Once considered exclusively as places of work and production, alpine summer pastures are becoming more and more frequently integrated into the domain of alternative tourism. This phenomenon straddles nature tourism and rural tourism, although very little is known about its characteristics and the motivations and attitudes of those who participate in it. To broaden this knowledge, a quantitative investigation was carried out in the summer of 2003, where information was gathered from short, multiple-choice, closed-response questionnaires, which were completed by visitors in four different alpine summer pasture areas of the central Alps. Following a previous work, where univariate and bivariate analyses of the entire sample were presented on the basis of all the responses to the questionnaire, in the present work attention is concentrated mainly on the differences between the various locations where the survey was carried out, with respect to four aspects: the reasons for the visit, the frequency of visits to similar locations, the general attitudes of visitors towards the alpine summer pastures and the grazing animals, and their specific attitudes with respect to the relationship between the alpine summer pastures and tourism.
