Culture and food & wine are increasingly interconnected in the way Italian destinations build identity. Food is not only something to consume. It is a true cultural product, capable of telling the story, traditions and values of a community.
Food and wine thus become a narrative key that makes culture tangible and accessible through direct visitor experience. This interdependence suggests the need to rethink the tourism product in an integrated way, where tangible and intangible culture merge into a single experiential offer.
Museums, cultural attractions and events can all find in gastronomy a common language and a shared tool for valorisation. At the same time, culinary and wine experiences gain stronger meaning when they are placed inside a coherent cultural context that explains their origins and ties to local history and traditions.
A strategic approach is therefore to open the cultural sector to the wider ecosystem of local production, creating integrated routes and tourism products that combine heritage and territorial resources. Wine sections inside museums linked with visits to historic wineries, or terracotta museums paired with companies that preserve extra virgin olive oil in traditional jars, show how culture and local production can renew the tourism offer and make it more authentic, participatory and competitive on international markets.
Global trends confirm that contemporary travellers are looking for authentic, multisensory and participatory experiences capable of creating emotion and active involvement. In this context, the union between culture and food & wine becomes a privileged lever, but it also requires the development of innovative tourism products that combine creativity and tradition and are easy to access thanks to technology.
It becomes essential to implement tools that facilitate information gathering, personalisation and direct purchase, allowing visitors to build a tailored journey and transform interest into real use. In recent years, hyper-personalisation has become increasingly important: destinations need to start from their distinctive characteristics and create made-to-measure experiences for each visitor.
Food and wine tourism confirms itself here as a strategic lever for inland areas such as the Valdichiana Senese, capable of combining culture, local production and identity into a coherent and sustainable model.
Valdichiana Senese as a laboratory of tourism innovation
Within this scenario, Valdichiana Living, the DMC of the Valdichiana Senese, has launched a set of initiatives aimed at strengthening the area’s ability to position itself as a valuable destination on foreign markets. The process involved local stakeholders directly through meetings and territorial workshops, from which emerged the shared desire to build a more integrated tourism system, conscious of its own identity and based on collaboration and the valorisation of local resources.
Two strategic development elements guide this path. The first is sustainability as a transversal component of experiences: today’s traveller wants authentic contact with nature and with local social dynamics, transforming travel into exchange and participation. The second is artificial intelligence and experience personalisation: advanced tools can help analyse visitor preferences and suggest tailored cultural and gastronomic routes, supporting both information gathering and direct purchase.
In this framework, local productions become real keys to access cultural and landscape heritage, enriching travel and creating an integrated offer that combines culture, food and identity. The evolution of the tourism product must therefore be based on territorial identity and on strengthening the elements capable of generating added value for both residents and visitors.
Contribution adapted from the 2025 Italian Food & Wine Tourism Report.
