FOREWORD

Sustainability is a very fashionable nice word, nowadays used for any social activity, often wrongly. Also the term sustainable tourism is largely used and widespread; it is a very common subject of discussion, especially with reference to the peculiar form of farm holiday.

Gloria De Poli Bortolotti, writer and journalist, founder of Le Francesche, thought that it was necessary to conceive a form of sustainable tourism also by the sea since the 1950s, when the practice was covering the coast with concrete and building as much as possible. Her choice of a different relation with the territory, of a well-conceived naturalistic settlement, of a "population" density compatible with the environment led all our other creations.

Others preferred to reproduce in the most beautiful places the structures and functions of a town, with all its related defects. We tried to do something different and this text is to describe our efforts, to tell you many aspects you may not know (it is easier to see the negative impacts than perceiving what we avoided or concealed), to explain the reasons of a series of choices and ask you suggestions for a future improvement.

What we tried to do was to put sustainable tourism into practice instead of talking about