Religious Fruition of the Territories: Ancient Traditions and New Trends in Aspromonte Donatella Di Gregorio (&) , Alfonso Picone Chiodo, and Agata Nicolosi Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, 89100 Reggio Calabria, Italy donatella.digregorio@unirc.it Abstract. The proposed work is intended to highlight certain routes born from a religious background that have become interesting from an environmental and naturalistic point of view. These routes can offer themselves within a framework of recovery and enhancement of local resources aimed at giving back to the communities concerned often forgotten testimonies of history and shared memory, fragments of life, literature, and art. The particular path of faith examined is that of the historical destination of the Sanctuary of the Madonna of the Mountain at Polsi in Aspromonte, long a place of devotion and faith. The objective of the work is to examine the conditions by which the pilgrimage can contribute even further to the creation of value and socio-economic development for the territories concerned, in a dual path that links together faith and the re-appropriation by the local community of places that have been contaminated and subjugated by the presence of the ‘ndràngheta, in order to promote virtuous processes of economic and social legality. This sees the Aspromonte as gen- erator of sustainable development, of fair trade, of responsible tourism, and of ethical agri-food production. Keywords: Religious landscape tourism Á Pilgrimage Sustainable development 1 Introduction and Literature Review Religious tourism represents a global market of approximately 300–330 million people who visit religious sites every year [1], with an estimated turnover of around 18 billion dollars (IS.NA.RT - National Institute for Research on Tourism). According to the World Tourism Organization [2], 40% of this religious tourism takes place in Europe. It is indeed a very complex phenomenon that does not simply combine tourism and religion, but stems from motivations that many authors identify as inner expression [3] and that represents an important element in the life of us all [4, 5]. Liutukas focuses in particular on the search for identity and values that the traveller/pilgrim seeks in his experience, on the traveller ’s motivation, and on his inner disposition. The categories that he identifies (valuistic journeys, spiritual tourism, holistic tourism, personal heritage tourism, and pilgrimages) provide a useful frame- work for understanding values-based tourism. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 F. Calabrò et al. (Eds.): ISHT 2018, SIST 101, pp. 85–93, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92102-0_10