The “Travel of Transhumance” project took place from 2011 to 2014 with two events each year that aimed at developing a sustainable tourist mobility in the area of Amatrice, province of Rieti, in the Central Italian Apennines, inside the National Park of Gran Sasso and Laga Mountains.

The Travel of Transhumance during 3 years represented a participated effort by a good part of the local population in order to rise awareness of tourists, politicians, local administrators and stakeholders on the problems connected with the shepherd’s world and on the opportunities that it could offer for a global sustainable development.
The project was stopped on 2014 because after many claims, promises and few initial help obtained from regional and local public authorities, the initiatve was supported only by the farmers and few volunteers which had not the strenght to go on alone

Today, after the disastrous earthquake of 2016 August 24th, this project could represent an usefull idea in order to ensure a dignified and sustainable future to the mountain territory of Amatrice, Accumoli and Arquata.
It would be necessary only the shared help of a very little portion of all the volunteer organisations and of the many public officers which came to give the first aid in order to ensure a minimum of public awareness, coordination and bureaucracy help aiming at a durable restart of this project that is now only an experiment for the touristic-economic-cultural promotion on life in the Central Appennines Mountains.

For the time being we resist on the Web to testify and give evidence of how was Amatrice and its inhabitants before the terrible earthquake of August 24th. In this way we invite to visit in the section “Culture” our webpages on images, videos, music, dances and songs, or women’s craftsmanship.

The project developped a seasonal ecotourism event in order to help to discover and to preserve the real traditional shepherd’s world, which through the history created the wealth of Amatrice and his 70 villages and which today is concealed behind the famous dish “Spaghetti all’Amatriciana”.

The “Ecotourism” term was created on 1988 by the architect Hector Ceballos-Lascurain, meaning: “Ecotourism is that tourism that involves travelling to relatively undisturbed natural areas with the specific object of studying, admiring and enjoying the scenery and its wild plants and animals, as well as any existing cultural aspects (both past and present) found in these areas”.

The Travel of Transhumance was promoted by the three farms: ANTONIO DI MARCO, STEFANIA DI GIAMMARCO, ANTONIO AURELI, helped by volunteers, associations and passionate peoples. They all together enabled to come over the many obstacles and difficulties of an experience which they repeated for three years in order to help Amatrice keeping and preserving its own roots in the future.

The Travel of Transhumance purpose was to disseminate the whole richness of an historical tradition of the past in order to develop new respect and awareness on the importance of the Central Apennine environment, as it was created by the shepherds in thousands of years of history. It wished to be a sustainable event in order to develop all the production and services local chain systems linked to the shepherd’s world and his own typical and zero-mile agro-food traditions: milk, cheese, meat, sausages, wool, textiles, music, poetry, dance, history, culture, art and legend, oral tradition, past technologies, farming and historical reception, ….but specially landscape and biodiversity preservation.

The action of The Travel of Transhumance was inspired by the results of a paper of FAO organisation “Review of evidence on drylands pastoral systems and climate change" (PDF 508 Kb) stressing the following key messages:
- It is estimated that 1 billion people depend on livestock. Grasslands overall occupy some 3.4 billion ha, or about 26 percent of emerged lands. They have a large potential to affect the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Globally grasslands store up 8 percent of the world’s carbon.
- Grasslands, by their extensive nature, hold enormous potential to serve as one of the greatest terrestrial sinks for carbon. Well-managed grasslands can store up to 260 tonnes of carbon per ha while providing important benefits for climate change adaptation.
- Appropriate grassland management practices contribute to adaptation and mitigation, as well as increasing productivity and food security and reducing risk of drought and flooding. Grassland management is thereby a key adaptation and mitigation strategy for addressing climate change and variability.
- Livestock play an important role in carbon sequestration through improved pasture and rangeland management. Grassland productivity is also dependent on the mobility of livestock.
- Enabling grassland and livestock stewards to manage the vast grassland for both productivity and carbon sequestration requires a global coordinated effort to overcome socio-political and economic barriers.