Religious Tourism in a Key Multimodal Discourse Analysis Perspective

Authenticity and Cultural Heritage

Abstract

In the last few decades, religious tourism has become a relevant sector for the international tourism industry, with pilgrimages counting 240 million travelers per year. These figures increase during specific events, as is the case with the Catholic Jubilee, which was held in Rome in 2025. In order to investigate the communicative strategies used to promote major pilgrimage destinations, the present study conducts a visual and verbal analysis of the official Jubilee 2025 website. More specifically, the study investigates its homepage and the web pages dedicated to Exhibitions, presented as cultural and spiritual preparation for the main event. The visual analysis employs Baldry and Thibault’s (2006) model to examine the intertextual relationships and meaning-making functions of the homepage and the web pages, while Dann’s (1996) framework is used to investigate patterns of tourism discourse in the verbal component of the Exhibitions’ web pages. The research objective is to examine the communicative strategies used by the Holy See to articulate the Jubilee’s spiritual significance within the broader landscape of contemporary travel. It specifically analyzes how the Vatican navigates the tension between mass mobility and spiritual pilgrimage, following Pope Francis’s pastoral call to transform the ‘tourist’ experience into a ‘pilgrim’ journey. Findings reveal that the website constructs the Jubilee as a hybrid experience situated between sacred pilgrimage and cultural tourism. Visual and verbal choices frame participation in the Exhibitions as a symbolic journey of preparation, aligning cultural engagement as integral to the spiritual path with promotional conventions typical of tourism communication.