Hello, I’m Dario Riccio, and this is “The uneXt Blog”.
Let’s talk about a sentence handed down to most of our wonderful towns and cities. It’s a silent tyranny that repeats every year: the tyranny of tourism seasonality. The economy of countless territories depends on a few, frantic months of summer tourism, leaving squares, restaurants, and businesses empty for the rest of the year. It’s a race against time to concentrate an entire year’s revenue into a handful of weeks, followed by a long autumn and winter hibernation that strains the sustainability of businesses and the very vitality of the community.
What happens when rain ruins the peak August weekend, washing away investments in the flagship event? What happens from October to May, when a vibrant village turns into a “ghost town” and young people are forced to seek work elsewhere? This dependence on a single, short peak period isn’t just an economic problem; it’s a social one. It creates precariousness, prevents long-term planning, and makes it impossible to build a truly sustainable tourism and cultural offering.
Many local administrators feel powerless against this reality, as if it were an immutable law of nature. They hope for good weather, invest everything in the “big summer event,” and cross their fingers. But what if I told you that this tyranny can be defeated? What if I told you there’s a municipality that has turned this weakness into an incredible strength, becoming a desirable destination 365 days a year?
Today, I’m sharing the story of Peccioli, a village in Tuscany that didn’t just manage seasonality—it annihilated it. Its story is a practical manual for every mayor and council member who dreams of seeing their community thrive not only in summer but also in autumn, winter, and spring. It’s a story that shows how a long-term vision and strategic investments can transform a seemingly insurmountable problem into an opportunity for unprecedented development.
Table of Contents
The Case Study (The Inspiration)
In 2024, a small municipality in the province of Pisa beat all competitors to win the prestigious “Borgo dei Borghi” (Village of the Villages) award. That municipality is Peccioli. This recognition was no stroke of luck but the culmination of a visionary journey that began decades earlier, orchestrated by a mayor who embodies a fundamental principle often forgotten: administrative continuity.
The protagonist of this story is Renzo Macelloni, serving his seventh term as the mayor of Peccioli. With nearly uninterrupted leadership since 1988, Macelloni has had the time and determination to implement a long-term strategy, now known throughout Italy as the “Peccioli System“. This is an integrated model that unites the Municipality with Belvedere S.p.A., a public-private company established in 1997 to manage the Legoli waste treatment facility. And herein lies the first stroke of genius: transforming the management of a problem (waste) into an extraordinary source of wealth for the community. Over the years, Belvedere S.p.A. has generated a direct economic impact of €174.7 million, a colossal sum that has been entirely reinvested in cultural projects, infrastructure, and community services.
At the heart of this permanent development strategy is a cultural gem: the “11Lune” (11 Moons) festival, which will celebrate its 21st edition in 2025. Every July, the Fonte Mazzola Amphitheatre becomes a stage of national and international renown. In twenty years, the festival has hosted 237 shows, attracting nearly 270,000 spectators with artists of the calibre of Renzo Arbore, Gianna Nannini, and Francesco De Gregori. The 2025 edition, featuring names like Stefano Massini, Edoardo Leo, Umberto Tozzi, and The Waterboys, confirms its trajectory of excellence.
But the real secret to defeating seasonality doesn’t just lie in a prestigious summer event. It lies in having created resilient infrastructure capable of hosting events all year round, regardless of the weather. The Fonte Mazzola Amphitheatre, built from tuff stone without cement and inspired by ancient Greek theatres, is a prime example of sustainable architecture. But it is the Triangolo Verde (Green Triangle) that represents the true revolution: an area that has transformed the Legoli landfill into a multi-purpose cultural centre, hosting concerts, fashion shows, and events for the Maggio Fiorentino festival. This facility, equipped with covered spaces and advanced technology, allows Peccioli to maintain an active cultural calendar 365 days a year, completely neutralizing the risk of bad weather.
The Peccioli model teaches us that while a summer event can attract tourists, it’s the permanent infrastructure that brings them back. It’s the cultural ecosystem that makes them stay. They didn’t just create a festival; they built a home for that festival and for hundreds of other initiatives.
