Italy is still the Bel Paese, a sought-after destination for tourists all over the world. This was announced by Euromonitor at the World Travel Market in London, which showcased the 100 most visited cities in the world in 2016.
According to Euromonitor, tourism in Italy will continue to grow, with 60 million international tourists expected by 2022. Over 10 million will visit Rome alone (the 12th most visited city in 2016) by 2020. Italian cities are a ‘unique mix of art, food and wine culture, nature and architecture that attracts tourists from all over the world. But the success of a destination also depends on other factors such as infrastructure, economic appeal, new technologies and safety” said Wouter Geerts, a travel analyst at the company, who once again emphasised the need to diversify the supply.
And this is exactly what the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism is trying to do, recently launching the Cammini d'Italia portal, which was designed as a slow mobility network and currently contains over 40 paths and itineraries dedicated to saints and brigades, like the Aspromonte Trail, which is dedicated to Dante, and the Trail of Peace, which revisits places and memories from the Great War, along with the Appian Way, the Francigena Way, the Way of the Gods and many more. The paths provide for walking trails, cycling trails, horse trails and trails for other forms of sustainable transport. The idea for the portal was born in 2016, declared the ‘National Year of Paths’, as a way of promoting the 6,600km of religious, natural, cultural and spiritual paths crisscrossing Italy.
And while 2017 is the ‘Year of Villages’, extraordinary pieces of heritage in our country, as declared by Minister Franceschini during the presentation of an initiative that aims to breathe new life into Italy’s villages through tourism, 2018 is the ‘Year of Italian Food’ and 2019 the ‘Year of Slow Tourism’. All these initiatives aim to promote Italy through a very specific type of tourism: sustainable tourism.