A recent article by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica celebrates the newest tourism trends of slow, responsible and local tourism. These were confirmed by the project “Actions for the enhancement and promotion of the tourism sector of territories and quality productions”, financed by the Ministry of Tourism in collaboration with Unioncamere and Isnart: in Italy, 50% of tourists belong to the Y and Z generations, digital natives born after 1981, of which 94% pays attention to sustainable travel options and 40% choose to explore unfamiliar destinations, longing for rediscovery and sense of belonging.

As Isnart president Roberto Di Vincenzo pointed out “Tourism is changing because the demand of tourists is changing. If in the past choices were based on the ‘what’ (what I want to do, what I want to see), today the trend is dominated by the ‘why’ (why do I want to travel? What motivates me?)”. He also added that “it is therefore necessary to move beyond the classic ‘Italian Way’ of Tourism towards a more up-to-date ‘Italian Why?’, to make people choose Italy as a tourist destination, including and intercepting numerous new phenomena such as slow tourism and staycation”.

Cultural tourism continues to play a central role, so much that more than 53.1% of operators identify it as their area of specialisation. It closely follows nature tourism, with the 51.1% of the tourism operators, then beach and water sports tourism, with 29.3%, and finally wine and food tourism, with 23.8%. Cycle tourism also continues to show growing interest both in terms of demand and economic dimension. In fact, the study showed that +30% of tourists chose to cycle in the two-year period 2019-2021 and the per capita expenditure of this category of tourists is higher than the overall average.