The Routes of Pilgrimage as Territorial and Urban Regeneration Axes

Today, the year in which the beginning of the “decade of action for the achievement of the SDGs” launched by the ONU General Assembly occurs, coinciding with the fifth anniversary of the COP21 Conference, which saw the adoption of the Paris Agreement on climate, and the Addis Abeba Conference on Development Funding, which defined crucial aspects of the 2030 Agenda, and the five years since the publication of the encyclical “Laudato si”, which has become the reference point for a shared ethics worldwide for human development and the protection of our earth, the conviction that it is necessary to transition to a different development model has been increasingly strengthened, also thanks to the position taken by the millions of young people who call all to face the climate emergency and sustainable development has clearly entered the political agenda. All individual territorial systems are required to abandon the current development model, which is deemed unsustainable, by moving to the implementation of a new paradigm of territorial sustainability and circular economy, according to a bottom-up approach, following a balanced territorial development model, based on the integration of the dimensions of social, environmental, financial and ecological sustainability, also favoring the slowdown of the strong territorial imbalances which risk increasingly distancing many territories from sustainable development trajectories. It is important to start from historically configured territorial systems, such as the one proposed on the Via Francigena, an opportunity that allows to bring synergistically to new life, according to principles of regeneration and territorial resilience, different wrecks that have survived time and natural events.