Sentiero vetrina, paesaggio operativo. Dalla Via dell’Amore al “mare di muretti”

The article reads the Cinque Terre as a landscape-architecture laboratory for rethinking tourism in fragile mountain and coastal territories. Focusing on the Via dell’Amore, a former construction path turned iconic cliffside promenade, it reconstructs the trail’s transformation through infrastructural works, safety regulations and controlled-access devices. The path is interpreted as a “showcase” infrastructure within a wider system of terraces, villages and minor trails, where design choices and management tools operate as spatial filters that can either amplify overtourism or redistribute flows in space and time. Shifting from the cliff path to the “sea of dry-stone walls”, the article addresses issues of material authenticity, maintenance economies and emerging forms of participatory and regenerative tourism. By comparing Cinque Terre with selected Alpine landscapes, it argues for an architecture of care in which landscape projects, agricultural practices and tourism policies are conceived together to sustain the everyday work that keeps mountain territories inhabited.