Description

On the spirit of roots tourism.
A round table was held last June 28th in Naples in the "catasti room" of the State Archives, in collaboration with the University Observatory on Tourism of the Federico II University; the Center for Research and Studies on Tourism (CReST) of the University of Calabria.
The event intended to be a place of discussion for academics, experts and professionals, in order to explore the profound meaning and cultural, economic and spiritual implications of this particular mode of tourism in view of the International Conference on Roots Tourism, scheduled from 12 to 15 December 2024 at the University of Calabria, city of Rende, province of Cosenza. Italy.
During the round table, the special issue dedicated to the topic by the scientific magazine "Fuori Luogo" was examined; the proceedings of the seminar "Special journeys of contemporary society", held in Rome in September, were also examined in depth. 2023.
Numerous and prestigious speakers attended:
• Doctor Candida Carrino, Director of the State Archives of Naples
• Professor Fabio Corbisiero, Coordinator of the University Observatory on Tourism
• Professor Gaetano Di Palma, teacher of Biblical Sciences
• Professor Pasquale Giustiniani, professor of Theoretical Philosophy
• Professor Antonella Perri, Scientific Coordinator at the Tourism Research and Studies Center
• Professor Giuseppe Reale, Director of the Monumental Complex of Santa Maria la Nova - Naples
• Professor Tullio Romita, Scientific Director of the Tourism Research and Studies Center
• Professor Giovanni Tocci, Governance Area Representative at the Tourism Research and Studies Center
Following is the text of the short report on the topic that I had the honor of illustrating:
State Archives, Naples, 28 June 2024
Between faith and tradition. 
The role of religion in the actions and perceptions of emigrants from the Italian community of origin.
(Pasquale Giustiniani)

• - Introduction
• Among the processes used by travelers and migrants to create a "home" outside their territories of origin, there is also the glue of religion, in Italy mainly in its Christian form, especially devotional rather than cultic. This glue almost acts as a suture thread which, at the same time, allows us to imagine and "remember" the past and re-attach the limbs and limbs of a collective body, which has often experienced social violence, or has been forced to leave their original places for economic and political reasons.
• In order to rebuild their personal and family identity, young and former young people return, often willingly, where rites and rituals are still important, which underline their original belonging to a true sacred order, defined by faiths , religions and, as far as the south is concerned, by religious folklore and popular devotions, more or less contiguous to the standard set by historical religions. In particular, popular devotion, managed and coordinated by the particular Churches, appears on the one hand as the suture to an adequate and institutional expression of lived faith; on the other hand, it preserves ancestral folkloric characters which, at times, are more the expression of an atavistic popular memory than the fruit of regimentation in the institutional forms of institutional faith 
• - In which religious context does the return to the roots take place?
• Comparing the sad political situation of the city of Mytilene under the tyranny of Myrsilus, Alcaeus found no better metaphor than that of a ship tossed by the waves, subjected to the struggle between the winds, with the mast in tatters and the sail completely torn. This metaphor has become a real topos of literature, political examination and even religious meditation in the period of the post-covid 19 pandemic crisis. When, during the first act of "The Tempest" (1611-1612) by William Shakespeare, the Boatswain, during a story "in retrospect", shouts: «Lock up, lock out! Lower the sails – let's go offshore! Lock out!», the sailors - now in the vortex of a storm which, although "enchanted", is still making its terrible damage felt -, cannot help but highlight their extreme vulnerability and the outcome of the prayer: «We are lost ! Let's pray, let's pray! We are lost! Everyone!" . And so prayer arises almost spontaneously on the lips of many in those dark moments, to the point that they seem to be able to anaesthetise, together with the memory and historical roots of the literary characters captured by Shakespeare's spell, even the same latent trust, highlighted precisely by prayer, in the presence of a divine in human affairs, capable, that is, of being able to curb and reduce the evil effects of death and suffering in a plagued humanity.
• Almost forced, in the midst of the tragedy of a storm or the inevitability of a shipwreck, to choose only between possible alternatives, without true freedom of choice from scratch, not only the subject - a modern discovery! -, but even the god - the divine of modernity seems to have become impotent in the face of ultra-modern events, which seem to happen, as we read in The Shakespearean Tempest, under the influence of a demonic power.                       
• - The institutional crisis of religions in the West                                                                      On the level of socio-religious phenomena, ultramodernity or postmodernity also means, among other things, secularism. It produces at least three distortions in social structures and civilization: thinking that we can do without faith in the name of arbitrariness and personally verified discovery; cultivate a mechanistic and theriomorphic vision of the human being, to the detriment of human dignity and respect for human morality; attribute a high success of the technique with its principles of all-out efficiency. Ultimately, it is the social outcome of a theoretical transition from eternal truths to developing doctrines.
• Postmodernity also means, in this sense, religious pluralism. After the religious wars in France and the Thirty Years' War had devastated Europe, the Enlightenment attempted to pierce the veil of superstition, violence, intolerance, to arrive in a new era of peace, love, tolerance. An attempt which then failed, leading to blind rationalism and prevailing secularism.
• From this drift - which, on a macro-cultural level, is configured today through the terms of secularism and religious indifference, as well as nihilism and trans-theism - the same way of posing the questions by Christian thought would not be exempt , since its origins. It is a fact that the encounter of the Christian gospel with the cities of the Mediterranean takes place in an intricate set of elements that we can well define, now for then, pluralistic, qualified as it was by various cults, religions, values, ideas, economic structures. .. In this complex world, Christians, rather than presenting a culture other than and antithetical to the pre-existing ones, contrasting it with a unique and exclusive truth, eliding any other contemporary perspective, prefer to wedge themselves into the multiplicity of backgrounds, occupy the same physical places as others, assume the same grammars, the same representational techniques, deal with the lemmas and concepts in use, inhabit the same places and woods, frequent the same temples and, thus, create topographical, geographical and cultural roots. But, very soon, they re-semantise and creatively re-signify all the previous structures, that is, by imitating on the reflected level the very kenosis of the Word, they allow the cultural heritage referring to Christ to be "incarnated" again in pre-existing cultures. existing and to regenerate them, so to speak, from within, sometimes proceeding with real linguistic re-inventions by appropriately re-semantizing everything.
• - Conclusion
• Qualified by the mobility and complexity of the world, extreme and exasperated pluralism, which sometimes leads to a false certainty (homologous, however, to a certain anxiety to find certainties, which accompanies at least other aspects of postmodernism), sometimes to consumerist conformism, to relativism extreme, to indifference, even accentuating exasperated individualism in the ethical field, the epistemic and ethical climate that we live in today - and our increasingly "sparse" young people live (in a demographic sense, in a civilization tending to be old and with one generation less) - is there to point out, especially in the latest nomadic generations, the tragic consequence entailed by the fall of fixed points to refer to and the correlative exhaustion of questions about the being, the true, the beautiful, the value, the meaning of existence, the very meaning of religion and of the human being's relationship with God.
• We postmodern inhabitants of traditional cities and, in any case, nomads for work reasons, cross paths and mix with refugees, emigrants and Mediterranean travelers who land on our coasts in search of an economic and social Eden: while our traditional cultures follow wavering processes of secularization and de-secularization, pushing all the ancient paradigms and ancient traces back into the "inner crypt", and we do not know how to go back down and back up the ancient stairs, or we suddenly realize that we are all in the same boat, we witness the social and religious appropriation of our ancient places, reliving them as so many appeals to re-appropriate our ancient gods and not let them sink with our boat. And the processes of ancient religious roots, crossing new boats that ply Mediterranean routes and territories, re-emerg