All roads lead to Rome, and vice versa. The urban transformation of the city and the implications for the local pilgrimage to the Shrine of Divine Love

In this presentation I argue a double thesis, supported by ethnographic evidence: 1. The city of Rome in its growth as Italy's capital changed the form and meaning of the religious ritual known as 'Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Divine Love'. 2. The Roman Catholic Church at the end of the last century embarked on a path of globalisation that modified the symbolic and urbanistic form of the same Sanctuary. In summary, this presentation intends to confirm the co-determination relationship between specifically Roman Catholicism and the city of Rome: the Catholic religion acts as a crucible of urban identity, and the urban structure of the city influences the specificity of its religious forms. The pilgrimage changed its form into something more and more like a procession as the city gradually expanded in space and social complexity. Urban growth brought the location of the shrine closer, making the route less and less a 'trip out of town' (as it had been for much of the 19th century) and more and more a procession through which Romans confirmed their belonging to the city. Since the second half of the 18th century, the Divine Love was considered 'the pilgrimage of the Romans'. With the rapid urbanisation at the turn of the 20th century, the city found itself full of Italian immigrants increasingly excluded from the elementary rights of citizenship (poor housing, precarious work, irregularity of documents). These not-yet-citizens thus began to consider the pilgrimage as a symbolic recognition of belonging to Rome: if participating in the pilgrimage was a privilege 'of the Romans', a non-Roman by birth who became a faithful devotee of Our Lady of Divine Love could gain a sort of Roman identity card, finding through Catholic devotion that inclusion in citizenship that the city's social and bureaucratic structures could not guarantee. This process of inclusion in the city's identity through participation in the religious rite has continued also with the arrival of new migrants, this time foreigners, who often use the pilgrimage as a licence of 'Italianness'. Since 1999, thanks mainly to the will of JPII, the original church has been flanked by a new church, which seems to have, even in its architectural form, a diametrically opposite function, namely to project the image of the Roman Church on a truly global stage. The traditional conception of Roman Catholicism as a space for the incorporation of diversity into the symbolic structure of the city is now flanked, in the new church, by the idea that it must be the city of Rome that moves to reach the recipients of its Catholic message throughout the world.