Italy doesn't really do half-measures. The espresso is short and serious, the lunches are long and serious, and the landscapes — Dolomite spires, Tuscan ridgelines, Aeolian volcanoes still steaming into the sea — feel almost theatrically over-engineered. Which is exactly why travelling here thoughtfully matters. The country gets staggering numbers of visitors, and the places they tend to flock to (Venice, the Cinque Terre, the Amalfi Coast in August) are the ones most visibly buckling. The good news: a slower, greener Italy is not only possible, it's often the more rewarding trip. Here's how to plan one.
Rethink where — and when — you go
Most of the strain on Italian destinations comes down to two things: too many people in too few places, all in the same handful of weeks. Venice, Florence and the cliffside villages of Liguria absorb far more visitors than their infrastructure was built for, while entire regions — Molise, Basilicata, the Marche, inland Sardinia — see a fraction of the foot traffic and could happily welcome more.
The single greenest planning decision you can make is to redistribute. That doesn't mean skipping the icons; it means pairing one with somewhere quieter. A few easy swaps and combinations:
- Instead of only the Amalfi Coast, give a few days to Cilento, just south. Same coastline DNA, UNESCO-listed national park, infinitely more breathing room.
- Instead of only the Cinque Terre, walk a stretch of the Ligurian coast further west, around Finale Ligure, or push east into Lunigiana.
- Instead of only Tuscany, dip into Umbria or the Marche — hill towns, vineyards, frescoes, and you'll actually hear birdsong.
- Instead of August, travel in May, June, late September or October. The light is better, the food is in season, and you're not contributing to peak-month overload.
Shoulder-season travel is genuinely one of the most underrated climate actions a tourist can take. It eases pressure on water, waste and energy systems that struggle under summer peaks.
Get there — and around — on rails
Italy is a country built for trains. The high-speed network connecting Turin, Milan, Bologna, Florence, Rome and Naples is fast, frequent and dramatically lower-carbon than flying domestically. From a sustainability standpoint, the simplest rule of thumb is: if there's a direct train under about five hours, take it.
From the UK and Ireland, the rail option is more involved but increasingly viable: Eurostar to Paris, then a TGV or sleeper down through the Alps. It costs more time than a budget flight, but you arrive in the middle of a city instead of an airport-adjacent retail park, and the journey itself becomes part of the holiday.
Once you're inside Italy, regional trains unlock the best of the country — the slow Trenino Verde routes through Sardinia, the Centovalli line into Switzerland, the coastal run from Genoa down to Pisa. They're often cheap, almost always scenic, and they stop in towns that car-based itineraries skip entirely.
When you do need wheels
For inland Sicily, deep Puglia or rural Tuscany, a car is sometimes the honest answer. If so, look for an EV rental and plan around the country's growing fast-charging network. Electric scooters and bikes — proper ones, not the pavement-clogging app rentals — are an excellent way to cover hill-town clusters without burning fuel or tearing up your lungs on switchbacks.
What a credible green stay actually looks like
"Eco-hotel" is a phrase that gets thrown around with very little quality control. In Italy specifically, here's what tends to separate a genuinely sustainable stay from a marketing exercise:
- Independent certification. Look for properties holding recognised standards such as EU Ecolabel, Legambiente Turismo, GSTC-recognised schemes, or Green Key. These require external auditing rather than self-declaration.
- Renewable energy on-site. Many agriturismi and rural retreats now run on solar, biomass from estate prunings, or geothermal. Ask directly — they're usually proud to explain.
- Water discipline. Italy has been hit hard by drought in recent years. Properties that harvest rainwater, recycle greywater for gardens, and don't pretend to be Dubai with their pools deserve your booking.
- Food from the same valley. A kitchen sourcing from its own garden, neighbouring farms and local cooperatives is doing more for sustainability than any laminated card on the bathroom sink.
- Restoration, not new build. A converted farmhouse, masseria, monastery or palazzo carries a fraction of the embodied carbon of a new resort. Italy has a beautiful tradition of restoring old stone buildings — this is climate work disguised as romance.
