Religious-based routes:a methodology for studying through digital cartography their capacity to foster rocher forms of sustainable tourism

Overall, our research aims at, on the one hand, contributing to the specific objectives identified by regional development programmes (i.e. incentivizing sustainable tourist activity through the promotion of various routes) and, on the other, creating a segment to be included in a larger itinerary to be submitted to the Council of Europe. Accordingly, we selected “clusters” of sanctuaries throughout the Veneto Region, away from main roads, to increase their visibility and make them appealing to outsiders, thereby fostering a kind of “slow” tourism. Here, we propose a methodology aimed at assessing if the area can withstand greater usage and sustain the presence of tourists with services and resources that are complementary to those already identified. With this in mind - and convinced of the opportunity given to local development by inserting “holy tourist resources” on a par with other elements of the (rural/urban) environment – we created a buffer zone around the route using ArcGIS10.1. This procedure allows one to provide added information compared to that which is specific to the itinerary, and identify any weaknesses.