Storygardenz - Ecotourism Travel, Ecotourism Trips, Ecotourism Vacation, Eco Tours – Storygardenz. Gardens with a story and a tale.

This project, founded by DADO (a.ka. Bernard Anson Silj), evolved from an idea of the Grand Tour to Italy, cultural tourism, the search for memory, identity and cultural roots, since Renaissance times. (Belvedere-italia, 1999).  

But, in recent years, the values of the old Grand Tour (Man, the measure of all things) were  hacvhh - - becoming increasingly unsustainable. In 2005 DADO published the storytelling novel Carmen Via, Journey in the songlines of Italy (Semar Press) in which he also explored the relationship between story and place, and between storytelling and habitat.

In a new book to be published in 2012 DADO investigates how the tourist-leisure business has been mutating - beyond its original quest for pleasure, well-being  and even culture - to becoming an unconscious search for a new mental space and a luminous sphere (quality time). Noise, bedlam, frenzy, hyper-communication are seen as the greatest pollutants of habitat, because of their destabilizing effect on the human psyche. The proliferating media,  instead of increasing the  variety of supply, tends to compact it down to a series of stereotypes - under the steamroll of "sponsors" - thereby generating a relatively small number of global icons which suck the life out of all diversity of perspectives and of subordinate cultural  species. But all the while, tourism just kept growing and growing, until it became the world's largest industry. Tourism is seen both as an epitome of such a negative phenomenon but also a possible panacea. And, for sure, its progression cannot be reversed. 

The first Storygardenz locations were established in Italy with RVS-Rome and Bel Poggiolo-Umbria. Both belong to DADO and his wife Eleonora and have been developed as cultural, ecological and economic models of a kind of tourism, which could be (1) as harmless as possible to outer habitat (carbon footprint) by inducing slower rhythms, observation, contemplation and a reduction and optimisation of activity, and also (2) by making          thethe the diminishing window of empty time (vacation originates from the Latin dies vacantes, meaning empty days) pay much greater dividends to inner habitat . This is achieved by luring people into a realm of stories and storytelling (a reasonably routine activity in tourism), which - it has been demonstrated, scientifically -substantially alters the functioning of the brain, in favour of unitary vision.

In 2009, these resources began to be placed on a MAP: the Map of Imagination.