“Diversamente migranti : il ruolo delle lifestyle migration nelle dinamiche di gentrification rurale contemporanee. Il caso della Vallesanta (Casentino)”

Lifestyle migrations are a new type of mobility developed in recent decades. This concept has been defined as a specific mobility of individuals, belonging to all age groups, who move permanently or for long periods in places that offer them a better quality of life. These complex mobility have been theorized in different ways: from counter-urbanization to rural gentrification, up to the actual conceptualization of lifestyle migration. In this essay, the theoretical-conceptual reflection, accompanied by a brief state of international art, constitutes the necessary prologue to the case study. In the early 1980s the Vallesanta Germans started a hybrid migration movement between political migration (radical environmental opposition to Germany's nuclear choices) and lifestyle migration. The successive waves of new inhabitants, Italians or of other origins, have contributed to revitalizing a marginal mountain area. Despite difficulties and failures, the new inhabitants of Vallesanta have given rise to demographic, socio-economic and cultural dynamics that have transformed this area (municipality of Chiusi della Verna) into an exemplary case of rural gentrification of the Italian mid-mountain.