Typical products and food and wine tourism: how to exploit a territory

3 INTRODUCTION The main topic of our work concerns typical products and food and wine tourism, in particular of how they can represent a resource for the social and economic development of a territory. We will start taking into account how the change of the passage from the industrial to post-industrial society has been accompanied to a new way of interpreting past time and, by consequence, a new ways of making tourism. The typical products, not seen from the nutritional point of view but as symbols, consequences of history, traditions and customs, become mediums for the territory and source of tourist attraction. Therefore, after an analysis of food and wine tourism and its supply and demand, we will see how it can represent a source of both economic and sociocultural development for the interested territories through initiatives of promotion and integrated and coordinated management of all the resources of the sector. In the first chapter, we will analyze the concept of personal identity and the consumption processes and we will face their change with the coming of the complex society. This will enable us to define better the discussion related to typical products and food and wine tourism that represent the main topic of this dissertation. In the second chapter, we will deal with food, cultural symbol and vehicle for meanings for a long time, and, more in detail, typical products, rich of history, tradition and culture. We will talk about them from an identity point of view and of belonging to arrive at the medium role they can play for communities and territories that keep their secrets, but also and above all as driving forces and levers of socioeconomic development that potentially represent for the zones that define their typicality. In the third chapter, we will see how there is an abandonment of the post-war mass tourism also in the field of past time, along to the changes of the concept of personal identity and of the consumption processes, to leave space to the