Italy has a crowding problem.
Not everywhere, of course. That is exactly the point.
A relatively small number of famous destinations absorb an enormous amount of visitor attention, while thousands of towns and villages remain almost invisible to the average traveller. Venice, Florence, Rome, the Cinque Terre and parts of the Amalfi Coast carry the weight of global demand, while just a few hours away there are communities with empty rooms, family-run businesses, local restaurants and cultural heritage that struggle to attract visitors for more than a few hours — if they attract them at all.
This imbalance affects both sides.
In heavily visited places, overtourism can make daily life harder for residents, push up costs, reduce housing availability and gradually transform neighbourhoods into spaces designed more for visitors than for the people who live there. In smaller towns, the opposite problem can appear: declining populations, fewer services and local economies that struggle to remain viable.
The future of Italian travel may depend less on discovering new places than on travelling differently between the places that already exist.
Walking holidays are one of the most practical ways to do that.
They naturally move travellers away from a model built around a handful of famous destinations and towards a network of smaller towns, rural communities and places connected by historic paths. Instead of visiting a village for forty minutes between two major attractions, you may arrive on foot, have dinner there, sleep there and buy breakfast or lunch before continuing the following morning.
That difference may seem small.
Economically and culturally, it is not.
Because the concentration of tourism in a limited number of destinations is increasingly difficult to sustain.
Italy has almost 8,000 municipalities, and the majority are far removed from the visitor volumes associated with the country's most famous cities. Many are places with significant cultural heritage, distinctive food traditions and landscapes worth travelling for, but they sit outside conventional city-to-city itineraries.
Small towns offer something that heavily visited destinations increasingly struggle to provide: space.
Space to move without queues. Space for residents and visitors to use the same streets and cafés. Space for businesses to serve a local community as well as travellers. Space for tourism to become one activity within everyday life rather than the force that reorganises everything around it.
This does not mean small towns need to become the “next big destination”.
In fact, that would defeat the purpose.
The better model is distributed tourism: more places receiving a manageable amount of attention rather than a small number of places absorbing almost all of it.
“Decongestion” can sound like the sort of word that belongs in a municipal strategy document rather than a holiday.
In practice, the idea is simple.
If travellers spread their time across a wider territory, the pressure created by tourism is shared more evenly. Instead of everyone spending the same three nights in Florence, some visitors stay in smaller Tuscan towns and walk between them. Rather than seeing Sicily only through Palermo, Taormina and the coast, others cross its interior along routes such as the Magna Via Francigena.
This can improve the experience for the traveller too.
Less crowding means you spend less time negotiating queues, reservations and full restaurants. Historic centres become easier to explore. Local businesses have more capacity to engage with visitors individually. Public spaces feel more like places rather than attractions.
The goal is not to avoid famous destinations completely. Italy's major cities and landmarks are famous for good reasons.
The question is whether every journey has to concentrate almost entirely around them.
Tourism gentrification happens when places gradually reshape themselves around visitor demand.
Long-term housing becomes short-term accommodation. Everyday shops disappear and are replaced by businesses aimed almost entirely at tourists. Rents rise. Traditional services become harder for residents to access. The appearance of a neighbourhood remains recognisable while its social fabric begins to change.
Small towns are not automatically protected from this. In fact, sudden popularity can put enormous pressure on a very small community.
But a slower, distributed tourism model creates a different possibility.
Walking travellers generally arrive in smaller numbers and stay within an existing network of local businesses: small hotels, B&Bs, agriturismi, cafés, restaurants, food shops, guides and transport providers. The aim is not to rebuild the town around tourism, but to allow tourism to support services that already belong to the place.
That distinction matters.
The most useful visitor is not necessarily the one who spends the most money in a single afternoon. It may be the traveller whose spending helps a local restaurant remain open beyond the busiest weekends, or whose overnight stay makes a small accommodation business viable for a longer part of the year.
One of the most interesting things happening in Italian tourism is not happening in a single destination at all.
It is happening along routes.
Cammini create a different geography of tourism because travellers need services at regular intervals. A long-distance walker cannot sleep every night in Florence or Rome. The route requires accommodation in smaller communities, somewhere to eat, somewhere to buy food and sometimes local transport, guides or luggage services.
As a result, an economy begins to form around the path.
In 2025, more than 300,000 people walked Italian long-distance routes, generating almost 2.5 million overnight stays and an estimated economic impact of €336 million across communities around the country.
The average walking experience lasted 7.4 days.
That number is especially important because it shows that these travellers were not simply visiting for an afternoon. They were moving slowly through a sequence of places, sleeping and spending money along the way.
