A multi-day walker does not arrive at a destination and stay put. They move through a territory, stage by stage, passing from one community to the next, staying overnight along the route, eating where they stop, buying supplies where they find them, using local services as they go. Their spending follows their footsteps rather than pooling in a single place.
This is one of the characteristics that distinguishes multi-day walking from more destination-based forms of tourism. A walker is not a visitor who arrives at one destination: they are a traveller who moves through a territory, spending as they go, in places that conventional tourism rarely reaches.
In Italy, this pattern is becoming increasingly well documented. According to the 2025 edition of the "Italia, Paese di Cammini" dossier, produced by Terre di Mezzo and the CAST research centre at the University of Bologna, an estimated 300,046 people walked Italian long-distance routes in 2025, generating around 2.5 million overnight stays. The dossier estimates the total economic impact at €336 million, a figure that includes indirect and induced effects calculated using a standard income multiplier. Much of that value, the researchers note, remains in inland areas far from the main tourism circuits. The logic behind this is straightforward: slow travel distributes spending rather than concentrating it.
Three Italian routes illustrate this logic in three quite different ways.
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Most tourism concentrates. Visitors fly into Rome, Venice or Florence, spend three nights, and leave. The economic benefit clusters around airports, major hotels, and the restaurants nearest the main piazzas. The rest of the country, the hill towns, the inland villages, the valleys between the famous places, largely watches from a distance.
Walking routes work against this logic by design. A multi-day trail is a linear (or circular) itinerary that passes through many communities in sequence. Each stage ends somewhere, and that somewhere needs a bed, a meal, and often a shop. The walker has no choice but to engage with each place they pass through: the geography of the route is also the geography of the spending.
The key distinction is not that walkers spend more, but that they spend differently. Their expenditure is spread across many small providers in many different places, rather than aggregated in a single destination. For communities outside the main tourism flows, even relatively small numbers of walkers can distribute spending among businesses and services that receive less benefit from conventional tourism.
The routes below are not presented as silver bullets. Walking tourism does not automatically reverse decades of rural decline, and no responsible analysis would suggest otherwise. But they do show, concretely, what becomes possible when a walking route becomes the thread connecting accommodation, food, local associations, and communities that might otherwise have little reason to be connected at all.
The Magna Via Francigena runs for around 184 kilometres through the interior of Sicily, connecting Palermo in the north to Agrigento on the southern coast across nine stages. It crosses three provinces and 13 municipalities, threading through the Monti Sicani, a landscape of wheat fields, limestone ridges, and hilltop towns far from Sicily's main tourism centres.
The route was formally launched in 2017, led by the municipality of Castronovo di Sicilia in partnership with twelve other municipalities and the Diocese of Agrigento, with support from the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Sicilian regional government. The groundwork had been laid since 2013, when the first formal agreements between municipalities were signed. What the project created was not simply a walking trail but a network: municipal offices, parishes, and local accommodation providers connected by a credential system that stamps the walker's progress from stage to stage, with the Testimonium issued on arrival in Agrigento.
Prizzi is one of the municipalities along the route, a hilltop town in the heart of the Monti Sicani. In May 2017, a group of local friends founded Sikanamente, a social promotion association whose purpose is to valorise the cultural, environmental and human heritage of the Sicani territory. Through events, cultural activities, and a hospitality space called C.A.O.S. (Centro di Aggregazione e Ospitalità Sikanamente), the association has created accommodation for pilgrims and walkers passing through, alongside a programme of local engagement that has brought Erasmus groups, volunteers, and travellers into contact with the community. Whether the Magna Via's launch and Sikanamente's founding in the same year reflect a direct relationship or a shared moment of local initiative is not something the available sources establish with certainty.
What the association does illustrate is a broader pattern. A long-distance route gives places like Prizzi a role in a larger story: a walker passes through not because the town is famous, but because the route does, and local organisations create the means to receive them well.
The Magna Via Francigena's model is fundamentally one of territorial connection. It links municipalities, associations, and local services across three provinces, and gives each of them a shared interest in the walker's experience.
If the Magna Via Francigena shows the shape of a community network, the Cammino di Oropa in Piedmont shows what that network can look like in economic terms, with the figures to back it up.
The Cammino di Oropa is a network of itineraries created by Movimento Lento, connecting various starting points to the Sanctuary of Oropa in the Biella Alps. The main itinerary runs from Vercelli, covering around 100 kilometres through a part of Piedmont that was, by its own organisers' description, neither a tourist destination nor a place people particularly passed through. According to project manager Marta Miolo, the route started with around 300 walkers in its first year. By 2025, that number had grown to an estimated 5,773 walkers, a 13% increase on 2024.
