Urban trekking is an excellent way to discover the lesser-known parts of the most beautiful cities in Italy. It is a way to slow down and experience the local life and it is the most sustainable of all forms of tourism.

When it was “invented” (well… walking around is certainly not a new thing, but the “label” is), urban trekking was meant for tourists and locals alike. Through this activity, tourists would discover spots off-the-beaten-path, and establish a deeper emotional connection with the destination. For residents, urban trekking was supposed to be “a healthy lifestyle and a way to regain possession of their spaces, and to get to know them better“.

These might seem a bunch of empty words, the rhetoric of a project outline, but if you live in a city like Florence, Siena or Pisa, you’ll understand very well what feeling the need to “regain possession of your spaces” means.

Sometimes I have to walk through Piazza dei Miracoli to go to work (yeah, I know, poor me…) and from March to October it can be challenging. I much prefer walking through the teaching hospital buildings where I don’t have to watch out for people suddenly stopping to take a photo, or those shopping for some tacky souvenir, or those walking ssssllllooooooowwwwwwwwwwly while wondering how the heck that tower is still standing. The walk back from the office, generally after dark, when the crowds have left, is much, much nicer. In the evening, when I walk through Piazza dei Miracoli I can enjoy the beauty of the place. And I understand why so many people make me late for work every morning!

The other thing is that when you live in a place, you often don’t get to visit it as well as tourists do. There are many exhibitions that I haven’t seen, galleries and museums I have never visited. And listen to this: I have never climbed up to the top of the Tower. I know, it’s unforgivable. I don’t even have a photo of me holding it up. Just sad, I know.

Urban Trekking is indeed a good way to make your city your own space again and certainly to get to know it better. There is another part that I really like in the definition of Urban Trekking: it says that it is an activity that everybody can do in order to tone up one’s muscles, heart and brain.

Tomorrow, October 31st, is national urban trekking day. Obviously, the itineraries will be Halloween-themed. The official name of the event is “dolcetti e scherzetti camminando in città“, meaning “tricks and treats walking in the city“. I think it’s a fantastic idea, really entertaining. Professional tour guides will lead trekkers through the mysterious sites of the cities of Tuscany, telling stories about real, or supposedly real, dark events set in the various buildings and places touched by the itinerary. Here are the programs in the Tuscan cities:

• Arezzo: from Piazza della Liberta to the Medicean Fortress, trekkers will have to be really brave to put up with the spooky stories they will be told by their guides! If they resist, the treat is a plate of roasted chestnuts in the Neighbourhood of Porta Crucifera! Download the brochure (in Italian only, sorry).
  
• Lucca: a real ghost tour of the city. Not to be missed. Download the brochure (in Italian only, sorry). The perfect weekend to go to Lucca if you like comics as well: check Lucca Comics.
  
• Massa: a scary walk through the narrowest alley of the center to the old castle. Mystery stories will be told along the way by mysterious characters… Download the brochure (in Italian only, sorry).
• Pisa: an itinerary entirely devoted to the macabre story of Count Ugolino, whose sad tale is told in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The legend says that, left to starve with his children in a tower, he ate them to survive and for this reason his house was destroyed and the ground where it once stood was cursed and never built on again. Today it’s still the only garden that opens onto the Lungarno. Treats available at Dolcemente, a fabulous exhibition of locally produced sweets. Download the brochure (in Italian only, sorry).
• Prato: the itinerary is devoted to the most beautiful cloisters in the city and to an exhibition about Italian and Russian fashion between the 14th and the 18th century. Download the brochure (in Italian only, sorry).
• Siena: an itinerary to discover 6 mysteries in the city, with legends and spooky stories. Siena is indeed always a magic place. Download the brochure (in Italian only, sorry).

He discusses a very interesting issue there, that is

“how quickly a phrase or an idea can catch on and seem to spawn a whole new generation of websites almost overnight”,

more specifically he deals on how

‘Local travel’ feels like it’s hit the big time at the moment, everyone wants a piece of the action, everyone wants to get involved in a web start-up and wrestle to become the next big thing in travel.

