Improving the cultural experience of a place: an innovative approach

One of the most recent modality used for local development of a territory consists in the construction of integrated systems for the management of cultural resources to be benefited through experiential paths. These paths are designed in order to identify existing heritage and, at the same time, to support and / or stimulate the development of creative industries. In order to frame the issue of territorial experiential paths, the proposed study, carried out in the framework of the research "The historic urban landscape as a resource for local development: an innovative approach for smart strategies to value creation" - within the PRIN - Project of Relevant Italian National Interest, aims to illustrate their definitional aspects and its evolution, and how to sustainably organize the territory in order to accommodate those paths. Starting from these premises, aim of this paper is to illustrate studies on experiential paths which find their roots in the disciplines of psychology and those of the economy, and, more recently, in the disciplines which study the territory. The synthesis of the case study of Pompeii, in course of development, devoted to identify the cultural and identity resources in order to both widen and differentiate those archaeological ones and create a smart sustainable experiential knowledge of the territory, concludes the paper.