Slow tourism and railways: a proposal for the Italian-French Roia Valley

The slow tourism philosophy is usually directed, on the one hand, at mature tourist destinations with the aim of renewing them with up-to-date sustainable and responsible elements and, on the other hand, at promising destinations in order to help them enter today’s extremely competitive tourism market. The Roia Valley, which since 1860 has been partly Italian and partly French, is the natural link between the maritime tourist region of the Riviera and the Côte d’Azur in the South, and the mountain resorts of Piedmont in the North, but it is not an important tourist destination per se. Nonetheless, since the 1920s a very interesting railway has crossed the Roia Valley. This railway line, destroyed during the Second World War and entirely restored in 1979, has mainly been used for local transport or to connect the seaside with Piedmont, but it has not yet been exploited for local tourism. The aim of this research is to see to what extent a tourist exploitation of the railway line, through a slow tourism programme, could transform the promising Roia Valley into a new tourist destination closely connected to the mature Riviera and Piedmont regions