«All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions» stipulated in Article 3 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic. Yet beyond the constitutional provisions in this age, accomplice even tragic events imposed by the international news, the common perception of the different religions other than Christianity is often the subject of suspicion, when it is not tinged with feelings bordering on racism.
Global Religion is a project whose origin is precisely the observation of this reality and the desire to show how the lives of many is greatly inspired by forms of spirituality far from tradition and geographical origin, but no less powerful than those generated by the culture prevailing in Italy. Then it was, at the beginning of the work, the search for a possible common ground, that of spirituality precisely, where both Italians and foreigners could meet on national territory.
After all religion, beyond the individual or collective profession, imbues every aspect of human activity under any latitude. For this reason it can easily be a great common thread for a far more extensive and thorough analysis, that borders on the fields of sociology and anthropology. Global Religion, in fact, has come to be directed precisely towards a journalistic interpretation of much wider religious phenomena. Religion, the main subject of analysis, it has in other words transformed into the instrument through which to pass the narration of complex and articulated stories. This occurs through a process of progressive approach to the socio-anthropological past issues through the escape documentation of Syrian Christians, persecuted by al-Nuṣra, from Aleppo and Kessab towards Armenia. A situation that has generated, after about a year, a return to the places to describe the country in its most intimate and less known nuances on the occasion of the centenary of the Armenian massacre.
Thanks to Tamara Ferrari and Marco Finazzi, and the magazine Vanity Fair, a further evolution has given rise to a very long process, which over the years, will lead to the documentation of the places in the world in which the Marian apparitions would have occurred. The common thread of places of worship, born where the popular belief has it that the Virgin Mary appeared to human beings, will be the guide to investigate mostly almost unknown situations in which the phenomenon, defined in religious terms, is not but the tip of the iceberg of relational networks with extremely complex implications.