by Douglas, one of Vayable’s newest ambassadors hailing from the beautiful Cinque Terre region in Italy!

In a moment when everything seems to flit by us at the speed of a mouse-click, when information zooms past and relationships are sometimes reduced to nothing more than a “like” on Fb, the thing we all need to combat the sense of constant movement and uncertainty is passion … genuine interest and care in what you are doing, the spiritual activity of slowing down and really looking at what is going on around us.

Tourism is too often reduced to a checklist of things to see and places to visit, and once seen and visited, the experience they leave can be little more than a snapshot in a forgotten desktop folder. Paris: Eiffel Tower, Bateau-mouche, Notre-Dame, Louvre, Cafè les deux magots, Tuileries, shopping, home. New York: Empire State, Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty, MOMA, Times Square, Broadway, shopping, home.

What makes Vayable unique is its guides, who offer themselves and their passion as a new way to enter worlds that otherwise would be next-to-impossible for a tourist to find. It is precisely this passion that make Vayable experiences stay with you long after you have returned home. Vayable guides are not guides in the official sense of the word: they are people with other jobs and other pursuits who want to share their personal world with you. And as anyone knows, doing something for your boss and doing something for yourself are totally different things.

And now Vayable has come to Italy, a place that perhaps needs it more than others. Tourism in Italy, like much of contemporary Italian society, stagnates under the weight of history. Italy means old buildings, old paintings, old churches. The structure of Italian bureaucracy doesn’t help much either. Want to be a tour guide in Italy? First, go to the high school for tourism. Second, apply for your tourist license. Third, pass a test. Fourth, shell out fees and taxes to the state. Fifth, get registered in the Regional Registry. Sixth …. You can imagine how stultifying it all is.

But the relative anarchy of the internet, gently tamed by responsible sites like Vayable, throws out the rules. For all of the wonderfully inventive, creative, and vibrant young Italians who are going through a moment of social crisis as the older generation shows itself incapable of evolving for the future, sites like Vayable offer hope. It is an idea bound to grasp the imagination of young Italians.

And the winner of this is the tourist, who all of a sudden finds him or herself with a new choice, the choice of the genuine, true, authentic, passionate Italy, seen through the eyes of their Vayable guide. Benvenuti nel futuro.