Notes on San Terenzo
San Terenzo is a historic village on Liguria's coastline. Its proximity to the famous Cinque Terre and its fast motorway connections with the main cities of northern Italy make it an extremely popular destination for summer tourism. Since the early 1950s, the seasonal influx of inhabitants has profoundly transformed the area in its architectural, infrastructural, ecological, and economic dimensions. These changes have influenced the way many people—both residents and visitors—relate to the landscape and develop attachments to some of its features. As in Calvino, a predatory attitude towards a place often triggers a similar emotional approach in other aspects of people’s lives.
Liguria was among the first European territories to confront the phenomenon of tourism. Representations of San Terenzo in painting and literature began to circulate from the nineteenth century onwards, thanks to English and German visitors. Since then, depictions of the Riviera’s landscape have continued to multiply, leading up to the era of mass tourism.
Today, San Terenzo embodies the contradictions of many Italian coastal towns. The transformations of its landscape reveal, in a particularly visible way, the tension between efforts to preserve a fragile territory and the drive to exploit its full economic potential. These two tendencies are in conflict, yet within their clash it is possible to discern new and unexpected ways of shaping the landscape and living with it.