Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes to examine the role of relics and space in the formation of the pilgrimage experience, through an analysis of the museum-like spaces of the Santa Maria delle Grazie sanctuary, located in San Giovanni Rotondo (S. Italy) and associated with San Pio, universally known as Padre Pio.

Paper long abstract:

The death of the recently canonized Padre Pio in San Giovanni Rotondo, in 1968, was met with the intensification of a 'charisma spatialization' process (Eade and Sallnow 1991b) at the shrine where his tomb is located. Part of this process, which transformed the previously person-centered sacredness into a space-centered sacredness (ibid), was the conversion of the old friary of Santa Maria delle Grazie where Padre Pio lived, into a sort of museum displaying and exhibiting his relics and pictures. In this museum, the way spaces, photographs and objects are arranged produce not only an official narrative about Padre Pio and ultimately the sacred but also a new ontological reality in which shrine visitors are invited to enter. Making use of ethnographic data gathered during fieldwork at the shrine in the year 2004-2005, in this paper, I propose to examine the old friary's museum-like spaces, in order to illustrate the role of space and materiality in the construction of the sacred and the formation of the pilgrimage experience. Drawing on pilgrimage and materiality theories, I will look, on the one hand, at how the structuring and arrangement of space and objects within it, triggers and guides the shrine visitors' imagination, confining their readings of the saint's meaning and biography and producing an official discourse about the sacred, and how on the other, the visitors' appropriation practices signify both space and the sacred, at times contesting official definitions and borders. Both space and the sacred will thus be seen as dialectically constructed.