The article got me thinking about a number of issues. We have a vacation rental in Tuscany. We made the decision to make it as locally-rooted as possible from the very moment we started it. It seemed the obvious way to go, despite being a clear counter-tendency in a place like Tuscany, where “off-the-beaten-path” (if such thing still exists here) is generally equated with “completely deprived of any tourist interest at all”. In such a well-know region, if nobody has already made an area “popular”, then it must be because there is nothing to do or see there.

Being extremely local myself (my entire family has lived in this village for at least 4 generations before me), and stubborn and proud too, I knew that there was much to do and see in and around the village. And that there was much to explain to non-local people about us and what we are about around here. Thank God, the many returning guests we have had over the years give us reason to believe that we are on the right track.

We started in the “post Frances Meyes era“, after the huge fuss created by the bestseller  “Under the Tuscan Sun“.  A great help for tourism in Tuscany, I won’t deny that (by the way, Mrs. Meyes, when is your next Tuscany-based bestseller coming out?! After the financial crisis, we need your help boosting up tourism again in this part of the world!!!) and in a way a voice speaking in favour of going slow and local, but one which pushed areas like ours even  further “out of the Tuscan Sun” in a way.

We made the choice of working in a way so as to show people what life in this part of the world is really like, in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of way. But, let me tell you, it is really hard. And I have to say, harder and harder these days for reasons that we cannot understand completely. Or rather, after reading Stephen Chapman’s article, now maybe I can.

Because, as I read somewhere this morning, “we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are”, more and more people seem to come expecting to find, in a village of 350 people in the countryside, the comforts that you can enjoy in modern cities, the same level of organization that you have in Switzerland, the same road conditions, the same availability of services that you have at home, etc. An attitude that, I have to say, was rarer in the immediate “after Under the Tuscan Sun”, when many people travelled so as to experience the type of difficulties that Mrs. Meyes wrote about, wrapping them up in a well-presented stereotyped package. (By the way, for a funny review of the blockbuster movie based on the novel see Miss Expatria’s Scathing Movie Review: Under the Tuscan Sun – don’t read it if you are a fan! ;oP)

And here is the connection with Stephen’s article about the (perhaps excessive) use of the term “local” in travel-related matters today.

I think what nowadays is called “local” is what was before one of the many facets of sustainable tourism. I remember reading the articles in the Journal of Tourism Studies back in the late 90′s and up to 2007 when the publication was interrupted (my real job is researching the English language and linguistics for tourism), and noticing a slow shift in “key words” and “key concepts”. First it was all about eco-tourism, then it was all about sustainable tourism and now it’s all about “going local“.

It’s not just a matter of definitions though, it is more a process of “specialization”, as each of these concepts were already contained in the others as they are obviously all connected. Specialized research draws from and feeds back into the non-specialized universe, because, besides being researchers, scholars are first and foremost people immersed in the out-of-the-academia world like the rest of us.

As an “out-and-out” supporter of the necessity of using local resources as much as possible, my opinion is that if a  “fashionable key phrase” helps us make our voice heard, there’s a good reason to  use it.  Unfortunately, as a linguist, I am also aware that what happens is that by using it, its meaning gets “worn out”, to the point where it becomes nothing more than a catch-phrase for most people, especially for the “general public”, to which, more often than not, travelers belong.

So could it be that going local is already a fashion rather than a well-considered travel choice? Can we expect to see more and more people look for local while expecting global?

I strongly believe that our role as people in the travel business (even though in different ways or for different reasons) is to help preserve the meaning of words. We need to help people remember what experiencing the local way of life means, and choose their holidays accordingly.

Travel relying on local resources cannot be mass tourism, I am afraid, otherwise it cannot be sustained. However, the fact that it exists should be made known to the “masses” (please forgive me the use of a term with such negative connotations: I am just trying to maintain semantic coherence), but, since words do indeed matter, it should be presented for what it is, as it can be the best option for many but not for all, especially in areas that are very different from the travellers’ country of origin. This is not the case of Italy, obviously, which, in many domains at least, is still a modern, comfortable country. And yet, it has enough to put some people off.

