The Grand Tour UNESCO in the Piedmont region. A slow travel route across “in between” territories, to improve the accessibility of places in cultural landscapes

In the time of the ecological transition, special attention should be focused on the fruition and accessibility of the landscape and cultural heritage for sustainable touristic purposes, which require new approaches and new strategies for inner and marginal places and their often forgotten landscapes. This paper introduces the initiative of the Grand Tour UNESCO in the Piedmont region, inserted in a broader project of connecting the Italian UNESCO sites by slow routes (in collaboration with the Italian National Commission for UNESCO), that aims at enhancing slow connections through the landscape focusing in particular to the territories “in-between” the UNESCO sites, as a sustainable travel mode to access also the less travelled tracks in the inner places. This paper shows how the Grand Tour has been defined on the basis of a complex territorial strategy, which relies on the rediscovery of remote and minor places, which are the most extraordinary and somehow less exploited, widespread, components in the Italian landscapes. The Grand Tour in Piedmont is a 660 km long route, completely drawn within the existing road/bike network of existing roads. It enables more efficient slow connections among the sites of the World Heritage List (WHL), Man and Biosphere (MAB), Geopark and Creative cities localized in the Piedmont Region. The strategy also considers accessibility and mobility issues, by promoting intermodal connections with railway stations, through which many centers and also villages are reachable, with benefit not only for tourists but also to inhabitants and with specific reference to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 3, 9 and 11).