Tourism in the phlegraean fields: Public perception and framing agenda of territorial public initiatives

Over the past few decades the Phlegraean Fields-which extend into the municipalities of Pozzuoli, Bacoli, Monte di Procida, Quarto and include the Phlegraean islands of Ischia, Procida and Vivara-have been affected by a series of policies aimed at urban redevelopment and tourist relaunch which, with different intensity, impacted on the territory. Starting from these considerations, the paper has two objectives: on one hand, to identify the territorial and tourist policies implemented in the Phlegraean Fields to which the media system has given greater prominence in the last 5 years and, on the other, to analyze the public opinion on territory management and tourism market. In order to answer these questions, the linguistic corpora of about 300 articles published on the topic in the period between 2015 and 2020 are analyzed through text mining techniques on the main online local newspapers that deal with topics related to tourism and territorial policies for the Phlegrean area and the readers’ comments that have been published. The conclusions indicate some possible policy guidelines.