So maybe the next page I will add to our website is a list of reasons for travelers to chose our homes, and an even longer list to not choose them if they expect the phrase “to feel at home away from home” to mean something other than that we are very happy to welcome them as we would do with our own local friends and that we will do our best to show them how the place they call a destination, for some people is home.

Hopefully, they will feel it’s their home too for a week or so.

The author, Len Cordiner, CEO of whl.travel, discusses the problem of the certification of accommodations and tours as “eco-friendly”, a matter that I will leave aside here. But the interesting point he makes is that he believes that something did not quite work as planned, as many people tend to equate

green vacation with doing it tough – hard beds and tasteless food. Green or sustainable holidays were perceived as something only tree huggers would do, not at all fun or enjoyable.

For this reason, he says, we need a new thinking and his proposal is to engage

“travellers with a coherent and inviting new vision of what ‘eco’ (now perhaps better known as responsible or sustainable or even slow) tourism is really about.

This done, travellers will need to be engaged in driving change throughout the supply chain by giving feedback to other travellers, much in the same way they are prompting evolution in the hotel industry (including new brands) with their feedback on services. I imagine a slow tourism version of Trip Advisor being what it looks like.”

I read this and I thought: “this is not a new way of thinking, this is what we have been doing for a while”. And indeed Slow Tourism is a well-established reality, as the lively community participating in the Slow Travel Forum and contributing to the site evidences clearly.

There are many professionals in Italy that adhere to the slow travel philosophy, and abroad as well (think about the Slow Travel Tours). We organizied a Get Together in Italy both last year (we hosted the first Italian Slow Travel Inn Keepers in our village in 2008) and this year Megan of Bella Vita Italia organized the get-together in Lerici, Liguria.

Nothing new about using travellers’ feedback either: Slow Travel has been posting slow travellers’ reviews for years.

So what’s new then? Giulia rightly pointed out that Mr. Cordiner brings into the mix the idea of ecotourism and sustainability. He actually writes “even slow“, as if “slow travel” was one of the possible ways to make tourism sustainable. I do agree on this: slow travel may and should indeed be sustainable.

People from different areas of expertise though should not work separately to defining the new paradigms of tourism research and practice. Tourists, practitioners and researchers should all work together.

I started wondering about why, in a time in which travelling slow seems to be getting quite popular (at least according to this article), I still felt that there is more to it than just pace and greenness…

I have been talking about this with 4 dear friends, with whom I feel I have much in common both from a human and professional point of view and with whom I have often discussed tourism-related matters. We share some fundamental views about both travelling and welcoming people: one is Giulia of La Locanda della Valle Nuova, near Urbino in Le Marche, and the others are Letizia of La Madonna del Piatto, near Assisi in Umbria, Diana of Baur B&B, near Acqui Terme in Piedmont, and Megan of La Bella Vita Italia, in Lerici in Liguria.

The article also reminded me of David Peat‘s work on Gentle Action (he’s a physicist and philosopher…, but that’s not the point, if you are curious to see what he’s up to in his small hilltop hamlet in Tuscany you can check the site of the cultural center he has created). He has similar ideas on social and economic issues. He says something important, I believe. He speaks of

“actions which begin from within the system in question and emerge in creative ways.. These may range from projects on an international scale to a simple action by an individual. Such actions generally flow from what Peat has termed “creative suspension” – that temporary pause when we listen and learn what the system has to teach us before taking action”.

This got me thinking, and I realized that this is exactly what defines my attitude to travel and tourism and this is what I think I share with Giulia, Letizia, Diana and Megan.

We believe in travelling slow, so that we can properly enjoy what is local, and actually learn from it. We do all we can to offer our guests this very same experience when we are the hosts rather than the travellers: we believe in offering a true and authentic local experience, in allowing people to see Italy and our life as it really is by helping them to take advantage of what the areas in which we are located has to offer.

I believe in promoting a type of travel experience which does not change the area in which I operate, but rather touches the people who come here. I don’t want to exploit, but to enrich, both my homeland and the travelers who come see it.

