Italy, a country of religious tourism, from San Giovanni Rotondo to Pompeii

“Italy, people of saints, poets and navigators” -- and of pilgrims (from the Latin peregrinatio, “journey to a foreign land”). In the Italy of a thousand bell towers and rich cities of art, there are places that attract millions of people to visit each year with mass phenomena concentrated in the best-known shrines of the Christian faith. As La Repubblica writes, there are 2,800 shrines in our country where about 20 million pilgrims were counted each year before Covid but today, although the emergency is largely behind us, the numbers have plummeted and are far from the heights.

Devotion to saints and places linked to the figure of Our Lady has generated mass phenomena that in 1998 the Vatican quantified with a record ranking far from today’s levels: at the threshold of two thousand in fact there were “7.5 million faithful who had visited San Giovanni Rotondo, 5 had gone to Padua, 4.5, to Assisi, Pompeii and Loreto.” More than the poverello of Assisi and St. Anthony, more than two very important Marian places like Pompeii and Loreto, the primacy belonged to a man of our time, after all, Padre Pio, proclaimed a saint only in 2002.

Looking abroad, the 1998 Vatican ranking included Guadalupe in Mexico (14 million), Aparecida in Brazil (7 million), and then Fatima, Lourdes, Czestochowa, Santiago de Compostela, all around 5 million. “In the course of time,” we read in Repubblica, “Medjugorje came into its own: the pope never recognized the apparitions, but approved pilgrimages, which would reach three million a year.” Numbers that after the pandemic have been greatly reduced and that, according to Church estimates, saw in recent years about “three million pilgrims a year arrive at the shrine of Pompeii, Loreto 2.5, Assisi 2 million, St. Anthony of Padua one million, the same figure approximately for San Giovanni Rotondo, a little less at Divino Amore near Rome. Or, at least, these were the estimates before Covid: the pandemic has brought down attendance, which, however, assures Father Mario Magro, president of the National Coordination of Sanctuaries, are in ’excellent recovery: we are going back to pre-pandemic times.’” A point on Italian san ctuaries will be made in November at a conference in the Vatican organized by the dicastery for the New Evangelization led by Monsignor Rino Fisichella, who is entrusted with the supervision of sanctuaries.

The most surprising figure of all is the decline of San Giovanni Rotondo given the devotion to Padre Pio in Italy, which has taken on massive increases over the years, and a television channel dedicated to the fixed shot of the Saint’s remains for the recitation of the Rosary. As Pope John Paul II had defined them, “sanctuaries are like milestones placed to mark the times of our itinerary on earth: they allow a pause of refreshment in the journey, to restore to us the joy and security of the journey, together with the strength to go forward, like the oases in the desert, born to offer water and shade.”

While the shrine is primarily a holy place, pilgrimage is the preferred way to reach it in a holy way, but unlike Islam, in Christianity there is no obligation to do so. It is done out of devotion to ask for intercessions and graces at a specific place and time, where relics are generally kept. “Here you find the possibility of having a special faith experience, and unlike a parish, where the poor parish priest cannot do everything, you find priests, confessors, spiritual fathers available who listen to you,” Father Mario Magro tells Repubblica.

Small villages or towns that thanks to the saint or Marian devotion have been transformed and adapted to the great flow of pilgrims who become like tourists to be welcomed by generating attached and related services and also rediscovering and enhancing the very paths that lead to the places of devotion, which like the Via Francigena become journeys to be made even outside of faith but linked to spirituality, contact with nature or the athletic aspect, an escape from the monotony of ordinary life. The Way of St. James is traveled by 200 thousand people a year influencing the places of its passage with all segments of the tourism supply chain.

Italy, a country that has in every territory a religious landmark to visit and has hundreds of diocesan museums, is preparing to be a destination for pilgrims for the Jubilee of 2025 and the celebrations for the 800th anniversary of the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi, Patron Saint of Italy.

To orient ourselves on the volume of business related to religious tourism in the world, we take the data presented at the International Religious Tourism Exchange held in Rome in 2017 where the estimate made by the WTO-the World Trade Organization-was presented, which estimated about $18 billion and 330 million people peryear, and in Italy, each year, according to research presented on that occasion by Isnart (National Institute on Tourism Research) and Unioncamere, religious tourism was estimated to generate 3 million tourists for a total of 8.6 million presences (overnight stays).

In February 2023, the Religious Tourism Exchange was held in Vicenza (in 2026 there will also be the Monte Berico Jubilee designed to enhance Vicenza’s Monte Berico Shrine on the occasion of the sixth centenary of the first apparition of the Virgin Mary) where the diocese expects 5 million visitors.

With the word ’tourism’ next to ’religious’ seems to juxtapose the sacred with the profane but often both travel and actual pilgrimages are a mixture of motivations where, undoubtedly, the main motivation for travel is faith to go to places where relics are kept. Places where there is often an artistic-cultural beauty built around that devotion that is to be appreciated and visited. It is not for nothing that the Italian Religious Hospitality Association has more than 1,200 managers for a total of 100,000 beds.

Italy, a country of religious tourism, from San Giovanni Rotondo to Pompeii

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