•  
  •  
 

Abstract

Religious tourism has experienced a strong growth in recent years. It represents a complex and articulate phenomenon, in which the reasons and proposals related to the devotional and personal sphere are combined with a series of innovative opportunities that help reach a depth knowledge of a territory. The religious motive often means that pilgrims travel along specific routes to visit a number of shrines or even to complete lengthy itineraries. Increasingly, purely religious motives are becoming mixed with more secular forms of religious tourism, which often centre around specific religious sites. In this perspective, faith itineraries can be interpreted as drivers for territorial development able to evaluate the resources, the peculiarities and the identity of each place. This justifies and motivates the increase of several important initiatives which aim to make a significant contribution to the enhancement of cultural heritage and local development. Many of them are related to the most famous European cultural routes. As regard the Via Francigena, various projects are being hatched, highlighting some ‘minor’ ways of pilgrimage: this is what is currently happening in Piacenza Valleys, in the north of Italy, the case study of the research presented in this paper.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/D7KH8P

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.