Luca Terenziani spent 470 days, eleven pairs of shoes, and three backpacks to cross all of Italy on foot. He set off from Muggia on May 18, 2025 and arrived in Santa Teresa di Gallura on August 30, 2026, after about 8,000 kilometers along the Sentiero Italia CAI, the longest hiking route in the world.
At the finish line, the phrase that summed it all up was “I’ll have the emptiest wallet, but I will be enormously richer,” as he told the Gazzettino. A personal story, certainly. But also a mirror of something happening on a much larger scale: more and more people are choosing to travel slowly, on foot, without rushing to reach the destination.
The story of Luca Terenziani: a year and a half on foot
Before this undertaking, Terenziani, 44, a native of Feltre, spent fourteen years competing at an athletic level in mountain and road running. His first long trek dates to 2024, after the shop he managed closed: five and a half days on the Via degli Dei, the beginning of a passion that in a year and a half led him to tackle twelve different treks, up to the decision to walk the entire Sentiero Italia CAI.
The journey was not a straight line. In October 2025, on the Alta Via dei Monti Liguri, a pain he could not explain forced him to stop. Two chronic autoimmune diseases, ulcerative colitis and spondyloarthritis, kept him grounded for three months in Pontremoli. It is the moment he himself calls the darkest of the entire adventure, the moment when he feared he would have to give up. In January he restarted exactly from where he had paused, keeping the illness under control with biologic drugs and continuing to the very end.
Along the way, a close encounter with a massive bear from Austria occurred, observed for a moment before it disappeared into the woods. But what he recounts most warmly is the relationship with the people he met, especially from Lazio southward, and the discovery of a loneliness that, day by day, became company: “You’re comfortable with yourself; you’re good being alone.” A path that led him to a simple conclusion: to live well you don’t need many things; you only need the essentials.
The Sentiero Italia CAI, the world’s longest hiking route
The journey Terenziani undertook is not an ordinary trek. The Sentiero Italia CAI is the longest hiking route in the world: about 8,000 kilometers that cross all twenty Italian regions, from the border with Slovenia to Sardinia, touching 17 national parks, 60 regional parks and reserves, numerous UNESCO sites, and areas of the Natura 2000 Network.
The idea originated in 1995 with the Cammina Italia project, but it was only in 2018, with the official relaunch of the Italian Alpine Club, that the path took its current form. 368 stages connect the Alps, the Apennines, and the major and minor islands into a single thread crossing the country from north to south. A project designed not only for the most seasoned hikers, but as a symbol of rediscovering historic trails and a slower, more deliberate way of looking at the Italian landscape.
Few complete it in its entirety as Terenziani did: most hikers choose individual stages or regional sections. Yet it is precisely his undertaking, with this scale and ambition, that made possible an achievement like the one just completed in Santa Teresa di Gallura.
