Vincenzo Martone

A hundred times the Camino de Santiago. Eight times the Kumano Kodo. Dozens of times the coasts of Portugal, then the Via Francigena, Ireland, England, Normandy: every walk you find here I have done on my own two feet, in every season, alone and with private groups and companies. I do not offer a single step I have not walked.

But the walking is the visible part. Underneath is a company I built with my own hands, piece by piece, with no investors: the website you are reading, the campaigns that brought you here, the photographs, the printed guides that sold thirty thousand copies, the back office we follow every trip with, the app our travellers open on the trail, the AI assistants that now work alongside us. Marketing, technology, photography, writing, numbers: I learned whatever was needed, when it was needed, and never stopped.

Before that I was a digital nomad, my work in a backpack and the world ahead. Then I chose to stop in Santiago de Compostela with Deborah Torreggiani, my partner in life and in business, to build something that did not exist back home: a way of getting people walking made of care, not of membership cards. From Apiediperilmondo came Wayure, a tour operator licensed in Spain, and with it more than thirty-five thousand people who have set off with us. We were among the pioneers of self-guided walking in Italy, and we helped two new walking routes come to life.

Then a serious health problem, resolved with time. I came out of it with one certainty: what I have learned is only worth something if I put it at the service of those who set off. I am an entrepreneur and a walker, and before that a lover of the open road. I walk slowly when it matters and drive for miles when the road calls. Either way, I leave free.