From Case Study to Strategic Principle (The Lesson)
Peccioli’s story is a practical demonstration of two powerful strategic principles that every local administrator should write in capital letters on their office door.
The first, as we’ve seen, is that administrative continuity and a long-term vision are the essential prerequisites for any significant territorial development. Profound transformations are not achieved in a single five-year electoral term. They require decades of consistent planning, progressive investment, and community trust. The “Peccioli System” would never have existed without the political stability that allowed Renzo Macelloni to pursue his vision decade after decade.
The second principle, even more revolutionary, is that culture, when conceived as a permanent model and not as a sporadic event, becomes the primary engine of local development. Peccioli stopped thinking of culture as a series of disconnected events and started building it as a permanent, widespread infrastructure.
What does this mean in practice? It means the investment didn’t just go into the “11Lune” festival lineup. It went into creating a complete ecosystem managed by the Fondazione Peccioliper (Peccioliper Foundation), which includes a Museum Hub with three different venues, an Open-Air Museum of Contemporary Art (MACCA), libraries, archives, and educational initiatives that run year-round.
This approach radically transforms the nature of the tourism offer. A tourist no longer visits Peccioli just for the July show. They visit Peccioli at any time of year to see the famous “Presenze” (Presences), the iconic sculptures up to 9 meters tall by the Naturaliter group, which have become a symbol of the village. Two of them are even located at the waste treatment plant, turning a utility site into an artistic attraction. They visit Peccioli to admire works by international artists like David Tremlett or Sergio Staino, who have transformed the urban fabric into a distributed museum.
This is the crucial point: Peccioli has shifted from an “event-driven” logic to a “destination-driven” logic. The summer festival has become the crown jewel of a perennial cultural offer, not the sole reason to visit. When culture becomes a stable infrastructure, the flow of tourism naturally deseasonalizes, because the reasons to visit the village don’t disappear when the summer stage is dismantled. They remain, embedded in the squares, the buildings, and even on top of a hill of waste transformed into an amphitheatre.
Technology as an Enabler (The Indirect Solution)
The principle of creating permanent cultural infrastructure is powerful, but its realization, as in Peccioli’s case, required decades and colossal investments. “That’s fantastic,” you might think, “but I don’t have 20 years or a multi-utility company generating millions to reinvest. How can I apply this lesson today with my limited resources?”
This is where technology becomes the strategic accelerator, the great democratizer that allows even a small municipality to achieve similar results in a much shorter time. To achieve deseasonalization, you need resilient infrastructure. But today, this infrastructure doesn’t have to be permanent or built of concrete.
The problem of seasonality is, ultimately, a problem of vulnerability. Vulnerability to weather: a downpour can nullify months of work and tens of thousands of euros invested in an outdoor event. Vulnerability of spaces: municipalities often have beautiful historic squares, perfect in summer, but lack indoor venues that are large, flexible, and inspiring enough to host quality events in autumn or winter.
The solution lies in a new category of architecture: temporary, modular, and technologically advanced structures that allow for the creation of unique experiential spaces, 365 days a year, regardless of external conditions. Sto parlando, ad esempio, delle immersive geodesic domes.
Think of a dome like our THOLUS DOME. It’s not just a tent. It’s a true piece of future-proof architecture, combining iconic design with extraordinary technical performance. It’s a “disaster-proof” structure, designed to withstand hurricane-force winds and heavy snow loads, that can be installed in record time (it takes just 135 minutes to assemble a 9-meter dome) in any location: a square, a park, even a disused industrial area.
Inside a dome, magic becomes possible. Thanks to 360-degree projection technology, you can turn it into a planetarium, an immersive cinema, a digital art gallery, or an experimental theatre. You can create a spectacular attraction that works at Christmas with snow, at Easter with rain, and in August under the scorching sun. You can offer your community a cinema when the local one closed years ago. You can host conferences, workshops, and corporate events. In essence, with a flexible investment, you create a multi-purpose cultural centre that didn’t exist before—just as Peccioli did with its Green Triangle, but in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the budget.
