Slow Mobility and Cultural Tourism. Walking on Historical Paths

Slow mobility could stand as an occasion to foster new sustainable forms of territorial fruition. In this sense, the design of methods and technical tools, able to support the decision-makers, amounts to fundamental exigence of a form of town planning oriented both towards safeguarding and promoting territorial resources. The pursuit of this aim requires an accurate political and administrative strategy based on integration among actors involved in territorial development, as well as being oriented towards attaining improved tourist attractiveness. Tourism, in fact, can be a facilitator of territorial development if it is embedded in the general process of territorial governance. Cultural and historical paths represent physical infrastructures for supporting this sustainable and slow form of tourism involving walking across territories. Using these premises as a starting point, this paper aims to provide a methodology for designing or recovering historical paths suitable for slow mobility. The paper, thus, is articulated in three parts. The first part focuses on the characteristics of slow mobility. The second part highlights the potentialities connected with the revitalization of cultural paths, considered physical infrastructures able to promote sustainable tourism. The third part proposes a methodology for the recovery of a historical path linked to the Via Francigena.