Santuari Mariani dell’arco alpino italiano

Forty Marian sanctuaries among thousands of sacred buildings in the Alps: certainly not an easy choice to determine both individual and group paths of faith and devotion. In this context, not only the long pilgrimages with an "up and down" journey were taken into consideration, but also the short ones, all trudging uphill: pilgrimages that had the form of a mystical understanding with the mountain, in that harsh walking with hats of felt and surcoats of the "companies", looking up and towards churches clinging to the rock. Forty sanctuaries created mostly without interruption with pre-Christian places of worship, where the central sacred figure of the Virgin appears, alongside multi-purpose saints who must be remembered as they are sometimes unpredictable expressions of Alpine religiosity. The multiple stories of miraculous discoveries, of legends dismantled and reassembled, of fantastic visions that intersect with chronological discontinuities and precise historical data, perhaps give the impression of an unfocused research direction; but the broad analysis highlights the link with common original myths specific to the Western world.