The evolution of the urban retail landscape in Italy’s provinces: tourism, the restructuring of retail networks, digitalisation and new consumption patterns

Working Paper n. 14/2026

This study analyses the relationship between growth in tourist demand and the transformation of local retail provision in Italian provinces. The literature on urban touristification has highlighted how an increase in visitor numbers can affect not only housing markets but also the composition of local retail, favouring businesses geared towards temporary consumption and reducing the functional diversity of neighbourhoods. However, attributing the entire transformation of the retail sector to tourism risks underestimating longer-term structural processes: retail concentration, the spatial reorganisation of retail networks, the growth of e-commerce and the progressive shift towards service-sector consumption by households.

On this basis, the paper proposes a province-level panel analysis, incorporating data on tourist arrivals, the sectoral structure of businesses and employees, levels of digitalisation, the socio-economic characteristics of local demand and the composition of consumption. The descriptive analysis covers the period 2012–2024, whilst the econometric estimation, constrained by the availability of variables, covers the period 2014–2023. The empirical strategy is based on panel models with provincial and annual fixed effects, with cluster-robust standard errors at the provincial level, and distinguishes between catering services and the retail sale of fashion goods.

The main hypothesis is that tourism helps to accelerate the transformation of the local retail sector, without being the sole cause of it. Indeed, tourism-related pressure affects a traditional retail sector that is already undergoing processes of reorganisation and contraction, attributable to innovations in distribution and changes in consumer behaviour. The results confirm expectations and indicate that pressure from tourism is primarily associated with employment growth in the catering sector, whilst fashion retail appears to be more closely linked to the internal structure of the sector and the spending power of the resident population. The catering and fashion retail sectors also demonstrate a positive complementarity, including a persistent temporal component.

The study makes a twofold contribution: it situates the ‘touristification’ of retail within a broader framework of the regional economy that takes into account external demand, domestic demand and changes in supply; and it provides comparative evidence covering the whole of the country, which is useful for guiding urban, tourism and retail policies.

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