Don’t pack lunch — buy it here to save our Alps, mayor tells tourists

Mayors of mountain towns near Turin have called on visitors to leave their packed lunches at home and buy from local shops instead when they venture into the Alps.
“People buy everything from the shop next to their homes and they don’t buy anything in the mountains,” complained Marco Bussone, mayor of Vallo Torinese, a town with fewer than 800 residents nestling in the foothills of the Alps 25km northwest of Turin.
Despite a boom in tourism across the Continent and especially in Italy, rural areas still suffer from a lack of investment, with young families leaving to seek work in larger towns and cities.Some 200 mountain communities in Italy are now without either a shop or a bar, threatening their future, and another 500 have fewer than three businesses serving the public.
Bussone, who heads an organisation which, along with other mayors, represents mountain communities, said it was vital that visitors invested in the mountain economy. “People pay for parking in the city and they can’t expect everything to be free when they go to the mountains,” Bussone said.
“This isn’t about ripping off the tourists but a way of saying that our territory has a cost too. Buying something in the local shop can help to guarantee the survival of the town.”
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Bussone said his members were adopting a slogan coined by the French: “Buy in the mountain, and the mountain will live.”
Mountain communities are adopting a variety of responses to the crisis, with some charging for parking, others for use of picnic areas, and others for access to the territory. The town of Castelluccio di Norcia in the Apennines restricts access to its flower-covered meadow at peak times, obliging visitors to use shuttle buses for the last part of their journey.
“My mountain community spends €10 million a year on cleaning up the picnic areas. The city can’t expect to use the mountain as a place to let off steam. We’re not an amusement park,” Bussone said.
The mayor said the mountains were not facing an overtourism crisis, like Venice, and there were long periods when no one came from outside at all. But the maintenance of the landscape, the upkeep of paths and the viability of the mountain economy were all at risk if visitors failed to contribute.
“No one wants to take advantage of the tourists or make people pay for fresh air, but this is an emergency,” Bussone said. It was time politicians awoke to the situation as well and delivered on tax breaks that had been promised decades ago, he said.
“I invite the mayors of the big cities to join us in this project, to realise that the mountain doesn’t come for free,” Bussone said. “It’s a cultural question: we need a pact between the mountain and the city.”