Roamin’ Holiday: Protestants on Foot in the Eternal City

Abstract

This article analyses accounts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglophone travellers to Rome who encountered and described Catholic rituals of walking. These visitors observed Catholic rituals such as pilgrimages and processions so closely that they came to understand the act of walking and ways of walking as expressions of religious identity. They also used the language of walking to interpret such moments of encounter in their narratives. Taken together, this evidence demonstrates the centrality of walking to their understanding of a religiously diverse Europe.

Keywords

• walking
• early modern travel
• early modern Rome
• Catholicism
• spectacle
• processions