Always in Becoming: Walking along Ancient Pilgrimage Ways as Heritage-Making
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36253/bsgi-7565Keywords:
place performance, walking holiday, pilgrimage, touristscapeslow mobilityAbstract
The tourist and heritage value of many types of landscape is currently receiving increased attention, thanks to the growing popularity of slow mobility. In this light, historical pilgrimage routes are being rediscovered across Europe in a secular context. In this article, we use a phenomenological approach to mobility, tourism, and cultural heritage to investigate how walking, defined as a place performance, contributes to the heritage-making of the landscapes covered by walking routes based on historic pilgrimages. These are increasingly being proposed as walking holiday routes. Referring to two experiences conducted on the Cammino di Sant’Antonio, a route that intersects with other historical-religious routes in Veneto, such as the Via Romea Strata (2021) and the Via Romea Germanica (2022), the contribution is based on mobile ethnography, enriched by geo-questionaire results. Both experiences originated as study trip, with walking serving as an embedded and immersive tool for learning and inquiry, enabling a better understanding of the relationship between tourism and landscape. The coming together of bodies, senses, cultural goods, the environment, through the walking allows to understand how this very practice of patrimonialisation and heritage-making plays a key role in re-interpreting pilgrimages, questioning recurring themes in the promotion of tourism and landscape.
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