Vineyard tourist routes as a factor of regional development: the case of Sicily in a path methodology

A tourist route encompasses the experience of discovering the identity of places, lifestyles, and landscapes of the past and present as well as future prospects. In this study, wine, food, land use and sustainability are the characteristic elements through which food and wine tourism, and its implications for the economic development of the Mediterranean, especially Sicily, emerge. Such route provides tourists with an overview of a region and its cultural values. A rigorous analysis of the phenomenon embraces an approach that is based upon the quality of supply, the local knowledge of authentic products and cultures, and the involvement of all actors upon whom depend on the success or lack of success of a process for developing sustainable and competitive wine and gastronomy tourism. Denominations of origin for the protection of typical local products, wine roads and gustatory paths which are capable of revealing the values of an area, and therefore of putting them in the framework of rural tourism, and new communication technologies and new industrial associations, are all tools to be used with the scope of transforming the productive culture of places and culinary traditions into tourist products that are capable of constructing a territorial brand, to win an economic and cultural gamble that is of extraordinary importance for an island like Sicily, which sees in tourism a strategic sector that can trigger mechanisms for enduring and sustainable development.