Camino de Santiago or Italy's Cammini? An Honest Comparison for Your Next Long Walk

If you've walked the Camino de Santiago — or you're planning your first long-distance walk and wondering whether to start there — you've probably encountered the same question that appears in every slow-travel forum and pilgrim Facebook group sooner or later: are Italy's walking routes worth doing instead? The honest answer is that they aren't really alternatives to each other. They're different enough in character, logistics, and experience that the better question is which one suits the kind of walker you are right now. Here's what a decade of organising both types of walk has taught us about that comparison.

The crowd question — and why it matters more than you expect

The Camino Francés, the most-walked route to Santiago de Compostela, now sees somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 pilgrims per year. The numbers are not evenly distributed — the final 100km from Sarria to Santiago can feel more like a procession than a long-distance walk — but even quieter stretches carry enough walker traffic to mean full albergues in peak season, queues for cafés at daybreak, and a kind of pilgrim bubble that follows you from stage to stage.

Italian cammini operate in a different register — quieter, but not solitary. The Via degli Dei, probably the most-walked multi-day route in Italy, sees a few thousand walkers per year: enough that you'll meet fellow long-distance walkers at evening stops, share a table over dinner, and occasionally fall into step with someone for a stage or two. On quieter routes like the Cammino di San Benedetto or the Cammino Minerario di Santa Barbara, encounters are rarer, but the social pattern holds — companions appear, bonds form, and the people you meet tend to be memorable precisely because they haven't been part of the same moving crowd since day one. What Italian routes don't offer is the Camino's particular sense of collective human flow — the pilgrim bubble that travels with you across hundreds of kilometres. Whether that's a loss depends entirely on what you're looking for from a long walk.

The routes themselves — where Spain gives you one icon, Italy gives four characters

The Camino de Santiago is not a single route; there are a dozen variants. But the Francés is so dominant — accounting for well over half of all completions — that for most people it's what "the Camino" means: a well-marked, westward line across the meseta and into Galicia, with a cathedral destination that carries centuries of pilgrimage weight.

Italian cammini are, by contrast, structurally diverse. The Via degli Dei threads through Apennine forests between Bologna and Florence — seven stages of genuine mountain walking, beech forests, and medieval ridge villages. The Cammino di San Benedetto crosses Umbria and Lazio along Benedictine monastery routes, linking Norcia to Subiaco through terrain that feels barely touched since the Middle Ages. The Cammino Minerario di Santa Barbara traces Sardinia's southwestern coastline through the industrial heritage of the old silver and lead mining region, with stages that end above sea cliffs or on sand. The Sentiero dei Ducati crosses the northern Apennines from Reggio Emilia to Sarzana — a route that makes no concessions to the tourist; it's an official mountain hiking trail that genuinely requires prior long-distance experience.

These four routes don't share a character the way Camino variants share the cathedral endpoint. Choosing between them is a different kind of decision than choosing between the Camino Francés and the Camino Portugués.

The logistics gap — and what it actually means in practice

The Camino's infrastructure is extraordinary for a long-distance walking route. Albergues line every stage, with beds rarely more than a few kilometres apart. Most have online booking systems in English. The mochila service — luggage transfer between stages — runs reliably on the main routes, bookable through any accommodation the night before. English is spoken widely enough that you can plan and execute the entire walk without a word of Spanish.

Italian cammini have none of this standardised pilgrim infrastructure. Accommodation is typically a family-run agriturismo, rifugio, or small B&B with eight to fifteen beds, a WhatsApp number for reservations, and no English-language website. Luggage transfer exists on most routes but is organised route by route, and sometimes stage by stage, through local providers who may communicate exclusively in Italian. Dinner at a rural agriturismo is often available only to guests who've confirmed in advance — arriving without a reservation means no meal, because the host has already bought precisely the ingredients they need. On some stages, there is a single viable place to stay; on others, the choice is between an established option you've confirmed and the nearest alternative several villages away.

None of this should read as a reason not to walk Italian routes. It's context for what organising them actually requires. The walkers who find Italian cammini most rewarding are almost always the ones who've had the logistics resolved before they set foot on the trail — knowing that the bags will be waiting at the next stage, that the dinner table is booked, that the shuttle back to the train at the end of the final day is confirmed. With that groundwork in place, the experience is exactly what people come to Italy for: genuinely off the tourist circuit, beautifully complex, and completely absorbing.

Cultural depth and what surrounds the walk

The Camino de Santiago's cultural identity is powerful and coherent: pilgrimage, the scallop shell, the Botafumeiro, the arrival at the Plaza del Obradoiro. For many people, that shared ritual purpose is inseparable from the experience of walking it.

Italian cammini offer a different kind of cultural layer — one that's more dispersed and perhaps more surprising. The Via degli Dei takes its name from the pre-Roman deities whose sanctuaries marked the original Etruscan and Roman route; you cross the Apennines past stones that were already old when the Roman legions used this road. The Cammino di San Benedetto visits working monasteries — not heritage sites, but communities where monks still observe canonical hours — and stages of the route have changed almost nothing since the saint himself walked them in the sixth century. Sardinia's mining-route landscape is a kind of industrial archaeology: abandoned processing plants, shaft heads, and ore-railway cuttings absorbed back into the macchia scrub over the last century.

None of it comes with the cathedral at the end. But few walkers who've done Italian cammini miss the single destination — because it's the route that stays with them, not a building.

Difficulty and terrain — who each walk is really for

The Camino Francés is correctly described as accessible for regular walkers without specialist hiking experience. It's long — around 780km from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port — but the terrain is mostly moderate, the waymarking is excellent, and the pilgrim infrastructure means you can slow down or speed up without stranding yourself.

Italian cammini have a wider difficulty range, and that range matters. The Via degli Dei and the Sardinian coastal route sit at moderate — demanding, with real cumulative ascent, but suitable for walkers who hike regularly and aren't mountain specialists. The Cammino di San Benedetto is comparable in effort. The Sentiero dei Ducati is categorically different: officially classified as a mountain hiking trail rather than a tourist route, requiring navigation skills, proper mountain footwear, and realistic experience of multi-day trekking in remote terrain. The consequence of getting the difficulty match wrong on Italian routes — especially on the Sentiero — is more serious than a bad day on the Camino, where help is always nearby.

• Regular walker, comfortable with hills, no prior multi-day trek: Camino Francés or Via degli Dei are both good starting points.
• Experienced long-distance walker wanting solitude and cultural complexity: Via degli Dei, Cammino di San Benedetto, or the Sardinian coastal route.
• After the collective pilgrimage experience and the shared endpoint ritual: Camino de Santiago.
• Experienced mountain hiker, confident with navigation and remote terrain: the Sentiero dei Ducati deserves serious consideration.

The honest summary

The Camino de Santiago remains one of the great long-distance walking experiences in Europe — its infrastructure, its sense of common purpose, and the weight of the Santiago arrival are genuinely irreplaceable. If you've never done a multi-day walk and want an introduction that won't punish logistical gaps, it remains a compelling choice.

Italy's cammini offer something the Camino no longer can: genuine quiet, a landscape that hasn't adjusted itself around walkers, and a cultural experience that requires a bit more of you than the Camino does. The tradeoff is a meaningfully higher organisational burden — one that's invisible once it's sorted, but real if it isn't.

Whether you walk Spain first and Italy second, or go straight to Italy because you're drawn to the specificity of the routes — either path leads somewhere worth going. The main difference is how much preparation the path home requires.