Where tourism fails: the (un)making of a post-working landscape in the Italian Alps

Abstract

This paper develops the notion of post-working landscape to describe how labour, largely no longer performed, continues to shape how local communities understand their landscape in two Alpine valleys in Italy’s Trentino Province. Following the abandonment of mountain agriculture, the landscape here is undergoing a process of rewilding, as part of which human traces (terrace fields, mountain pastures, etc.) are being erased. Post-working landscapes thus evoke a sense of loss, but also an intimate and embodied tie with the land. I mobilise this framework to discuss why tourism – a crucial economic activity in this part of northern Italy, but strikingly absent from the case study I analyse – is locally perceived in ambiguous terms, and often openly resisted.