ROME – Between 2012 and 2020, over 77 thousand retail trade activities (-14%) and almost 14 thousand itinerant businesses (-14.8%) disappeared from Italian cities, with a progressive process of commercial desertification. Thus the analysis of the Confcommercio Research Office “Business demography in Italian cities”, which launches another alarm: in 2021, only in the historic centers of the 110 provincial capitals and 10 other medium-sized cities, in addition to a decrease even greater for the retail trade (-17.1%), the loss of a quarter of accommodation and catering businesses (-24.9%) will be recorded for the first time in two decades.
“The risk of not getting our historic centers back as we saw and experienced them before the pandemic is therefore very real and this means a lower quality of life for residents and less tourist appeal”, underlines the association.
Between 2012 and 2020 – according to the analysis – there was a change in the commercial fabric within the historic centers that the pandemic will tend to emphasize. For trade in fixed locations, basic shops such as grocery stores (-2.6%) and those that, in addition to satisfying basic needs, perform new functions, such as tobacconists (-2.3%), hold somehow; significant changes are instead linked to changes in consumption, such as technology and communications (+ 18.9%) and pharmacies (+ 19.7%), the latter which have now become places to develop self-care and not only traditional points of supply of medicines.
The rest of the product sectors, highlights Confcommercio, are instead rapidly decreasing: these are traditional goods shops that move to shopping centers or, in any case, outside historic centers, which record reductions ranging from 17% for clothing to 25%. , 3% for books and toys, from 27.1% for furniture and hardware up to 33% for petrol stations. The pandemic exacerbates these trends and does so with surgical precision: the sectors that have held up or that were growing will continue to grow, those in decline risk disappearing from the historic centers.
As for the dynamics regarding street vendors, hotels, bars and restaurants, compared to a process of rationalization of the former (-19.5%), for hotels and public businesses, which in the period recorded respectively + 46.9% and + 10%, “The future is very uncertain. But we need to react to give a different perspective to our cities which represent a heritage to be preserved and enhanced. – the association again underlines – There are three guidelines: an urban regeneration project, the innovation of small sales areas and a fair and equitable web tax to restore parity of market rules among all companies ».