Aerial view of the cathedral

© MCC / DRAC Picardie / service de l'inventaire / Phot. Inv. J.C. Stamm

My name is Lucia and I am planning a holiday to explore the “Via Francigena”, an ancient pilgrimage road which in the Middle Ages connected Rome, where I live, with many important cathedrals across Europe. I know that the route passed through Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain to Canterbury in southern England and through many sites in France.

I’m going to travel by car and I would like to plan a tour visiting the most interesting areas in Italy and France, discovering famous and less known cathedrals and pilgrim’s hostels. I would like to know more about symbols and meanings of the historical route and about Gothic architecture and art. I read about the MICHAEL EU portal in a newspaper and so I decided to look at it to find suggestions and information to plan my itinerary.

I went to the home page of MICHAEL and typed “pilgrim” into the quicksearch box. I found many collections, such as websites, CD-ROM publications and databases. Using the advanced search, I was able to refine the query by selecting “France” in the “spatial coverage” field and by selecting “13th century” in the “period” field. I was able to sort my results starting with the most recent and to view 10 items per page.

Tuscania (VT), Lunette of the doorway of San Pietro in Tuscia

All rights reserved (Irene Buonazia, 2006)

I consulted the collection “Cathédrals de Picardie” from the Regional Inventory Service of France and saved the result into “my favourites”. Back on the home page, I clicked on the map of Europe and zoomed in to France. I was able to consults some interesting websites about Provence and Burgundy, where I discovered museums and churches with traditions of venerating saints. I found 21 collections relating to “Picardy”, so I refined my search by “subject” - selecting “Local History”. Some of the results were not so relevant to my research and so I searched again by the subject “religion” and found 3 interesting items. There was a virtual tour in the website of an exhibition on Middle-Age relics organized by the Musée du Trésor de la Cathédrale de Amiens. I was able to go to the website of the museum where I found information on the opening hours, tickets and even about the availability of tourist guides in Italian.

In the description for the museum collection I read “cloisonée goldsmith” and decided to find out more about it. I searched for the term in MICHAEL using the quicksearch box finding 4 items, amongst which there is a digital collection of French gold handcrafts by the Institute Ausonius, Université de Bordeaux.

As I will be travelling from Rome, I looked for Italian monuments relating to the “Via Francigena” in Lazio. This time I used the option to go to the Italian MICHAEL portal, and I selected the Lazio region, refining my query to covering the period from the 10th to the 14th century.

Canterbury Cathedral Towers from the South West, 1890 (Francis Frith)

KCC, Centre for Kentish Studies http://www.hereshistorykent.org.uk/

I found the description for the collection “Censimento dei Santuari Cristiani” (the Census of the Christian Sanctuaries in Italy). I was able to search for “related physical objects” - religious buildings in my case. I scrolled through and found the “Basilica of Saint Peter in Tuscia”. I was interested and then I searched “Tuscia” using the “spatial coverage” advanced search. I found a virtual tour of “Romanesque churches in Tuscia”, from the Lazio Region. It mentioned that a map tour was available and so I visited the website and viewed the churches on a map – it also let me identify “relevant natural environments” and “cultural walking tours”.

I can see that this small area is full of interesting and less well-known monuments, rich in the symbols and iconography of the ancient pilgrimage route. So I decided to spend the first part of my tour in Lazio and then to continue towards Arles in Provence and Dijon in Burgundy.

Next year I plan to visit the beginning of the pilgrimage route in England. I will come back to MICHAEL EU to find out about Canterbury and the surrounding area.