Attraversare il deserto. Le esperienze dei pellegrini in viaggio verso la Terrasanta nel basso medioevo Con una appendice dei profili e delle opere dei pellegrini del XV secolo

Abstract

The essay identifies in the tales of pilgrimage of the late medieval period the experiences and memories of travellers who went on the Egyptian and Sinaitic Sahara desert or the Neghev from Gerusalemme or towards the Holy City. Descriptions of extreme adventures, inaccessible in undefined and boundless spaces, where the immensity and hardness of the landscape take hold of the pilgrim's thought. In the literary production of those years, the desert stimulated the construction of the image of the “other” which became the leitmotif of the narration and led to reconsidering the “geography of the sacred” through a renewed actualization of the past. The perceptions of the physical and human environment described in detail are, for those who try to brush the past bringing it back to its soft colors, extraordinary sources for the history of mentalities; testimonies that have shaped the “identity” of the pilgrim and transformed the homo viator into a geographer and explorer. From the encounter not only with the divine, from the extreme experience of the journey through the wide desert plains, the fifteenth-century travel journals, more oriented to the careful use of the word and the gaze of the other, laid the foundations of relationships with the communities encountered, where the sacredness of places has also given space to the narration of cultural, social, political and economic contexts.

Keywords

• deserto
• pellegrinaggio
• terrasanta
• alterità
• letteratura odeporica