In the last decades, with the rapid structural changes in society and in consumers’ attitudes at both global and local scale, forest landowners and managers are facing a complex and multi-faceted demand, in which the role of forest services - recreation, landscape, biodiversity, C-sequestration amongst others - has become increasingly important. New forest policy tools are therefore required to create or consolidate the shift in forest management from the traditional production function towards more multi-stakeholders and multi-functional goals. On the basis of the existing theoretical background and by means of three explanatory-exploratory case-studies chosen amongst the few experiences present in Italy, the paper seeks to analyse the potentials and challenges in different organisational PES models applied to the provision of forest services in the country, with a special focus on tourism-related environmental services. The analysis shows that the markets for the various forest services have different drivers, sizes and levels of maturity. Performances in effectiveness, efficiency and equity are also highly variable. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for new private and mixed private-public initiatives need therefore to be further explored before assessing the true potential for implementing PES in Italy.