Rural Culinary Tourism in Europe: New Trends and Emerging Educational Needs – with Michele Fontefrancesco

Rural culinary tourism is a growing sector in European tourism and a key resource for rural development, in particular in Southern Europe. The boom of the sector that followed the Covid-19 pandemic, however, poses important questions concerning the actual capacity of local actors to grasp this opportunity. The lecture investigates the main trends in rural tourism in Southern Europe and the specific educational needs entrepreneurs express based on extensive research conducted within the Erasmus + project “The European Network for the Promotion of Culinary and Proximity Tourism in Rural Areas” in 2022. In so doing, it indicates a way forward for new gastronomes to understand this sector and invest their professionality in it (see the attachment).