The pattern to look for, region by region: masserie in Puglia, agriturismi across Tuscany and Umbria, rifugi in the Alps and Apennines, family-run pensioni in coastal villages, and the small wave of converted convents being run as quiet, low-impact retreats. None of these are inherently green, but the model — small, local, rooted — gives sustainability a fighting chance.
Eat like the country wants you to
Italian food culture is, by accident and by design, one of the most sustainable cuisines on the planet. It's seasonal, regional and built around vegetables, legumes and grains, with meat and fish as accents rather than centrepieces. Lean into that and you're already doing the work.
A few practical habits:
- Eat the season. Artichokes in spring, tomatoes and stone fruit at the height of summer, porcini and chestnuts in autumn, citrus and bitter greens in winter. Out-of-season produce in Italy almost always means a greenhouse or a long-haul flight.
- Order regionally. Cacio e pepe in Rome, orecchiette in Puglia, pesto in Liguria, ragù in Emilia-Romagna. It's not a tourist cliché — it's a supply chain decision.
- Buy from alimentari and markets. Picnics from a neighbourhood deli are cheaper, lower-waste and tastier than a chain sandwich at a motorway services.
- Drink the tap water. Italian tap water is, almost everywhere, excellent. A refillable bottle saves you money and keeps single-use plastic out of the system. Many towns have public fountains — Rome's nasoni are the famous example — that have been pouring cold drinking water for over a century.
And the wine
Italy's organic and biodynamic wine scene is one of the most interesting in Europe. Look for small producers working without synthetic inputs — natural-wine bars in cities like Turin, Bologna and Palermo are a good shortcut. Drink less, drink better, drink local: a quietly radical sustainability strategy.
Slow the itinerary down
The most carbon-intensive holidays are the ones where you try to do everything. Five cities in seven days means five sets of transfers, five hotel turnovers, five rounds of laundry and almost no time to actually be anywhere.
A better Italian template: pick one base, stay a week, and make day trips by train, bike or foot. A week in Bologna gives you Modena, Parma, Ravenna and Ferrara. A week in Lecce unlocks half of Salento. A week in a Val d'Orcia farmhouse unlocks more Tuscany than most people see in a fortnight of hopping. Slower is greener and, almost without exception, better.
Walk, hike, paddle
Italy has an enormous and underused network of long-distance trails. The Via Francigena runs the length of the country, the Sentiero Italia stitches together the entire Apennine spine, and the Dolomites' high routes — the Alte Vie — are among the great walks of Europe. Walking holidays are essentially zero-carbon once you've arrived, and they spread spend across small mountain villages that need it.
On the water, sea kayaking along the Cilento or Sardinian coasts, sailing the Aeolian Islands with a small operator, or paddling the lakes of the north all do less damage than the diesel-belching tourist boats that crowd the headline destinations.
Spend in places that need it
Sustainability isn't only about carbon. The other half is whether your money strengthens or hollows out the place you're visiting. Buying ceramics directly from a workshop in Deruta, leather from a Florentine artisan whose name is on the door, or olive oil from the family that pressed it keeps craft economies alive and keeps young people in towns that would otherwise empty out. The cheap fridge magnet probably came from much further away than you think.
Bringing it back to the booking
None of this requires sainthood — it requires a few better defaults. Travel in shoulder season. Take the train when the train makes sense. Stay in places that restored a building rather than poured a new one. Eat the season, drink the tap, walk more than you planned to. On the booking side, this is the kind of trip IMPT is built around: every hotel stay booked through the platform offsets a tonne of CO₂ on-chain, paid from our commission rather than tacked onto your bill, across a network of more than 1.7 million hotels in 195 countries. Pair that with the IMPT Card and IMPT Token for the everyday spending around a trip — flights to the airport, that ceramic dish you couldn't leave behind — and a careful Italian holiday becomes a slightly easier thing to plan, and a slightly lighter thing to take home.