The economic data from 2025 is unusually precise for a route of this scale:
5,773 estimated walkers in 2025
More than 17,600 overnight stays generated along the route
Average stay of 3.06 nights per walker
Estimated spend of around €290 per walker, covering accommodation, meals, and small purchases
Total local spending in 2025: approximately €1.67 million
Cumulative economic impact since 2019: more than €5.7 million
What makes these numbers meaningful is not their size but their distribution. Overnight stays are spread across hostels, small hotels, religious guesthouses, and family accommodation in the villages along the route, not concentrated in a single town. The spending follows the walker, stage by stage, rather than pooling at a single destination.
The village of Torrazzo, one of the smaller communities along the route, offers a concrete if carefully qualified example. According to reporting by Italia che Cambia, four B&Bs have opened in the village in recent years, and a grocery shop that had been closed for some time has reopened. Whether the Cammino alone prompted these developments is not something the available sources establish with certainty, and it would be wrong to claim it did. But the correlation is noted by those who work most closely with the route, and it is the kind of small, tangible change that aggregate economic figures tend to obscure.
The Cammino di Oropa also uses a Slow Card system, a digital pass priced at €27 for the duration of a walk, which gives walkers a 10% discount at affiliated accommodation and restaurants along the route, as well as a complimentary credential. The Slow Card generates a local economic circuit: "Thanks to this system we have created four jobs for local women," Marta Miolo told Italia che Cambia.
The Oropa model demonstrates that impact can be measured, and that the measurement itself becomes a tool for making the case for slow tourism in places that have historically been overlooked.
The third model is perhaps the most instructive, because it begins with an explicit question: what do you do about a place that tourism has simply never reached?
The Cammino dei Borghi Silenti is a 90-kilometre circular route in south-western Umbria, in the province of Terni, created in 2020 with a clear purpose: to bring attention to the small villages of the Monti Amerini, an area affected by depopulation and largely outside the region's main tourism flows. Umbria is not an unknown destination, but the Amerini mountains are. The route was designed to change that.
The route passes through 13 villages in the Monti Amerini, including Tenaglie, Guardea, Santa Restituta, Toscolano, Melezzole, Morre, Civitella del Lago, Baschi, and Montecchio. These are not places that appear on most itineraries. Several of them have been affected by depopulation, as younger residents move to cities and the services that sustain rural life gradually thin out.
The route does not claim to solve this. What it does is create a reason to go. Over five stages, walkers move through a succession of small communities, creating opportunities for overnight stays, meals and other local spending along the route. A network of affiliated accommodation has developed to receive them.
Three different routes, three different regions, three different mechanisms. But the underlying logic is the same in each case.
Walking routes function as networks. They create relationships between places that would otherwise have no particular connection to one another, and they give each place along the route a reason to invest in receiving visitors well. The accommodation owner in Torrazzo, the association member in Prizzi, the guesthouse in Civitella del Lago: all of them become part of the same experience, even if they never meet.
For the walker, accommodation, meals, supplies and other local purchases are simply part of moving through a multi-stage route. The spending flows naturally from the travel itself, distributed across many communities rather than concentrated in one place.
There is also a seasonality dimension worth noting. Our own walking and cycling itineraries are designed, in part, with the goal of reducing seasonality, alongside highlighting lesser-known destinations and supporting local economies. Extending travel beyond the traditional peak months can help distribute activity and spending more evenly across the year.
The patterns described in this article are ones we think about when designing walking itineraries. Where practical, we choose local and family-run accommodation, encourage travellers to eat at local restaurants along the route, and collaborate with local providers. We design itineraries with the explicit goals of reducing seasonality, highlighting lesser-known destinations, and supporting local economies.
In 2025, as part of our sustainability process, we evaluated 90 suppliers and worked with 85 of them to formalise an environmental sustainability commitment. It is one part of a broader approach that tries to ensure the value of a journey is shared with the communities that make it possible.
We are not in the business of making grand claims about the power of slow travel to transform rural economies. But the evidence from routes like these suggests that the way you travel matters. Choosing to walk through a territory rather than simply visit it is one of the more meaningful choices a traveller can make.
If you're curious about walking Italy's great pilgrimage routes or planning your first walking holiday in Italy, we'd be glad to help you find the right route.
Walking slowly changes more than the way we see a place. It changes where we stop, where we stay and where we spend, allowing the value of a journey to travel through a territory with us.
Written by the SloWays Team
Nominee Best Specialist Tour Operator 2026
