MEMORY RESILIENCE AND SUSTAINABILITY: WHEN TOURISM AND ART MEET AT THE ‘CROSS’ OF BYZANTIUM

Byzantine heritages are widespread and multidimensional with their evidence in churches, houses, buildings, trails and memories (and memorabilia), all of them from the North to the South of Italy. Tourists are looking for these heritages at the same time as citizens and communities. Resilience and sustainability of this memory, they both need strategies. Promoting and fundraising are especially exploited in order to increase and diversify resources that are essential when the core-business is enlarging itself and including from creativity to tourism. Networks stem from public-private partnerships different stakeholders are engaged for. The philanthropic stakeholders can be public administrations, museums, churches and grant-making foundations. Objective of this paper is the analysis of contents and performances of the Byzantine memory with focus on some heritages which can be touristic attractions for a specific segment of national and international tourists, who are not only interested in this memory resilience, but also in creative contents from culture to food, from landscape to events like festivals and historical re-enactment. This research is a focus on the creative entrepreneur who is today struggling for survival, especially in scenario where cultural and creative contents are diversified and competing for audiences and visitors. In crisis times this research can be helpful in order to verify who has the competitive advantage and match profiles of tourism and cultural participation, for resilience and sustainability of macro and micro-destinations.