The Dark Side of Tourism's Implications: SEM Study of 2016 Italian Earthquake

Even though growing academic attention on dark tourism is a fairly recent phenomenon, among the various reasons for travelling death-related ones are very ancient. Furthermore, the darker side of human nature has always been fascinated and curious regarding death, or at least, man has always tried to learn lessons from death. This study proposes to describe the phenomenon of dark tourism related to the 2016 earthquake in Central Italy, deadly for 303 people and highly destructive for the rural areas of Lazio, Marche and Umbria Regions. The primary objective is to examine the motivation-experience relationship in a dark tourism site, using the structural equation model, applied for the first time to a dark tourism research in 2016, in a study conducted after the Beichuan earthquake (BER). The findings of the current study are derived from the calculations conducted on primary data compiled from 361 tourists in the areas mostly affected by the 2016 earthquake, including the town of Amatrice, near the epicentre, Castelluccio, Norcia, Ussita and Visso, through conducting a Likert scale survey. Furthermore, we use the structural equation model to examine the motivation behind dark travel and how this experience can influence the motivation and emotional reaction of tourists. Expected findings are partially in line with the previous study mentioned above, indicating that socio-cultural context differences play a role. In particular: not all tourists visit thanatourism sites for dark tourism purposes, tourists’ emotional reactions affect all four dimensions of experience, and moral experience is only enriched by motivation of curiosity, stating perhaps an already deep level of empathy and sympathy among visitors.