“A Healthy Person is a Happy Person”. Biopolitical Reflections on the Promotion of Favignana as a COVID-free Island

This chapter discusses the experiment of ‘COVID-free’ island, promoted as an enclavic immunised space by the Italian government during the pandemic. The idea of an experimental tourist community placed in an enclavic space located on an island draws from a long tradition of tourist ‘laboratories’ in which tourist bodies may be closely governed and monitored. In a time in which ‘COVID-free’ spaces and travel corridors have become a new putative horizon to be explored by the relevant industry, some islands have been advertised as potentially shielded from contamination and available for close and continuous monitoring of individual and collective behavior of ‘the guests’ and their move-ments. As the analysis of the island of Favignana developed in this chapter demonstrates, the attempt to promote this destination as an immunized COVID-free space has resulted in the arrival of an almost unmonitored mass of tourists in the summer 2021, in a relatively poor respect of the protective measures and in the exposure of the tourist workers to the frequent possibility of been contaminated.