Mapping the Sentiero Italia CAI: 500 Panels, One Automated System

Eight thousand kilometres. From Trieste to Santa Teresa di Gallura, across the Alps, the Apennines, Calabria, Sicily. The Sentiero Italia CAI is one of the longest hiking routes in the world, and every stage point along this immense trail now has an information panel — with map, elevation profiles and stage data — produced with an automated cartographic system that I designed and developed on commission for the Club Alpino Italiano (Italian Alpine Club).

This project has nothing to do with the panoramic maps you'll find in my MountainCarto shop: it's professional cartographic consulting work, with an institutional client, an operational scale with few precedents in my experience, and very specific technical challenges. Here's the story.

The project: helping hikers find their way

Every stage point of the SICAI — over 500 across the country — is a node from which one or more stages of the route depart. Whoever arrives at that point needs to get oriented: from here, where do I go? How much further? How much climbing?

The panel answers these questions in an immediate, visual way. For each stage departing from that node it shows: difficulty level, duration, elevation gain and loss, distance in kilometres, and an elevation profile showing the shape of the terrain. All in 70x100 cm format, bilingual Italian-English, with a map centred on the stage point showing the connected stages in the surrounding territory.

I developed the design together with the CAI headquarters in Milan, the client of the project. I deliver the QGIS project that automatically generates the print-ready digital files; the CAI prints them and distributes them to its local sections. The first panels were presented to the public at the Fa' la cosa giusta fair in Milan, in the 2026 edition. Printing is progressively rolling out across the country.

The data: from the mountains to the screen

One of the most interesting aspects of the project, from a technical standpoint, is the source of the data.

The Italian hiking network and the Sentiero Italia CAI route don't come from a proprietary database, but from the OSM2CAI / INFOMONT platform: a system in which CAI volunteers, spread across the whole country, validate the hiking routes previously mapped in OpenStreetMap. It's a participatory mapping effort that has been going on for years, done by people who know the territory because they walk it.

This means the data has a granular, on-the-ground quality that is hard to replicate with top-down methods. For the Sentiero Italia stages the validation process was particularly rigorous: every section was verified by volunteers in the field, which translates into a reliable and consistent database — an essential condition for building an automated system on top of it.

The automation: QGIS Atlas at national scale

The key word of the project is automation. With 500+ stage points, producing each panel by hand would have been simply impossible. The system I built generates all the panels autonomously, starting from the input data.

At its core is QGIS Atlas: a tool that iterates over a set of geometries — in this case the stage points — and generates a cartographic layout for each one. But Atlas alone isn't enough. Upstream there's a whole data preprocessing phase: cleaning and normalising the geometries, computing stage statistics, automatically generating the elevation profiles, and composing the information layout.

The map styling isn't limited to the hiking data: it integrates the digital terrain model for the relief rendering, land-use data, the hydrographic network and man-made features, also sourced from OpenStreetMap. The result is a complete map that conveys the geographic context of the territory around the route.

A non-trivial technical aspect concerns the map projection: the panels use the UTM system, but Italy spans multiple zones (mainly 32N and 33N). The system automatically detects which zone each map falls into and applies the correct projection, ensuring the geometric consistency of every panel without manual intervention.

A further challenge is the variable scale: each panel must show the stage point and all the stages converging on it, centred in the map. Since the stages vary greatly in length — from a few kilometres to over twenty — the scale changes from panel to panel, adapting automatically to the extent of the geometries to be displayed.

The result: cartographic quality and deliberate trade-offs

The cartographic style is deliberately different from that of my panoramic maps. Here the register is that of classic hiking cartography: legible, clear, functional. The colours follow the reading of the territory: the green of the forests and the light green of the pastures, the grey of the rock, the dark blue of the SICAI route, the dashed red of the surrounding Italian hiking network.

At this scale of production — national, automated, 500 panels — the most evident limitation concerns place names. In the hiking maps I normally produce, the selection of toponyms and their placement are manual, precise operations, considered case by case: every name has its visual weight, its relationship with the other elements of the map, its hierarchy. In an automated system this level of control isn't possible: place names are positioned algorithmically, and inevitably some end up less refined than they would be by hand.

Everything else — the relief rendering, the cartographic style, the hierarchy of the routes — is instead the result of the template design, into which I tried to bring my experience in reading and representing the territory.

It's a balance between industrial efficiency and cartographic sensibility. And this, I believe, is the most interesting challenge of the project.

A consulting project, not a product

I want to be explicit about this: the Sentiero Italia CAI panels are not a MountainCarto product. You won't find them in my shop. They are the result of professional consulting work for a public institution, on a specific commission.

If you have a similar project — information panels, cartographic signage, automated map production systems for institutions, parks, associations — this is exactly the kind of work I do. Details on how I work and what I can offer are on the Services page.

The panels, on the other hand, you'll find out there: along the Sentiero Italia CAI, hanging in mountain huts and at the starting points of the stages, as the CAI prints and distributes them. If you come across one while hiking, let me know.