This approach allows you to replicate Peccioli’s strategy on a different scale. You’re not just creating an event; you’re equipping your municipality with a new, resilient cultural infrastructure, an attraction that can generate visitor flows throughout the year. You are creating the “place” where culture can happen, always.
This isn’t just a theory; it’s backed by data. Our comparative studies, also presented in the book “Immersive Events,” show that the ROI of a well-designed immersive experience hosted in a dedicated structure systematically exceeds 95%, compared to 23% for a traditional, one-off event. Why? Because the investment doesn’t end with the event itself; it creates a lasting asset that continues to generate value.
Technology, therefore, is not the end goal. It’s the means that allows you to apply Peccioli’s strategic principle—creating permanent culture—more quickly, flexibly, and sustainably, turning any public space into a potential magnet for year-round tourism.
Practical Takeaways for Local Administrators (The Action)
Peccioli’s lesson is clear, but how can you turn it into concrete actions for your community, starting tomorrow morning? Here are three practical takeaways to bring to your next council meeting to begin defeating the tyranny of seasonality.
- Think in Infrastructure, Not Seasons: Radically revise your approach to the culture budget. Instead of scattering resources across ten small summer events, which are vulnerable to weather and have a fleeting impact, focus your investment on creating or renovating a single, high-quality, permanent or semi-permanent cultural space that can operate 365 days a year. Whether it’s renovating an existing building or installing a new structure, the goal is to create an “asset” that generates continuous value, not a cost that ends with the final applause.
- Launch a Call for Resilience: Identify an underused public space in your municipality—a square, a park, a former industrial site. Instead of the usual call for event proposals, launch a call for ideas for a lightweight, innovative, and resilient architectural installation, like a geodesic dome, capable of hosting a multi-purpose program (cinema, art, conferences) throughout the year. Consider a Special Public-Private Partnership (PPP) for its management, involving local operators. Don’t just buy an event; invest in a “venue for events.”
- Create Your Own “Giant of Peccioli”: Deseasonalization thrives on permanent reasons to visit a place. Commission a piece of public art that can become an icon, a recognizable symbol of your town. It doesn’t have to be a colossal sculpture. It could be a permanent video mapping installation on the town hall façade, a soundscape trail in a park, or a digital art piece. The goal is to create a contemporary landmark, an attraction that doesn’t depend on a calendar but is always there, ready to welcome visitors and generate photos and word-of-mouth, even on a rainy Tuesday in November.
The Vision
The story of Peccioli gives us a truth as simple as it is revolutionary: seasonality is not an inescapable fate written in the stars or weather forecasts. It is the result of a strategic choice. You can either passively submit to it, hoping for summer sun, or you can actively fight it by investing in vision, long-term planning, and, above all, in permanent and resilient cultural infrastructure.
Today, this choice is no longer just an option for more sustainable tourism growth. In an era marked by climate change, where meteorological unpredictability has become the new, frightening normal, investing in cultural venues that operate 365 days a year is no longer just a development strategy. It is an act of responsibility. It is the only way to guarantee a stable economic future for our communities, freeing them from the whims of a passing cloud.
“Year-Round Tourism” is not a utopia. It is a concrete development model based on the awareness that a territory’s greatest resource is not its climate, but its ability to generate beauty, meaning, and memorable experiences. And fortunately, those things have no season.
As “the usual neXt,” our mission is to provide courageous administrators with the technological and strategic tools to build this future. To create places where wonder doesn’t depend on the weather.
Because the true infrastructure of the future isn’t just made of concrete and asphalt. It’s made of culture, art, and shared experiences. An iconic work of art, an innovative museum, or a multi-purpose cultural centre are the only construction sites that, once completed, never stop working. On the contrary: they begin to generate economic and social value, forever. And that is the most resilient infrastructure we can leave as a legacy for the generations to come.
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