Religious Heritography and Sustainable Tourism in the Middle Lands: insights from the Italian Alps

In the framework of the so-called erythography, an original paradigm created by the author to combine heritage and geography, the contribution aims to investigate the deep relationship between local religious cultural heritage and a defined geographical space. This is the Terre di Mezzo (Middle Lands), a landscape that has been receiving the attention of numerous geographers and other researchers in recent years as a living laboratory of projects involving, in Italy, inland areas, marginal and peripheral contexts, and small towns. A landscape that takes on value precisely because of how it is seen and perceived by local communities, in a perspective of participation and bottom-up commitment. The contribution presents a case study in north-eastern Piedmont: involved in the Comuniterràe/Commonlands project, over 300 inhabitants of ten mountain communities in the Val Grande National Park became active in the co-design and management of cultural and tourist initiatives, enhancing the local tangible and intangible heritage. The rural religious resources, scattered and hidden, find new ways to tell the value of Alpine religious components and popular religiosity, making their landscapes places where tourists can live authentic spiritual and emotional experiences shared by the communities themselves.