Global connectivity facilitated tourism and redefined economic landscapes, highlight an interest in better understanding tourism retention factors. Today, in view of the global COVID-19 pandemic, this is made even more important as the world prepares to lift lockdown restrictions and to re-engage in cross border circulation; reiterating needs to understand tourism satisfaction and revisit intentions. This study thus sheds light on the predictors of tourists’ intention to the explorative and exploitative use of Smart Tourism Technologies (STTs) and memorable experiences in tourism destinations via an integrated model and a self-administered questionnaire—distributed among domestic tourists visiting Tehran—employing the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The results indicated that tourists’ attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control toward STTs had significant positive impacts on their explorative and exploitative intentions. Furthermore, tourists’ explorative/exploitative intention and perceived behavioral control exercised significant, positive effects on their memorable experiences. Finally, the results demonstrate that tourists’ memorable experiences significantly influence their satisfaction and intention to revisit smart destinations. This study expands existing literature by exploring a new model for enhancing memorable experiences and revisit intention using STTs, and presents findings applicable to the city of Tehran, while adopting a model which can be replicated in other geographies looking at better understanding its tourism landscape. Finally, the results in this study can be helpful for both researchers and policy makers in their quest to rejuvenate local post-pandemic economies via tourism measures.

COVID-19 hit Italy in February 2020 after its outbreak in China at the beginning of January. Why was Italy first among the Western countries? What are the conditions that made Italy more vulnerable and the first target of this disease? What characteristics and diffusion patterns could be highlighted and hypothesized from its outbreak to the end of March 2020, after containment measures, including a national lockdown, were introduced? In this paper, we try to provide some answers to these questions, analyzing the issue from medical, geographical and planning points of view. With reference to the Italian case, we observed the phenomenon in terms of the spatial diffusion process and by observing the relation between the epidemic and various environmental elements. In particular, we started from a hypothesis of the comparable economic, geographical, climatic and environmental conditions of the areas of Wuhan (in the Hubei Province in China, where the epidemic broke out) and the Po Valley area (in Italy) where most cases and deaths were registered. Via an ecological approach, we compared the spatial distribution and pattern of COVID-19-related mortality in Italy with several geographical, environmental and socio-economic variables at a Provincial level, analyzing them by means of spatial analytical techniques such as LISA (Local Indicators of Spatial Association). Possible evidence arose relating to COVID-19 cases and Nitrogen-related pollutants and land take, particularly in the Po Valley area.

Artificial land use trends could represent an effective indicator of the settlement process quality and could also provide information about the efficacy of protection and exploitation policies in natural and rural areas. This work discusses an analytic procedure for the time series investigation of urban settlement development at the regional scale to verify the nexus between urban growth and demographic trends connected with the phenomenon of land take. In Italy, since 1950, the land take phenomenon has been a consequence of several factors: urbanization, realization of transport infrastructures including ports, airports, and highways, and the enhancement of industrial and productive systems. We analyzed all these territorial transformations that create waterproof soil, and more generally, a transition from natural and semi-natural uses toward artificial land use. After World War II, the demographic growth and the consequent housing demand generated a strong urbanization process in the main poles of economic development areas in Italy. Since the early 2000s, the situation has completely changed and the land take phenomenon is no longer mainly based on real need for new urban expansion areas based on effective urban planning tools, but is strongly related to a scattered demand for new housing in a weak territorial spatial planning system not able to drive effective urban development that minimizes speculative real estate initiatives. This uncontrolled occupation of soil generated, in Italy, a landscape fragmentation called the urban sprinkling phenomenon, different from urban sprawl, which is a wider phenomenon characterized by disordered urban growth. The present document aims to assess how uncontrolled expansion in areas characterized by low settlement density can generate fragmentation. To define if the territory is affected by the urban sprinkling phenomenon, two 50-year time series concerning urban expansion of buildings and demographic trends are analyzed calculating population and building density indices and their variation over the years. The sprinkling index is used to analyze the variation in the fragmentation degree at two different scales (regional and municipal). Finally, we discuss the context where this phenomenon has developed, analyzing the buildings located in hydrogeological risk zones and protected areas, and the correlation between demographic changes and the degree of territorial fragmentation variation.