With the project “Along the Danube” we aim to offer a group of young people with fewer opportunities an educational mobility experience that goes beyond travel itself and becomes a genuine learning process through experience. The journey along the Danube is designed to use train travel as an educational, sustainable and accessible tool, transforming daily movements, stops and encounters into continuous opportunities for personal and social growth. The river thus becomes both a symbolic and concrete guiding thread, connecting countries, histories and different contexts, and offering participants a broader and more integrated vision of Europe. From a youth work perspective, the project responds to real needs observed in daily work with young people living in peripheral urban contexts. Many of them struggle to develop autonomy and personal initiative, have limited cultural horizons and experience forms of exclusion linked to economic, social, educational or health-related factors, often intertwined. The journey represents a privileged educational space to interrupt these dynamics: stepping out of daily routines, facing new situations, making concrete decisions and engaging with different cultural contexts allows young people to test themselves in a protected yet real environment, gradually feeling more competent and capable. The objectives of the project stem from this approach. We aim to strengthen participants’ autonomy through their direct involvement in planning and managing the journey, to support the development of confidence and resilience when dealing with unexpected situations, and to promote empathy and solidarity through contact with local communities and other young people encountered along the route. At the same time, we seek to enhance the cultural and natural heritage of the regions crossed and to stimulate critical reflection on diversity, inclusion and sustainability, allowing these themes to emerge naturally from lived experience rather than from a theoretical or classroom-based approach.