Underground Built Heritage (UBH) as valuable resource for sustainable growth

In recent years, in Naples there has been an exponential increase in tourist presences, thanks to a series of measures that have increased its attractiveness. The cultural offer is very varied, with sites of greater or lesser appeal and particularly the underground landscape of the city has progressively gained the tourists appreciation. However, some critical issues still affect the take-off of an integrated tourist offer based on the underground built heritage and aimed at obtaining positive outcomes on economic development and on safeguarding local identity. The paper will focus on the preliminary results of a research conducted by the writer in the context of a bilateral Italy-Japan research project between the National Research Council and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, entitled "Damage assessment and conservation of underground space as valuable resources for human activities use in Italy and Japan" (2018-2019)