I cammini d'Italia: Italy's routes. Local Enhancement Strategies

«As 2016 was the national year of walking routes, 2017 the national year of villages and 2018 the year of Italian food, 2019 will be the year of slow tourism». So said the Italian Minister for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism at the end of 2017 during a presentation of the Digital Atlas of Walking Routes, the Ministry’s new portal for tourists who want to travel across Italy at a slow pace. The launch of the Cammini d’Italia network is certainly an effort to re-balance the local tourist pressure, characterised by unsustainable peaks in the most extreme and known cases, where public administrations have been incapable to find any alternative solutions to reduce the number intensity of accesses (Venice, Florence among the cities of art, Limone del Garda, the Cinque Terre National Park, to mention the most famous and controversial destinations). The launch of the Cammini d’Italia network is also a way to develop the productivity of some parts of our cultural heritage, and the surrounding settlements, which are unaffected by tourist pressure, underused, marginalised, perhaps even depressed, but still capable of triggering synergistic and regenerative processes. But, more generally, the launch of Cammini d’Italia, seen as a local tourist promotion strategy, embodies «the art of adding value» (Carandini, 2017: 144), as a necessary action to safeguard, protect, maintain and manage the cultural heritage that abounds in this Country.