Travel & Tourism Injected €215BN into Italy’s Economy

For a food that begins with just flour, water or sometimes eggs, there are infinite variations of pasta. So what happens when you convene a panel of five Italian cuisine experts and ask them to determine the 25 pasta dishes throughout Italy? “I’m sweating,” said Davide Palluda, the chef and owner of All’Enoteca restaurant and osteria in the Piedmont region. “This is too heavy,” he joked during the two-hour video call that I convened to debate his nominations and those of the four other panelists: Stefano Secchi, the chef and a co-owner of New York City’s Rezdôra; the Tuscany-based cookbook author Emiko Davies; the Umbria-based culinary historian Karima Moyer-Nocchi; and the food writer and novelist Roberta Corradin, who lives in Florence, Sicily and Boston. A week before our call, I’d asked each to make their own list of 10 standouts (since he was a panelist, Palluda’s restaurants were automatically excluded); after an energetic debate and several more phone calls, emails and WhatsApp messages, we whittled that list in half. The final picks appear below in unranked alphabetical order, along with the ideal wine to drink with each pasta dish, as recommended by the chosen restaurants and reviewed by Davies’s husband, the sommelier Marco Lami.

As tourists flock to Italy this summer, it may be tough to snag a reservation at one of the 146 hotels recently recognized with “Michelin Keys.”

“Rimini is my home. I grew up in Cattolica, a nearby village, and I’m incredibly proud of this region of Italy. It’s an often-overlooked part of the country, but there is so much to explore in this area, from the food to the beaches, the culture and, most importantly, the people. There is an easiness to Rimini that makes you feel like a local even when you are just visiting.”

You can’t beat an agriturismo. Rural locations, owners whose main job is farming, plus food and drink produced on site all add up to a charmingly informal stay. There is rarely a reception desk and there’ll be dogs and crowing roosters to contend with, but they offer brilliant food and a friendly welcome. And they are not all buried in the countryside; there are lots of agriturismos around Italy’s 5,000 miles of coast. Here are 10 within walking or cycling distance of the beach.

This year, Italy’s hotel world is upping the ante when it comes to its many standout luxury offerings, with a plethora of new openings and property updates giving even more choice to visitors. From Italy’s mountainous peaks to its azure waters in the dramatic south of the country, here is Part 2 of Italy’s latest hotel news from the centre to the south of the country.

The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) together with IC Bellagio and Members of the private Travel & Tourism sector, has launched a new consumer focussed initiative helping travellers understand how they can discover the world sustainably.

Steamy natural thermal water simmers beneath the surface throughout almost the whole Italian peninsula. It bubbles up above the ground in the form of hot springs across the country, creating heavenly hot pools and balmy baths.

Whether it is the outstanding Renaissance monuments or authentic, regional cuisine, Italy’s appeal has long been far-reaching. As a country, it has never had to ‘hard sell’ itself to tourists, with the country being a perennial favourite destination for travellers. As well as having more UNESCO World Heritage sites than any other country (59 in total), its rich culture, architecture, art and beloved gastronomy is a source of inspiration for tourists across the world.

ON THE COUNTER sits a bucket of tomatoes just picked from a tumble of fields halfway up a mountain in southern Italy. Concetta D’Aniello hands me an apron and we begin. I follow her lead, breaking into each tomato with my thumb, the flesh giving way. The smell of minerals fills the kitchen. Her husband, Sabato Abagnale, known as Sabatino — who grows and cans tomatoes, like his father before him — describes how the scent clings when you walk the fields in August. “Even when you shower, you can’t get rid of it,” he says. (We speak through an interpreter, Sandra Gambarotto.) It’s late October now and the end of harvest; these tomatoes are the stragglers, still dreaming of summer, sun-gorged and supersweet.

FOR MUCH OF Italy’s history, ravioli was a luxury reserved for banquet tables or feast days. All pasta was a rarefied food in the Middle Ages, but few forms captured the popular imagination as completely as stuffed pasta, considered the noblest of the species. In “The Decameron,” a 14th-century collection of stories by Giovanni Boccaccio about a group of young Florentines who abandon the city for the countryside during the plague, one of the characters, Maso del Saggio, describes an idyllic landscape to entertain the friends: “On a mountain, all of grated Parmesan cheese, dwell folk that do nought else but make macaroni and raviuoli.” Centuries later, every corner of Italy has its own version of filled pasta, which is broadly referred to as ravioli throughout the country. The “Encyclopedia of Pasta” (2009), the Italian food historian Oretta Zanini De Vita’s decades-long effort to catalog Italy’s most popular food, identifies more than 80 types of pasta ripiena (“stuffed pasta”), allowing for countless variations.

The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) 2024 Economic Impact Research (EIR) has revealed Portugal’s Travel & Tourism sector is on the brink of a historic year, with its economic contribution expected to exceed €54 billion. The latest data from the WTTC, in collaboration with Oxford Economics, points to a surge of 24.3% compared to 2019, and representing 20% of the national economy, cementing the sector’s role as a key economic driver.

The World Travel & Tourism Council’s (WTTC) 2024 Economic Impact Research (EIR) has revealed the Qatari Travel & Tourism sector reached new heights last year, with GDP contribution, jobs and domestic traveller spend all surpassing previous peaks. Last year, the Travel & Tourism’s GDP contribution grew by 31% to reach a record-breaking QAR 81.2BN, representing 10.3% of Qatar’s total economic output, demonstrating the sector’s importance to the national economy.