Pilgrimages and Tourisms Differences and intersections between different ways of land use

The increase of the urban dwelling and the growth of the cities phenomenon correspond to the similar rise of new forms of land use, it is characterized by a greater environmental sensitivity and by a wish to belong to the earth, especially to places whose main feature seems to be the apparent genuineness of natural, agricultural and pre-industrial landscapes. The article establishes a comparison among the models of these new forms of sustainable tourism, the forms of more conventional travel, heritage of the XIXth century jumping and bourgeois tourism, and the ancient pilgrimages, trying to highlight differences and possible overlaps. Even in the advanced secularization of our time, the contemporary forms of environmental tourism seem to be originated by the same inescapable religious roots that moved the footsteps of ancient pilgrims, and nowadays they are (chi???) still searching for a ontological justification to dwelling "here and now”. It is the similarity between the models of contemporary environmental tourism and the ones of ancient religious pilgrimage that now makes possible to weave "sustainable" trips in the combination of environmental and spiritual interests: routes of silence and rutes of nature, itineraries for physical and metaphysical contemplation, are therefore easily mixable in "sustainable" travel proposals, because they originate by the same root: the universal religious vocation of human being.