Responsible travel is just one aspect of Sustainable Tourism, but it's an important one because if you don't minimize your impact on popular destinations then before too long you'll find living and breathing local communities turned into little more than museums.
We've commented many times on this website about the pernicious effects of over-tourism in Italy including a quote in our article on Chioggia from Matteo Secchi, who is part of the activist group Venessia striving to protect the historic center of Venice.
We also bring up this topic whenever we write about an Italian town that is both small and very popular like San Gimignano, which we first wrote about 4 years ago, because it is the smaller towns that suffer the most. Likewise our article on San Terenzo on the very popular Ligurian coastline.
However, as we noted in our comments on various towns in Veneto that we visited in the month of February last year, being a responsible traveler and visiting Italy in the off-season brings many advantages to the tourist as well as to the destination itself.
Living year round in Italy for over a decade and now rarely ever leaving the country, I have witnessed first hand the steady deterioration in the quality of life in our home town of Lucca during the peak summer months which now effectively stretch from May to September.
Medieval city centers were not designed to accommodate thousands of people all trying to squeeze through narrow alleyways at the same time while stopping to take photographs, and every year another useful shop for residents becomes yet another gelateria or bar or restaurant serving mostly tourists and another residential building ejects its year round family occupants to become the umpteenth airbnb holiday rental.
Easily identified by their lockboxes outside, the proliferation of airbnb apartments in the popular Trastevere district of Rome drew the ire recently of a group of local residents who reacted by glueing the lockboxes shut to fight back against what they perceive as the destruction of their community, a community whose history as part of Rome dates back to the time of the Emperor Augustus. Once considered a typical working class district, Trastevere has lost almost half of its full time residents in the last 10 years, a trend that is now unlikely ever to be reversed.
Italy's economy depends on tourism so the best one can hope for is that locally elected officials strike a better balance for their community and that tour operators and tourists themselves become more responsible about when they visit the most popular destinations.
The good news however is that from November to April Lucca and many other towns become livable again and a visitor can enjoy Lucca in the company of Italians rather than other tourists. And there's probably no better example of the benefits of responsible travel than the much smaller town of San Gimignano because there is no other small town in Italy that is more famous abroad and as high up on everyone's list to visit.
Although we are now offering various tours to off-the-beaten-track places like Abruzzo and the Tuscan Maremma, where tourism is a force for good and helps to regenerate local communities, we simply refuse to take you to places like San Gimignano or Cinque Terre in the summer. However, as the photographs on this page demonstrate, a visit to San Gimignano in winter will be much more enjoyable than it could ever be in the summer and at this time of year almost all of the people you see around you in this town will be Italians.
To prove our point, in the last week of February we drove a couple of guests (above) to San Gimignano and Elena gave them a tour of the town. It was a perfect walking around temperature of 60 degrees, which is not that uncommon, and despite being a Sunday we had no trouble finding a table to sit outside and we also had the top of the Torre Grossa all to ourselves.
All the Italians with whom we interacted, in the museum and shops etc, had time for a chat and there was no sign of tourist fatigue or the grumpiness that is forgivable and probably inevitable in the peak tourist months. There was also very little traffic around the town and there were literally hundreds of available parking spaces which gives you some idea of just how many spaces are needed in the summer.
Even 25 years ago on my first trip to San Gimignano, which by necessity took place in the summer, the town was swamped with tourists so I can only imagine how suffocating the summer experience must be today with another 2 billion people occupying our planet since the year 2000, many of whom will visit Italy more than once in their lifetimes.
A brief word about the Torre Grossa as we didn't include it in our article 4 years ago. It's the tallest tower in San Gimignano, standing at 177 feet versus the Guinigi Tower in Lucca at 148 feet. Construction began in 1300 shortly after Dante's visit to the town and it served as both a defensive watchtower and a bell tower.
There are various galleries near the entrance including the Sala di Dante where the Madonna in Majesty (above) by Lippo Memmi takes center stage - painted in 1317 as a homage to the Maestà by Simone Martini that was finished 2 years earlier and is displayed in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena.
There are 218 steps up to the viewing area at the top of the tower and it's well worth the effort because even on a cloudy day there are fabulous views of the town below. Another obvious sign that there were only local Italians in town on the day of our visit and no tourists was the fact that nobody else came up the tower whilst we were there - it's not something that a local resident is going to do on a typical weekend unless he is showing visitors around his town.
Take my word for it - Italy out of season is a completely different and much more authentic experience.