“Back to Normal” vs. “New Normal”: the Post-Pandemic Recovery of Italian Tourism

Abstract

Based on one year of intensive interaction with and feedback from practitioners, this paper provides a twofold contribution of a conceptual nature. On the one hand, it attempts to clarify the nature of the crisis in comparison with the past experiences. On the other hand, with reference to the literature on dynamic capabilities, it outlines, in an ideal-typical way, two diverging and co-existing (and therefore conflicting) perspectives of the recovery process that are summarized in – respectively – the “back to normal” and the “new normal” discourses.