From this, we can rightly understand how much interest there is in this field even in scientific and economic study circles.

A new focus on land development has been animating the theoretical debate about the influence of this component on the economic performance of local business activities for several years now. This trend, already particularly important in itself, even becomes crucial if the focus is on tourism, i.e., a set of activities in which supply and demand interact as a function of stimuli strongly conditioned by the territorial component. Indeed, for those who are about to carry out studies or make strategic decisions in the field of tourism, it is of fundamental importance to have a wide range of quantitative and qualitative information derived from the territory-or even geo-referenced-that best describes the characteristics of the sites of interest

Less obvious and still little addressed is the problem of synthesizing, through appropriate indicators, the information content of this multiplicity of variables. In detail, the idea of tourism georeferencing implies an approach to the territory that is as analytical as possible and that is conventionally identified at the municipal level.

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A fundamentally important element derived from this definition is that tourism depends not only on the activities and products of individual types of tourism enterprises (hotel, restaurant, transportation enterprises, etc.) but also on the interaction of these enterprises with the surrounding environment, which conditions their activities and is in turn conditioned by them.

The Italian Touring Club, in a recent research report, also highlighted the relevance of the concept of tourism potential, defined as a proxy for the overall level of development of a locality, filtered by what of the overall development can be translated into incoming tourist or excursion movements

In the conviction that, although of fundamental importance in itself, the mere availability of an integrated database does not automatically imply a clearer and deeper reading of the attractiveness potential of an area, in this context we also set ourselves the goal of defining, calculating and interpreting appropriate indexes of touristy for each of the municipalities of the analyzed province, based on methodologies that can be generalized to other territorial contexts. These indices aim to synthesize the previous concept of touristicity in a quantitative key and should grow possibly within a fixed range of amplitude as the actual or potential attractiveness of a site increases. In detail, the points covered are as follows:

• 1) feeding, with reference to a delimited territorial scope, an integrated municipal database (available by consulting a multiplicity of statistical sources) that concentrates the wealth of information on the natural, historical, artistic, and infrastructural wealth of the examined territory

 2 ) quantification, through the construction of appropriate tourism indices, of the degree of territorial attractiveness of individual units. To this end, three alternative statistical methodologies will be proposed and compared ;

3)  calculation and interpretation of the above indices for municipalities in the province of Foggia for empirical validation of the analysis model;

4) verification of the usefulness of the results obtained through an initial spatial analysis aimed at the tourism reclassification of the observed municipalities and initial identification of Local Tourist Systems (STLs), based solely on the aforementioned tourism indices.

ASPECTS OF TOURISTICITY

At present, there is no unambiguous definition of a tourist municipality, just as there is no universally accepted list of variables to be measured as the one actually needed to assess the level of municipal touristicity. As a result, there is also a lack of a specific methodology capable of leading to a synthetic tourist index. Some recent studies have touched somewhat on this issue, but without providing particularly detailed indications that can be generalized to territorial contexts of any size or nature.

In the creation of an equation that could give us an Index of Touristiness, Multivariate Analysis techniques were used; with a criterion of evaluation of the variables not a posteriori, but rather, evaluated by an evaluation method that was neutral and not affected by prior cognitive bias. This is because with a posteriori evaluation , after the collection phase and through appropriate factorial processing, it turns out to be possible to reinterpret a posteriori the semantic meaning of the original variables; incurring as already mentioned very large errors of evaluation.

The derived equation, which is very complex, includes 32 variables and we will not introduce it because it is important to derive the philosophy of creation.

It is interesting, however, to mention three of the variables used for their importance and reasons for choice:

1) the potential tourist attractiveness (TA), which represents the territory’s endowment of structural, environmental, historical-artistic, etc. types;

2) the availability of tourist bed places (TB), which is a specific endowment of the territory, treated separately from the other structural variables, as it is more directly related to tourism;

3) the actual tourist impact derived from tourist demand (tourist impact – TI), i.e., recorded attendance, transit riders, tourist spending, etc.

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With reference to infrastructure, the fact that most penalizes the territory is undoubtedly the lack of facilities in the transport sector. The latter, while sufficient for road and rail transport, are extremely deficient in terms of the presence of ports (4) and airports (1) which, among other things, appear small in size and with limited operations in relation to the extension and particular shape of the provincial territory.

Although no attempt is made in this context to identify actual Local Tourist Systems (STLs), it is still possible to arrive at aggregations between touristically similar municipalities, according to a certain search algorithm. In detail, two criteria for identifying different tourist areas can be applied:

a) the groups of municipalities can be identified on the basis of a criterion derived simply from an assessment of the extent to which each municipality differs from the average level of one or more of the above-mentioned tourism indices, thus according to an approach that determines a priori the logical significance of each group;

b)groups of municipalities should be characterized by the purely statistical property of being as internally homogeneous as possible and, consequently, as different from each other as possible. Such groups must then be assigned a logical-interpretive identity a posteriori that better connotes their essential peculiarities.

Having chosen, in a systemic view of spatial units, the logic of the greatest homogeneity of spatial units at the aggregation stage, the minimum deviance clustering technique was opted for in order to maximize the criterion of internal cohesion of the groups to be originated.

With reference to the problem of the choice of variables, the concept of touristic attractiveness (tourist - T) of a given territory has been broken down, at a first level, into three components: potential touristic attractiveness in terms of environment, historical-artistic, etc. (tourist attractiveness - TA); availability of bed places for touristic purposes (tourist bed places - TB); and actual touristic impact derived from demand, i.e. tourist attendance and spending (tourist impact - TI).

At a second level of conceptual disaggregation, two of the three components were then further broken down: TA into five sub-components (land and environment; infrastructure; historical and natural attractions; other attractions; notoriety), TI into three (tourism economic profile; final tourism demand; tourism investment).

Since the selected variables take on different significance depending on whether they are evaluated in absolute or relative terms (i.e., in relation to a dimensional indicator such as resident population), the proposed and compared synthetic analysis models were applied according to two separate analyses aimed at highlighting:

1) In one case, the tourism dimension, that is, the absolute importance from the tourism point of view of the territorial unit, regardless of its size;

2)in the other, relative tourist attractiveness, that is, the tourist importance of the territorial unit in relation to its population size.

Having a highly territorialized database through which to derive tools for both a descriptive reading of the territory and a synthetic analysis of tourism potential has several advantages. Among them: 

a) it is a great decision-support tool for local governments, especially in the perspective of the need for all Italian regions to come up with models of systemic aggregation of individual municipal realities, as prepared by the aforementioned framework law on tourism with regard to STLs (Local Tourist Systems);

b) one has the possibility of proposing a typological reclassification of Italian municipalities in terms of tourist attractiveness, as an alternative to the typological classification currently used by official statistics, which is derived essentially from the geo-morphological characteristics of the territory and is partially obsolete;

c) local realities can be identified that are as yet untouched by final tourism demand, but potentially developable and thus possible recipients of local investment plans.

Finally, the preparation of a comprehensive theoretical model both in terms of the choice of variables and with reference to the methodology for their analysis and synthesis allows for replicability of the elaborations in time and space and transferability to local realities of varying sizes (districts, labor districts, census areas, tourism promotion companies, provinces, etc.), although it seems advisable to operate at a level of detail at least municipal.