Smart Community and landscape in progress. The case of the Santa Barbara walk (Sulcis, Sardinia)

Tourism of the paths is a phenomenon that undergone considerable development in recent years. Initially linked to religious paths (i.e. the way of Santiago in Spain or the Via Francigena in Italy), today also includes cultural, landscape, naturalistic and spiritual paths. In Italy 2016 was the ‘Year of the Paths’ with the aim of building and / or consolidating a “slow network in the sensitive landscape”, while 2019 was dedicated to slow tourism. The slow itineraries constitute a network that flows smoothly into the territories, some of which not yet mature as tourist destinations. Opportunities offer by the new technologies create smart communities that make these destinations and travelers the undisputed protagonists, in contributing to the formation of Big Data (open and close). The objective of this study is to analyze the Santa Barbara Walk in the Sulcis area, considering its particular changing and dangerous nature, by analyzing the open (walk and bike) GPS tracks left by the Smart Community. The interest shown by the smart community through the digital traces sharing, also referring to the danger of a landscape in continuous change, proves to be of strategic importance for the use of the slow network in the Sulcis. In this sense, the role of the smart community is fundamental for the implementation of the information layer relating to risks and for the management of risks in sensitive and evolving contexts.