Turismo e grandi eventi. Torino e le prospettive post-olimpiche: da città-fabbrica a meta turistica?

Mega-Events, as the recent winter Olympic Games held in Torino, receive an increasing attention in the debate over urban transformations, as the international urban competition to host them shows very well. Tourism legacy is one of the main causes for this attention. Mega events allow cities and surrounding territories to operate both material and immaterial transformations, that may be seen as touristic resources: the improvement of international visibility, the renewal of urban sites of interest and suburbs, connectivity, the expansion of hotels and accommodations, the qualification of touristic operators and so on. To manage this complex and multidimensional legacy requires wide-ranging territorial and touristic policies, able to spread through time the positive effects of the event. The case of Torino 2006 well represents this issue. The Olympic event signalled a transformation of the image of the city which definitively casts aside the idea of Torino as a purely industrial city, promoting it as a new as a worthwhile tourist and cultural destination. At the same time, the event operated extraordinary tangible changes to the city. In this framework, the paper aims to explore the tourism legacy of Torino 2006, attempting to identify some of the challenges which the city is facing (or it is likely to face in the future) to promote long-lasting tourism-related policies and to manage its huge Olympic legacy.