Between faith and nature: sacred landscapes of South Tyrol in nineteenth-century travel accounts

This paper examines how religion, landscape, and identity intersected in the nineteenth-century South Tyrol using a cultural and historical geography perspective. It primarily draws on travel writings, complemented by iconographic sources, to show how sacred inscriptions shaped spatial relations, collective identities, and mobility across the Alpine region. The analysis distinguishes between local expressions of devotion and perceptions brought by foreign travellers, revealing the interaction between lived religious practices and external representations. Treating the sacred as a spatial language mediating human–environment interactions, the study argues that sacredness is not a fixed property of place but a relational process embedded in social, symbolic, and territorial dynamics. These findings inform broader debates on the spatiality of faith and the role of religious imaginaries in forming cultural landscapes and regional identities in Europe.