Every year, tens of thousands of people born or raised abroad—children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Italian emigrants—embark on a special journey to Italy. They don't seek the most famous beaches or the most photographed cities of art. They seek something more intimate and powerful: their grandparents' village, the house where their great-grandfather grew up, the bell tower they've heard about all their lives. This is the root tourism, and has an enormous size that the Italian tourism system has historically struggled to capture. It is estimated that the potential of this segment involves million people every year, distributed across the main emigration countries: Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Australia, Venezuela, Germany, Switzerland, and France. These are not ordinary tourists. They are highly motivated visitors, with an average higher propensity to spend than the average tourist, and a tendency to return to the same destination multiple times.
The Municipalities Project is designed, among other things, to help Italian municipalities transform this latent potential into concrete, planned, and sustainable flows.
Who are the root tourists?
To design effective experiences, it's useful to understand who the people who make these trips are. Most of them belong to the second or third generation of emigrants: born abroad, often speaking little or no Italian, yet retaining a deep sense of belonging to their family's place of origin. Many don't know exactly where their grandparents' town is, don't know the relatives who remained in Italy, and have never visited the places they heard about in childhood. Others belong to the first generation — emigrants who have lived abroad for decades and who, approaching retirement or at certain points in their lives, feel the call to return, at least temporarily. In both cases, the journey to their roots is not a vacation in the ordinary sense of the term. It's a identity journey: you go to understand who you are, where you come from, what's in your blood through the generations. This profound motivation makes the roots tourist different from any other segment: more emotionally engaged, more curious, more willing to immerse themselves in local life.
What the Comuni Project offers to tourists of the roots
The Italiani.it Foundation, through the Municipalities Project, plans and promotes tailor-made experiential itineraries for this type of visitors.
The heart of every path is the visit to places of memoryThe family home, the cemetery with the ancestors' graves, the church where the grandfather's baptism was celebrated, the square where the great-grandparents met on market day. These are not places of historical or artistic interest in the conventional sense—but for those who experience them with eyes rooted in their own family history, they are places of extraordinary emotional intensity.
Complementary experiences are built around this core: traditional cooking workshops, basic or dialect Italian language courses, meetings with local artisans, walks through the landscapes that characterize the area, visits to local museums and historical archives. The Foundation supports municipalities in designing these itineraries, training the guides and operators involved, and communicating with potential visitors.
A fundamental role is also played by the genealogical researchMany ancestral tourists don't know exactly which family they descend from or where their hometown is. The Foundation's support in building genealogical databases and accessing parish and municipal archives is often the first step in transforming a vague intention into a concrete journey.
An added value for small municipalities
Roots tourism is by its nature a slow and local tourismIt requires time, requires longer-than-average stays, and requires the involvement of local accommodations, restaurants, shops, and artisans. It's a type of tourism that benefits not only the large urban center, but is also distributed throughout the region, making it particularly valuable for small towns that are often excluded from traditional tourist circuits.
A village of 2.000 inhabitants in Molise or Calabria, Veneto, or Sicily, has almost no chance of competing with Florence, Rome, or Positano for the international tourist who chooses Italy from the catalog. But for the descendant of a family that emigrated from that village, that destination has no rivals: it's the only one in the world.
To generate flows of root tourism, the first condition is that potential visitors know that there is something waiting for themAnd this is precisely the problem that the Italiani.it Foundation is equipped to solve. Through the Italiani.it channels—articles, videos, social media, newsletters, and apps—the Foundation reaches millions of people with emotional ties to Italy every month. The stories of places, the testimonies of those who have already made the journey to their roots, reports on villages and the communities that inhabit them: all this editorial work has the effect of keeping the desire alive and, gradually, of turn it into a travel intention.
The Municipality that joins the Municipalities Project becomes the protagonist of this story. It doesn't wait for anyone to discover it: it's the Foundation that brings its territory before the eyes of those who have every reason in the world to visit it. Municipalities Project It helps administrations transform grassroots tourism into a structured, communicated, and accessible offering. Even before being a development opportunity, grassroots tourism is a cultural policy, the recognition that the history of a territory does not end at municipal borders, but branches out into the world through the families who have left it over time.