For a small town, that kind of tourism can be very different from receiving a coach that arrives at 11:00 and leaves at 12:30.
Sometimes the answer is obvious: accommodation.
A walking route needs places to sleep, and this can create opportunities for existing hotels, B&Bs, agriturismi and guesthouses.
But the economic effect is broader.
Walkers need breakfast, dinner and packed lunches. They stop at bars and cafés. They use grocery shops and bakeries. They may book a local guide, visit a winery or pay for a transfer. Their luggage may be moved by a local transport company.
A route can therefore support a network of small businesses rather than a single attraction.
At SloWays, this is one of the reasons we favour local and family-run accommodation and work with local providers wherever practical. Our sustainability policies explicitly focus on supporting local communities, and in 2025 we also developed new walking and cycling itineraries designed to highlight lesser-known destinations, support local economies and reduce tourism seasonality.
This is not a side effect of the walking holiday.
It is part of how the journey is designed.
This is not only an economic argument.
It is also about enjoyment.
Large cities offer extraordinary concentration: art, architecture, restaurants, museums and history all within a relatively small area. But that concentration also creates intensity.
Small towns offer another kind of value.
You can arrive without needing a list of ten reservations. You can sit in the main square without feeling that you should be somewhere else in twenty minutes. You begin to notice how the place works because it is small enough to read: the bar that everyone uses, the bakery opening early, the streets getting quieter in the afternoon.
That scale makes travel more legible.
The traveller does not need to “do” the town.
It is enough to be there.
The Cammino dei Borghi Silenti in Umbria may be one of the clearest examples.
The 90-kilometre circular route begins and ends in the small village of Tenaglie and crosses the Monti Amerini through forests, chestnut woods, old tracks and medieval villages.
The name tells you almost everything: the Silent Villages Camino.
These are not towns that exist to entertain large visitor numbers. The appeal lies precisely in the scale of the communities and the quiet landscape connecting them.
A traveller walking this route does not need one spectacular attraction to justify the trip. The value accumulates gradually through the villages, accommodation, local food, conversations and days spent moving between them.
It is a fundamentally different tourism model from one based on a single “must-see” destination.
The Via Francigena is useful because it demonstrates that distributed tourism does not mean excluding famous places.
You can walk through Tuscany and still visit San Gimignano and Siena.
But you reach them through an entire landscape of smaller settlements, agricultural areas, rural accommodation and villages that become part of the same journey.
This changes the relationship between the famous destination and everything around it.
Rather than treating the countryside as empty space between attractions, the route gives value to the places in between.
And sometimes those are the places travellers remember most clearly.
Sicily offers another particularly interesting example.
Visitor attention is strongly concentrated around certain cities, archaeological sites and coastal areas, while much of the interior receives far less tourism.
The Magna Via Francigena turns that geography inside out.
Walking between Palermo and Agrigento brings travellers through inland communities such as Prizzi and other hill towns that would rarely form part of a conventional first trip to Sicily.
The route does not make these places important by inventing attractions.
It makes them important because you need them.
You need somewhere to stop, eat, sleep and continue from the next morning.
This is one of the most powerful things a walking route can do for a small community: it turns a place that conventional tourism might classify as “between destinations” into a destination in its own right.
The future of small-town tourism is not only about where people travel.
It is also about when.
A village that receives nearly all its visitors during six summer weeks faces a very different economic reality from one that welcomes travellers steadily from spring through autumn.
Walking holidays naturally work well outside peak summer periods. Spring and autumn are often among the best seasons for walking in Italy because temperatures are more comfortable and landscapes are particularly rewarding.
That helps extend demand into months when smaller accommodation providers and restaurants might otherwise receive fewer visitors.
SloWays explicitly identifies reducing tourism seasonality as one of the objectives behind the development of its new walking and cycling routes.
For the traveller, this often feels less like a sustainability strategy and more like a better holiday: cooler weather, quieter streets and a landscape experienced at a more comfortable pace.
No.
And it is important not to romanticise it.
A small town can be overwhelmed much more quickly than a large city. A sudden social-media trend can send thousands of visitors into a place with limited parking, waste management, housing and public infrastructure. Property can still be converted into short-term accommodation. Residents can still be priced out.
There is nothing automatically sustainable about visiting somewhere simply because it is small.
The difference lies in scale, behaviour and distribution.
A tourism model based on manageable visitor numbers, longer stays, local businesses and a wider geographical spread can create benefits.
A model that simply searches for “the next hidden gem” and then sends everyone there risks reproducing exactly the same problem elsewhere.
