Ribordone: Religious Culture and Traditions

Reference material and documentary accounts proposed through sophisticated multimedia solutions intend to draw the visitor’s attention to the devotional experience of the people belonging to the valleys inside the Park. This may be considered a fascinating and evocative topic; anyone who happens to walk along the mountain paths or has the opportunity of visiting the ancient hamlets comes across aedicules, devotional shrines or frescoes which testify the deep-rooted presence of religious tradition that expresses itself in a simple and direct language profoundly related to Alpine culture. The selected venue for this meeting is the complex adjacent to the Shrine of Prascondù. The shrine was built in the XVII century to commemorate a miraculous recovery through the instrument of the Virgin Mary and has ever since been a traditional place of pilgrimage.
The building, which once accommodated pilgrims arriving from afar, currently houses the most important events pertaining to a culture, which although in decline, still has something to say.
The religious phenomenon, intended as the set of beliefs, of ethical and redeeming principles, of cultural and devotional expression, which voice the relationship between man and the divine, has revealed itself in the history of mankind in a great variety of forms and features.
However naïve and far from common sensibility the various forms of traditional religiosity may appear at present, they are an answer to questions which are still fundamental to man today: the origin of life, destiny, illness, the necessity of pain, the aspiration to happiness.
In alpine culture the people’s religiosity is not an isolated and occasional experience, it is deeply steeped in everyday life, it pervades every gesture, every important moment of the individual’s and of the community’s existence.
The forms it uses to express itself are multifarious, in accordance with tradition, but without renouncing creativity: patronal festivals, processions, ex voto, special evotions, formulae used to drive off ill luck, the blessing of objects, of the produce of the land and of domestic animals, pilgrimages, confraternities.