Alessandro Scafi
Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Cultural history at the Warburg Institute
Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Cultural history at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Since 2011 he has run at the Warburg Institute (and since 2016 at the Italian Institute of Culture, London) with John Took a series of Dante public readings aimed at a general public.
Author of books like Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth and essays on various aspects of the history of cartography and the history of pilgrimage. Alessandro Scafi has published several articles on Aby Warburg, the relationship between the Italian and Hungarian Renaissances and on Italian art and literature, in particular on Dante and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini.
He is the author of audioguides for museums and exhibitions and has been a contributor to a number of cultural broadcasts, for, among others, Arte, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, the BBC, Radio Rai, Swiss Radio and Vatican Radio. He contributes to The Times Literary Supplement, L’Osservatore Romano and Il Sole 24 Ore.
Presentation: On the Way of Heaven
Are you a devout pilgrim or an existential tourist? Along the Camino the route is set within the context of its past heritage, framed by natural, historical and cultural landscapes. Have you abandoned the comfort of home to perform an inner journey to a spiritual destination, or are you seeking an encounter with cultural and natural Otherness, far from your everyday life? Today the most diverse people engage with pilgrimage spaces and holy places in search for a sense of authenticity. On their way to the sacred relics of St. James, tourists are led by the desire for a physical challenge or look for ‘a contact with nature’. On the Way to Heaven is an attempt to explore and explain the power of place, as cultural and natural landscapes accompany the experience of both devout pilgrims and non-devotional visitors to pilgrimage sites and routes. In the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century there has been a renaissance of interest in Christian pilgrimage in Western Europe, as contemporary pilgrimage practices blend the medieval and the modern. Competing demands are placed on pilgrimage spaces and a sensitive management is needed to meet complex requirements and preserve the nature and charisma of holy places.
November
