The Way of St. James in Spain is the main European pilgrimage route. Currently, it is a cultural, tourist, monumental, spiritual, and sports route. For this reason, the paper aims to discuss the concept of the “Polysemy of The Way”, by analysing how the new pilgrims’ motivations are creating an inclusive and complex space, which is making a shift from religious space to a multifaceted tourism reality. We study the characterisation and interaction of the new actors involved in its development, maintenance and promotion. As a result, its original “space of faith” is now a “live heritage space”, thanks to the rehabilitation of routes, monuments, and landscapes. The combination of these motivational and spatial transformations enhances the factors of post-secular pilgrimage, such as slow mobility, the liminality and the sense of community, which the same actors assume as priorities for territorial management.

This study aims at demonstrating how cycle tourism could activate a regeneration of small and medium sized stations in inland areas, able to involve also territorial and urban areas hosting these stations. Starting point of this research is the issue of the small and medium sized Italian stations, mostly unused even if they are still active as rail service. Since control of trains' traffic is organized only in bigger railway yards, small stations are gradually becoming empty containers: ghost stations, without any railway personnel. Thanks to the potentiality of the cycle tourism, riding slow through landscapes, it becomes possible to valorize and safeguard this heritage, not only exploiting its potentiality as shiftnode between train and bike, but also imaging a systemic strategy triggering urban, territorial and social reactivation. Main challenge was to experiment how another model of mobility, the cycle tourism, able to promote a territorial project preferring to pass slowly through the inland areas, avoided by the fast infrastructural lines, could contribute in such regeneration process. In order to validate this intuition, it was carried out a project of four stations in proximity of the cycle tourist path VENTO, along the Po River. These stations were transformed in "green mobility hubs", where shifting from train to bicycle and vice versa. This becomes the occasion to imagining new functions hosted in empty spaces of stations (both internal and external): they will provide cycle tourists with territorial info and specific services, such as repair areas and bikes and baggage safekeeping and both tourists and local inhabitants with social activities in order to bring them to live again station's area. These functions want to generate an expectation, both in tourists and local people, to rediscover the territory around: in this way stations reassume their role of urban and territorial gates. which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

European marginalised areas are affected by an alarming rate of abandonment and depopulation. Thus, they are therefore object of specific European policies aiming to their reactivation. Official guidelines, both European and Italian, indicate sustainable tourism as one of the main triggers able to activate positive processes. This research experiments a suggestion in a case study, the North of Sardinia. The coastal areas of Sardinia are popular tourist destinations, particularly in the North with the famous Costa Smeralda. Therefore, it is worthy to imagine a way to allow them to discover the inner territories of the region too.

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