Local tourism: rediscovering what lies close to home

Local tourism: what does it really mean, beyond the label? It's the choice to travel within a short radius of home, usually an hour or two by car or train, treating your own area as a destination and not as a backdrop. It isn't a fallback wrapped up as "nearby because far away costs too much": it's a way of looking. It means stopping in that town you've always driven past on the bypass, booking a night forty kilometres from home, stepping into a courtyard you've walked by a thousand times without ever crossing the threshold.

In Italy this approach has old roots, the day trip out of town of the 1950s was already local tourism, but it came back to the fore after 2020, when millions of people discovered that the region they live in held places they had never visited. The advantages are concrete: lower travel costs, fewer emissions, weekends made possible without long holidays, and the chance to return several times in the same season instead of consuming a place in a single hit-and-run trip. There's also a less measurable gain: you slow down. Without the anxiety of "seeing everything", a single day is more than enough for a village and a walk.

What to visit nearby

The practical question, then, becomes: what to visit within reach? The answer depends on where you live, but the Italian basket is enormous. Let's start with the villages, which remain the backbone of local tourism because they are often the neighbours we take for granted.

The villages on your doorstep

If you live on the Po Valley plain, the Val d'Arda is just around the corner: Castell'Arquato offers a high medieval square and hillside wineries reachable in half a day from Milan, Parma or Bologna. Those in Piedmont or the Aosta Valley have Bard, the stone town at the foot of the fort, perfect as a Saturday stop. In Friuli and eastern Veneto there's Venzone, rebuilt stone by stone after the 1976 earthquake and today a textbook case of revival. From western Liguria you climb in an hour to Triora, in the upper Valle Argentina, with its memory of the witch trials.

For those in Tuscany or Umbria, the Valtiberina offers Anghiari, to be explored on foot among uphill alleys and artisan workshops. In the Tuscia area of Lazio, a stone's throw from Viterbo and little more than an hour from Rome, there's Celleno Vecchia, the abandoned tuff village between the Orsini castle and the badlands. Heading south, the Daunia gives Apulians Bovino, while Basilicata packs together two destinations close to one another: Aliano among the badlands of Carlo Levi's internal exile, and Castelmezzano, set among the spires of the Lucanian Dolomites. These are all places a southern resident can reach in a day, and yet often knows only by hearsay.

The tourist in your own city

Local tourism, however, isn't only villages and countryside. It works just as well inside your own city, if you learn to stray from your usual streets. It's the idea of playing tourist where you live. In Milan you need only step into the Vicolo dei Lavandai, the old washing lane on the Navigli, to change eras without taking the car. In Rome the Coppedè Quarter, between Via Veneto and Piazza Buenos Aires, is a concentrate of fairytale architecture a few steps from the traffic. In Turin the Baroque stables of the Cavallerizza Reale open up a block from Piazza Castello. In Naples the climb up to the "hawk-wing" staircase of the Rione Sanità is worth it, lived-in, everyday Baroque. And in Sicily, in Caltagirone, there are the 142 majolica steps of the staircase of Santa Maria del Monte.

How to organise it

How do you organise it, in practice? Three simple rules. First: draw a one-hour circle around your home on a map and mark what you've never seen. Second: travel on weekdays or off-season, when even the well-known places can breathe. Third: spend money on the spot, a lunch in a trattoria, a purchase in a shop, because that's how local tourism also becomes a local economy. The beauty of it is that you don't need a grand plan: your next interesting trip might be twenty minutes away, and so far you've only watched it go by from the car window.