Small towns do not need to become famous.
They need tourism that fits.
Walking imposes limits.
You can only cover so much distance in a day. You need somewhere to sleep at the end of it. You notice whether the shop is open because you actually need to buy something there.
That slowness makes it difficult to consume places in large quantities.
A walking holiday tends to involve fewer destinations, more overnight stays and more time spent in the territory between famous sites.
This is also why local spending becomes so important.
SloWays' sustainability approach prioritises local, family-run accommodation and encourages travellers to eat locally and support small businesses. When transfers are necessary, we also aim to work with local providers.
No journey is automatically sustainable, and walking still involves accommodation, transport and other impacts.
But the structure of a walking holiday can make a more distributed relationship with the destination much easier to build.
It probably does not mean everyone abandoning Rome and heading to a village nobody has heard of.
Nor should it.
Italy's great cities will remain essential parts of its cultural identity and tourism economy.
The more interesting future is one in which travellers stop treating them as the entire country.
A week in Italy might include Florence and three nights walking through smaller Tuscan towns.
A trip to Sicily might combine Palermo with several days crossing the interior.
A journey through Umbria might be organised around a route connecting villages rather than one hotel used as a base for day trips.
This creates a different map.
Famous places remain important, but they stop absorbing the whole journey.
For decades, tourism has been organised around destinations.
Where are you going?
Rome. Florence. Venice. Amalfi.
Walking routes suggest another answer.
You are going from one place to another.
The value lies in the network: the town where you sleep, the village where you stop for coffee, the landscape between them, the bakery where you buy lunch and the next place waiting at the end of the trail.
That model is particularly suited to Italy because the country is made up of thousands of small municipalities, each with its own history, food and relationship with the landscape.
The future of Italian travel may therefore be less about finding the next famous town and more about learning to move differently through the ones that are already there.
At SloWays, that is the Italy we have been travelling through for more than twenty years: a country connected by paths rather than just roads, where the places between the highlights are part of the reason for going.
And perhaps the best thing we can do for small towns is not turn them all into destinations everyone has heard of.
It is to give travellers a reason to stay.
Small towns can help distribute visitor numbers and spending more evenly across Italy, reducing concentration in a limited number of heavily visited destinations. When tourism is managed at an appropriate scale, overnight stays, meals and local services can also support smaller regional economies.
Yes. Walking travellers spend money on accommodation, restaurants, cafés, food shops, local transport, guides and other services. In 2025, more than 300,000 people walked Italian long-distance routes, generating almost 2.5 million overnight stays and an estimated €336 million in economic impact across communities around the country.
Long-distance walking routes require travellers to stop regularly for accommodation, meals and supplies. This spreads spending across a sequence of communities instead of concentrating it in one major destination and can support networks of locally owned accommodation, restaurants, shops, guides and transport providers.
Travelling through smaller towns and rural areas can help distribute tourism away from the most heavily visited destinations. However, small towns can also be overwhelmed if visitor numbers grow too quickly, so the aim should be balanced, distributed tourism rather than simply shifting mass tourism elsewhere.
Tourism gentrification describes changes that can occur when a neighbourhood or town becomes increasingly shaped around visitor demand, such as the conversion of long-term housing into tourist accommodation, rising rents and the replacement of everyday local businesses with services aimed primarily at visitors.
Walking holidays can support a more balanced tourism model because travellers generally move slowly, stay overnight in multiple communities and use local services along the route. However, no form of travel is automatically sustainable; transport, accommodation and visitor behaviour still have an impact.
Routes such as the Via Francigena, Magna Via Francigena in Sicily, Cammino dei Borghi Silenti in Umbria and many other Italian cammini connect smaller towns and rural communities as part of the journey rather than treating them as optional detours.
The Cammino dei Borghi Silenti is a 90-kilometre circular walking route through the Monti Amerini in Umbria. It begins and ends in Tenaglie and crosses forests, chestnut woods, historic tracks and small medieval villages.
SloWays prioritises local and family-run accommodation, works with local suppliers where possible and develops itineraries designed to highlight lesser-known destinations, support local economies and reduce tourism seasonality. In 2025, 90 suppliers were involved in SloWays' ESG evaluation process and 85 signed a formal environmental sustainability commitment.
It can be. Extending visitor demand into spring and autumn can help local businesses operate beyond a short peak season and can distribute tourism more evenly throughout the year. SloWays includes reducing tourism seasonality among the objectives of its itinerary development.
Written by the SloWays Team
Nominee Best Specialist Tour Operator 2026
