Inter-village cultural mobility: towards a sustainable cultural metro model in the Castelli Romani

Tourism in peri-urban cultural landscapes is often characterized by high car dependency, resulting in congestion, pollution, and a diminished visitor experience.The Castelli Romani area near Rome exemplifies this challenge: despite its rich cultural and natural heritage, over 65% of tourists access the region by private car, causing significant CO2 emissions, noise, and parking saturation.To address these issues, this paper introduces the concept of Inter-Village Cultural Mobility, which extends the Cultural Metro model from urban heritage contexts to a network of villages connected through sustainable ring routes.A web-based platform developed with LeafletJS enables interactive visualization of routes and comparative assessment between carbased and bus/trekking options, also contributing to the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) domain.Preliminary simulations on a representative ring route indicate a 65% reduction in CO2 emissions, an increase in accessibility from 0.58 to 0.91, and 47% integration with trekking networks.Usability tests with twelve participants confirmed the added value of interactive visualizations in supporting visitor decision-making.This study contributes to research in sustainable transport and digital tourism by integrating methodological formalization, simulationbased evaluation, and user-centered design.Future work will focus on expanding empirical validation, optimizing routing strategies, and exploring scalability to other peri-urban cultural destinations.