Rome, 12 December 2019
2020 will be the year of the tourist train.
The FS Italiane Group has confirmed its commitment to the development and promotion of slow and sustainable tourism, in line with the announcement made by the Minister for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, Dario Franceschini.
In 2014, with the FS Foundation, of which MiBACT has been an institutional member since 2015, the Group launched the Binari senza tempo project in order to create a new form of railway tourism, making it possible to reach lesser-known but extraordinarily beautiful Italian destinations to discover art, landscapes and food and wine. In particular, the project, supported by MiBACT, has made it possible between 2014 and 2018 to reopen 600 kilometres of railway lines from the North to the South of the Peninsula for tourism.
The initiative was created with the aim of offering people the opportunity to travel along 10 historical lines to visit the most fascinating and suggestive places in Italy. The Fondazione FS Italiane foundation's vintage trains transported around 100,000 people in 2019 (460 train events). In 2020 the luxury Arlecchino electric train will also return to the tracks and the restoration of the Settebello train will begin.
The FS Italiane Group is committed to improving the tourist experience in Italy by enhancing train connections to small and medium-sized towns and cities with high cultural and scenic attractiveness, promoting environmental sustainability and encouraging people to choose green modes of transport.
The 2019-2020 Trenitalia winter timetable, in use from Sunday 15 December, will see greater capillarity in urban areas, more customised services and a dynamic response to the needs of foreign travellers and tourists, including connections linking the train to other modes of transport.
In addition, 24 intermodal projects were launched in 2019 alone, with a further 40 planned for next year. Lastly, the focus continues on travel for leisure and tourism on regional trains with the Travel Book, the series Itinerari di pAssaggio and a guide for school trips.
In order to meet the growing tourism demand (20% more international arrivals in 2019 than in 2018) and renewed customer mobility needs, in June last year the FS Italiane Group launched the Tourism Hub: in line with FS's 2019-2023 Business Plan, which plans to intercept twenty million more tourists starting from the current 100 million, the Hub aims to redistribute tourist flows and improve accessibility to cities of art and holiday destinations, enhancing the Italian image and cultural heritage and landscape.
The FS Italiane Group is therefore a point of reference for the national tourism ecosystem, able to facilitate connections between the country's airports, stations, ports and support the economic growth of the Italian economy.