The Sentiero Italia is the world's longest trekking route, crossing the country along its mountain ranges. Va' Sentiero is a project by three young enthusiasts who set out to explore and document it, shining a light on forgotten places along the way.
To travel the length of the country, crossing all twenty of its regions and 360 of its municipalities, covering 6,880 kilometres along Italy's mountain spine. All on foot, walking, slowly. Because, as the poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote, "the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot".
A project that could only have been born from people who deeply love and respect Italy and its mountains, and who believe that walking is the most sustainable way to experience both. On 1 May, Va' Sentiero sets off to discover the until now little-trodden and little-known Sentiero Italia. An extraordinary adventure whose origins read almost like a novel.
If it is true that what remains of a journey is above all the path and not the final destination, then the events that led to the conception of the Va' Sentiero project are the compelling prologue to an adventure that promises to be one of a kind. The initial protagonist is Yuri Basilicò, an active travel guide but above all a passionate mountain lover. The setting is not Italy at first but Corsica, where Basilicò gets lost during a trekking trip. Losing the trail leads him to discover another — perhaps the most important of his life — all thanks to some Norwegians he meets by chance, who ask him for information about the "famous Sentiero Italia". So well known, it seems, that Basilicò has never heard of it; yet from that day on it leaves an indelible mark on him.
Some time passes, however, before the memory resurfaces and Basilicò decides with determination not only to find out more about the Sentiero Italia, but to walk it himself and, along that very route, to develop a project to bring it to wider attention and give a voice to the "highland communities". To that end he knocks on a few doors and comes across Piero Carlesi (a journalist at the Touring club who is likewise passionate about mountains), who points him in the right direction to track down the three people — Teresio Valsesia, Riccardo Carnovalini and Giancarlo Corbellini — who conceived the Sentiero Italia between 1983 and 1995, making it the world's longest trekking route. The adventure thus begins, and to develop it to its full potential Basilicò enlists two friends, Sara Furlanetto, a photographer, and Giacomo Riccobono, a communications expert, together with whom he founds the Va' Sentiero association in the spring of 2017.
Meanwhile, the best possible news reaches them: in January 2018, the Cai, Club Alpino Italiano, announces the reopening of the Sentiero Italia in spring 2019 and, with its invaluable volunteers, sets in motion a monumental restoration effort. We discussed this commitment with Antonio Montani, vice president of the Cai. "Already at the start of 2018, our president Vincenzo Torti had expressed the desire to reactivate the Sentiero Italia before the end of his term of office, in May 2019. The Cai therefore threw itself into the work with conviction, mobilising all its resources: to verify the route, propose alternative routes and carry out the actual trail maintenance, we ended up involving 600 volunteers. If you also factor in the production and installation of dedicated signage bearing the Sentiero Italia Cai logo, the number of people involved grows even further."
Another concrete initiative is the launch of a dedicated website, officially presented on 16 February: Sentieroitalia.cai.
The aim of Va' Sentiero is to traverse the whole of Italy by following the path naturally traced by its mountains — on foot. "Life is a journey to be made on foot," as travel writer Bruce Chatwin put it. We asked Yuri Basilicò what sense there is today in walking and moving slowly, in a world that moves fast. "All three of us at Va' Sentiero feel a constant need to keep moving. This desire to travel, to journey, often spills over into a frenzy that in practice leaves no time to actually achieve anything. Walking, on the other hand, is a way of placing yourself on an equal footing with the world. I've thought about it a great deal and I believe that the true form of attraction the mountains hold for me is the feeling of being in a real dimension. It's a way of 'being in the world' on your own terms, not dictated by someone else or by a vehicle. So, walking in the mountains becomes an empowering act, dependent on yourself alone, and as a result every form of knowledge that comes from it runs deeper, because it has been hard-won. And let's not forget: walking is sustainable."
In practical terms, the trek will be walked by the Va' Sentiero team from the first of May, when the "rope team" of Basilicò, Furlanetto and Riccobono will set out from Grotta Gigante in the province of Trieste, the first stage of the Sentiero Italia, now finally reopened and walkable. 368 stages, but above all 360 municipalities — which means stories, realities and folk traditions. "What interests us most about the Sentiero Italia is that it was conceived from the very beginning to connect hundreds of small villages, many of them in the mountains, so it is a trek of landscapes, of wide open spaces, but also rich in human stories," says Basilicò.
Places, trades, customs, languages, different faces — all capable, in the minds of the three young people behind the project, of spontaneously weaving the story of a country united (by its mountains) and at the same time divided by its very local character, by being part of the country that is Italy. Storytelling understood as sharing lies at the heart of Va' Sentiero: walking, gathering testimonies, but also leaving a mark by raising awareness among enthusiasts and citizens of the need to protect the environment and mountain communities.
"We will reach the Marche, Visso, at the end of the first part of the trail, before the winter break," Basilicò explains. "The intention is to stop there for three months, also with the aim of 'championing' these lands. The message we want to send is that of making a fresh start from the Marche, and as far as possible we intend to commit fully to ensuring that these wonderful places are no longer left to fend for themselves and forgotten, as they are now." After crossing all 20 regions over 18 months of walking, the adventure will come to an end in August 2020 at Santa Teresa di Gallura, in the province of Sassari.
What perhaps makes the Va' Sentiero project unique is the openness of this adventure to anyone who w