When I was young, very young, I saved all the money I could in order to have a chance to travel. Travelling was a relatively complicated matter and a rather expensive one, mostly for a student with a limited budget. But the intriguing taste of the adventure was intense and peculiar, like an unknown, spicy food, full of surprises. If someone had told me, in those years, that one day plane tickets to every destinations in Europe or in the whole world would be ridiculously cheap, that it would be possible to rent temporary flats at affordable prices and it would be possible to go everywhere nearly without obstacles or limits, I'd have probably imagined a wonderful world. And instead mass tourism has appeared. If we travel now, we are all part of mass tourism, because no destination is precluded: New York, London, Paris, Rome…
We crowd mercilessly Venetian enchanting alleys, we row swinging our elbows on Trinità dei Monti staircase, we waste long and sweaty nights , all together, on Barcelona ramblas, we fill, with thousands of others, small, historical, precious little squares. We produce confusion, noise, garbage. Everyone gets sick of us, included those who study how to increase tourism, and, as a consequence, the cash flow. They would look for elitist tourism instead. But quantity and quality never go together.
Then we arrive, and those who are worse than us as well. Those who get drunk, that jump into ancient and elegant fountains, who transform monument in picnic areas. Those who goes around dresses like beachcombers even when they are in the centre of an historical town. Those who take selfies turning their back to the beauty.
It's horrible, isn't it? Or maybe it's not; it's one more right in the planet of rights. We have gained the right to vote, without understanding, the right to pontificate on social networks without knowing and the right to travel without respecting.
It's just democracy with its side effects, that is, after all, the inviolable right to be idiot.
What more could we want?
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