1 Learning Sustainability of Rural Tourism: Farm Competitiveness and Landscape Health Risk Assessment

In the last decades, rural tourism has spread to all countries. This has been seen as part of an increasing farm diversification to solve the crisis of the agricultural sector. The prospect of financial grants has caused different kinds of interventions and effects on the landscape. The results have not always respected the sense of place, neither the identity of rural landscape recommendations of the Europe landscape convention. Looking at the problems surveyed in the rural landscapes of Northern Italy, this paper re-views how to implement the principles of sustainable tourism to enhance working farms and local identity. It examines how those principles can be translated into practice, identifying new and innovative ways for individual operators and stakeholders. A web page is introduced as interactive guide-lines for future practitioners. Identifying markers of sustainability which define the links between the farm and its environment, it guides to reusing old farm buildings, in a manner that is able to revitalise the agricultural landscape and/or promote novel alternatives to the tourism-residential function envisaged by the redevelopment policies currently in force. As Web-based decision support system for ru-ral land, it assists the users in their day-to-day decisions on considering of the costs and the benefits for environment and landscape of alternative types of rural tourism businesses and helps planning authorities to develop a marketing project to expand forms of agri-tourisms able to creating employment and increasing the appeal of agriculture to younger generations