing, region by region, the relationship between tourism within the region and tourism coming from others regions. The choice of arrivals, instead of night spent, reduces the influence of the specific type of tourism in each region. The first results appear interesting

Students' opinions on teaching and services provided by the Italian Universities: a proposal for a new evaluation scheme

In Italy, the evaluation of the internal effectiveness of academic training courses has been substantiated, for over 20 years, in periodical surveys on students' opinions on teaching and related services. The first proposal to homogenize the various measurement methods adopted by the Universities was advanced by the former National Committee for the Evaluation of the University System in 2000 and it was the reference model until 2011, when the first Board of Directors of the National Evaluation of University and Research Agency (ANVUR) took over. The Agency's attempt, within the AVA (Self-assessment, Periodic Evaluation and Accreditation) methodological framework, to enrich and update the survey highlighted a number of critical issues, essentially linked to the ways and times of participation of students, compared to the modalities in which the training offers of the universities are organized. Taking a cue from these critical issues, the purpose of this paper is to propose a new, simpler and more rational evaluation model, which still maintains substantial continuity with the inspiring principles of the past plants, and tries to consolidate the monitoring efforts made by the universities to date

Assessment of Flame Transfer Function Formulations for the Thermoacoustic Analysis of Lean Burn Aero-Engine Combustors

Abstract The numerical analysis of thermoacoustic instability in lean burn aero-engines requires proper Flame Transfer Functions (FTF) able to describe the complex physical phenomena characterizing the coupling between heat release rate fluctuations and the acoustic field which is further complicated by the use of liquid fuel together with advanced injection systems. In this work simple FTF formulations have been applied to the thermoacoustic analysis of a tubular combustor equipped with a PERM (Partially Evaporating and Rapid Mixing) injection system with the main aim of assessing their capabilities in the prediction of thermoacoustic instabilities in lean burn aero-engine combustors

Self-Supervised Prediction of the Intention to Interact with a Service Robot

A service robot can provide a smoother interaction experience if it has the ability to proactively detect whether a nearby user intends to interact, in order to adapt its behavior e.g. by explicitly showing that it is available to provide a service. In this work, we propose a learning-based approach to predict the probability that a human user will interact with a robot before the interaction actually begins; the approach is self-supervised because after each encounter with a human, the robot can automatically label it depending on whether it resulted in an interaction or not. We explore different classification approaches, using different sets of features considering the pose and the motion of the user. We validate and deploy the approach in three scenarios. The first collects $3442$ natural sequences (both interacting and non-interacting) representing employees in an office break area: a real-world, challenging setting, where we consider a coffee machine in place of a service robot. The other two scenarios represent researchers interacting with service robots ($200$ and $72$ sequences, respectively). Results show that, even in challenging real-world settings, our approach can learn without external supervision, and can achieve accurate classification (i.e. AUROC greater than $0.9$) of the user's intention to interact with an advance of more than $3$s before the interaction actually occurs.Comment: Paper under revision for Robotics and Autonomous Systems journa

Social diversity: a look at tourism

This paper addresses the issue of social diversity, with reference to the phenomenon of tourism in Italy. Social inequality influences numerous socio-economic phenomena: tourism has been scarcely examined under this perspective. Tourism has significant effects at social level: both on travellers and on the inhabitants of the visited regions. Italy that is one of the most important touristic nations is significantly affected by the phenomena we are studying and, therefore, is an ideal context to analyse and identify the characteristics of tourism and its interaction on various aspects of social diversity. We could consider the interactions on tourism by persons with different economic and social conditions, race, gender, age, religion, mentality. These issues are usually considered by qualitative approaches. This paper attempts to give a quantitative dimension to these phenomena looking for possible statistical and administrative sources. We examined some, direct and indirect, official sources of the National Statistical System and other sources disseminated by European projects and research institutions. To get a more detailed picture of a particular form of social tourism, we used the data provided to us by a very active association in this area. This study is only a first approach in order to find a strategy to help assessing some quantitative characteristics of accessible tourism. The development of this type of tourism shall imply actions, techniques, and policies aimed at reducing the problems about social diversity in the sector, in order to make tourism become a factor of social inclusion

Social diversity: a look at tourism

This paper addresses the issue of social diversity, with reference to the phenomenon of tourism in Italy. Social inequality influences numerous socio-economic phenomena: tourism has been scarcely examined under this perspective. Tourism has significant effects at social level: both on travellers and on the inhabitants of the visited regions. Italy that is one of the most important touristic nations is significantly affected by the phenomena we are studying and, therefore, is an ideal context to analyse and identify the characteristics of tourism and its interaction on various aspects of social diversity. We could consider the interactions on tourism by persons with different economic and social conditions, race, gender, age, religion, mentality. These issues are usually considered by qualitative approaches. This paper attempts to give a quantitative dimension to these phenomena looking for possible statistical and administrative sources. We examined some, direct and indirect, official sources of the National Statistical System and other sources disseminated by European projects and research institutions. To get a more detailed picture of a particular form of social tourism, we used the data provided to us by a very active association in this area. This study is only a first approach in order to find a strategy to help assessing some quantitative characteristics of accessible tourism. The development of this type of tourism shall imply actions, techniques, and policies aimed at reducing the problems about social diversity in the sector, in order to make tourism become a factor of social inclusion