I have understood that I believe not only in Slow Travel and Slow Tourism, but in a true Gentle Travel, in Gentle Tourism and by this I mean a type of tourism experience which is sustainable, which promotes what’s truly local, the way it is, without adjusting it to please the traveler, and which for this reason allows him or her to truly experience everyday life in its most authentic aspects.

And at the same time it allows the locals to be able to show what they have to offer. This is why I have contacted the local wineries to organize wine tastings rather than sending people to a more famous  area farther away. I have found local farmers who can show their olive groves, or take people out for a ride with their horses. I have found a local bike shop whose owners are happy to take people out for a bike tour. I have found local people willing to teach family cooking. I invite people to shop at the local stores, so that they can truly experience the local way of life. I try to show what the system has to give.

I believe that travellers should get in contact with the local communities, enrich them and learn from them, looking at them with an open mind.

I hope I’ll be able to promote this idea by helping people to travel in a gentle way to Tuscany and at the same time by helping locals to bring out all the amazing things that I know for a fact this area has to offer.

I really hope I’ll be able to help my area speak for itself and help people to listen to it.

The florist is a dear friend, a true artist. She does not speak English but many foreign brides go to her for wedding flowers because her work is really outstanding. (http://www.fioriedintorni.com) So much better than most florists’ in the region and maybe well beyond that. Anyway, a comment by the bride’s mother got me thinking. She was amazed at the fact that a flower store, and such a lovely one, could survive in such a small village.

Not the first time I’ve heard the question “how do people survive out here?“.

This got me thinking about how relative a concept “out here” is and how much people from cities often have no idea of how much stuff you can do living “slower”, in a small, quiet village in the Tuscan countryside.

First, the “out here” concept. The people in the area, and I am not just thinking of the people living in the village and immediate surroundings, but the people living in Southern Tuscany in general, would consider Civitella to be in an extremely lucky location. It is just by the major road connecting Florence to Grosseto via Siena. This means that you don’t need to drive 10 minutes on a small, winding road, before getting on the road that will take you where you need to go, you are already on that road. This also means that you can be in downtown Grosseto in less than 30 minutes and in downtown Siena in less than 45. Plus, being only 6km away from the road that goes to Monte Amiata, it means that in 30 minutes you can also reach the top of the mountain, as well as Montalcino and the Val d’Orcia. And the road that goes to Massa Marittima and Follonica, passes by the village too, so it’s very easy to go there as well.

Second, we are all so used to having to drive to the city for anything, that it does not really seem that big a deal at all. Crossing a larger city in traffic takes more (time and stress) than driving from Civitella to Siena. We are used to driving there for anything, I wrote, but I should have said “for anything major“. Because the other thing that most people tend to forget is that small villages like Civitella have a life of their own. There are shops, bars, restaurants (by the way we have an excellent one for real, with people coming from all over the region to eat there – La Locanda nel Cassero), and there are PEOPLE, who need to buy flowers, bread, and food, who go to the restaurant, get married, have children, and so on.

The small villages which are just a holiday destination for most people are hometowns for others, and this is how LOCAL STORES survive: because there are LOCAL PEOPLE. And thank God there are foreign people too, who come enjoy the beautiful area!

Third, we are “small but resourceful”! Most people would be astonished by how lively small communities can be. Also, internet really helps. In a global world also our local communities expand!

Lorella, the florist, works all over the region: thanks to the internet, brides from all over Tuscany but also lots of foreign brides contact her and ask her to do their wedding flowers. She studies a lot, also on foreign sites and publications, where she can get new, different ideas and fresh sources of inspiration.

And small communities are also lively from a cultural point of view. Pari, for instance, is a village of 180 people more or less. And yet, it has a lively cultural center (Pari Center for New Learning) and even a publishing house (Pari Publishing) that are renowned and appreciated not only in Italy, but in Europe and in the States too. They have visitors, courses, conferences, and contribute to keep alive the dialogue between local and global on such important issues as literature, social action, science, religion, the arts, linguistics, and even women rights. (check their new books by the way!)

So, surprised people, we can indeed live very well “out here”. It’s actually very pleasant! )

Just think about this when you travel: the place you call a destination, for some people is home. )

An interesting link to sustainable tourism near Siena: from tourist to citizen of the Terre di Siena.