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Tourism, the frog and the scorpion

Di Antonio Caneva, 4 Aprile 2013

A scorpion and a frog met on the bank of a stream.
They both wanted to cross to the other side, and while the frog had no difficulty, the scorpion was worried because it could not swim.
“Please, dear frog, would you carry me across on your back?” asked the scorpion in his sweetest voice.
The frog said: "Oh no! As soon as we are in the water, you will sting me and kill me!” “But why should I sting you?” insisted the scorpion “If I sting you, you die, and I will drown because i cannot swim!”. The frog thought it over for a minute, convinced himself that the scorpion’s objection made sense, then allowed him to hop on his back and they entered the water together.
They were half way through, right in midstream, when the frog felt a sharp pain in his back. “What?” he exclaimed “You stung me! Now we are both going to die! Why did you do it?”
“Because I am a scorpion.” Replied the scorpion: "It’s my nature."
This fable, very popular all over the world, is attributed to Aesop.
With the next government (because there will be one, sooner or later) there will be a new Minister of Tourism. Who will it be, and how is he/she going to approach the many problems afflicting the sector?
Is it going to be a minister like Michela Vittoria Brambilla, in the opinion of many, more involved in animal issues than in the office she had been entrusted with, or like the present minister Piero Gnudi, who is going to leave the legacy of a massive study by Boston Consulting Group, which nobody will likely follow up on, while we would need concrete actions?
Recent and less recent history has taught us that tourism, with its inability to operate as a system or to appear as a cohesive entity, ranks in government’s consideration after industry, finance, public administration, health care, defence… Only well down in the list comes tourism.
Let’s not delude ourselves that the next government may have a different approach: it is its nature.
We would like to be wrong.

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