Experience Prato Industrial Culture

The EPIC (Experience Prato Industrial Culture) project leverages tourism as a means to promote fair, productive, and green growth in the city of Prato. Its approach is to achieve this by developing an innovative, competitive, and sustainable industrial tourism offer for visitors. The idea is that local industrial heritage is integrated into the existing cultural and natural attractions, highlighting and making accessible the previously untapped wealth of culture embedded in the city's industrial history and contemporary practices in design, fashion, and textile production.

Together with the stakeholders of the tourism ecosystem (hotels, restaurants, site managers, tourist guides, etc), economic actors (particularly SMEs of the local textile & clothing (T&C) industry), and civil society organisations, the project involves co-designing new tourism products that expand the offer and extend it both in time and space (the concept of ‘never-ending tourism’), thereby reducing seasonality and rebalancing tourism flows within the region.

Under the lead of the municipality of Prato and with the support of research and advanced technology providers, the concept behind the new co-created products is to combine real-life experiences with AI-powered Virtual Reality content, in order to offer an immersive all-round experience to visitors. These experiences are also designed to facilitate knowledge, information, planning, accessibility and sustainability, fostering environmental awareness and developing a deeper, longer-term engagement of the visitors with the city of Prato.