New tourist practices and consumption patterns: the impact of the factory outlet format on the sicilian tourism sector

This paper deals with the analysis of the potential tourist impacts exerted by “Sicilia Fashion Village”, a Factory Outlet lately opened in Sicily (Italy), at the very core of the island, in the province of Enna. Such a “consumption cathedral”, which combines contemporary shopping practises with unprecedented socialisation dynamics, has been recently revealing unexpected potentialities in terms of tourist flows, due to the increasingly tight link among consumption, tourism and leisure. As a result, the work aims at underlining the effects provoked by the Factory Outlet within the area which it is located in, particularly peculiar from the environmental and cultural standpoint, in order to evaluate the links between such a retail format and its territorial background as well as understanding to what extent it has been contributing to the tourist revitalization of the area.