Il pellegrinaggio italiano e la costruzione della personalità. Dai Romei al turismo esperienziale

The endeavour to build an Italian heritage was based on the millennial tradition of pilgrimages to Rome and the Holy Land, which started as from the IVth century AD, and was the archetype of the Italian Grand Tour of the XVI-XVIII centuries, and its ability to “develop personality”, an individual character. Starting from the construction of Constantine's basilica and the basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, called Hierusalem, an early cult of saints and martyrs developed in Rome, and grew in competition with Jerusalem until, with the Jubilee of 1300 proclaimed by Pope Bonifacio VIII, it was no longer possible to go to these holy places because they had passed into the hands of the Muslims. In time, pilgrimages to Rome created accepted routes complete with stations and services, such as Via Francigena, which descended from the Aosta Valley to Siena and Viterbo, and the different Roman roads that moved from the East, from the Adige Valley and Veneto, at times joining the ancient Flaminia. At the times of the Grand Tour, the route from the north ended up by systemetizing the Venice (or Milan) / Bologna / Florence / Rome axis, sometimes with deviations to Marche region through the Flaminia (with a stop in Loreto, especially in the XVI- XVII centuries), reaching, as from the Eighteenth century, Naples and Sicily. During the journey, the young aristocrat, usually accompanied by a servant, was to acquire information considered to be essential to those belonging to the ruling class of the time. But reading the diaries of famous travellers should not mislead us. The scope of the journey to Italy was not to become original. On the contrary, consistently with the pilgrimage, its purpose was to assimilate a standardised and stable culture. Making a mental journey on paper or making a journey in places was considered to be very much the same thing. So much so as to give life to traditions and literary genres such as Returns (of which the Odyssey is a perfect example), and descriptions of itineraries used to enrich stories along an imaginary route, that the history of positivist geography has endeavoured to consider as sources of real geography. This duplicity is still an integral part of Italian charm (even today, “Italy – the Bel Paese of Dante” that does not know how to put a value on its assets, a place of incredible beauty and notorious forms of ugliness, the home of law and the Ma a, but also with its unlivable cities full of personality). But it is also the intrinsic structure of its media dimension and rhetoric. The journey is indeed the physical translation of the metaphor; the metaforài are still today in Athens the public buses. The pilgrim and traveller of the Grand Tour thus developed his character during the itinerary, but without putting aside conventions (curiosity was considered to be a sin, simply an inconvenience, and not a virtue). When they described their journey according to the agreed rules, pilgrims and travellers thus gathered a repertoire of characters handed down and indicated by the travel guides. The paradigm of the pilgrimage (religious or antiquarian) based on emotionality underwent a profound change in the Romantic age, when emotions played a dominant role with respect to their original traditional function of vehicle and binding element of the information of tradition. As Marc Augé says, the contemporary age no longer has ruins, but only rubble. Ruins were the product of history, a story invented and nurtured, an opportunity to venture into meditative experiences based on a manifest metaphoricity. Christian ruins like antiquarian ruins were in any case linked to a feeing of time: the ancient time of the humanists, and the possible time of salvation of the pilgrims. In 1929, in Civilization and its Discontents, Freud, as a tourist in Rome, could still compare the eternal city to the human psyche, imagining the strati cation of ages and buildings, as the foundation of both, one over the other. The ruins of our time, indeed, are nothing more than the product of a continuous present, perhaps electrifying, but without history and future. «Future history», says Marc Augé, «will not produce more ruins, it doesn't have the time».