Jubilee 2025: a strategic opportunity for religious tourism and food & wine tourism
The launch of Jubilee 2025 opens a major opportunity for Italy. With more than 35 million expected arrivals and an estimated overall economic impact of 16.7 billion euro, the event can strengthen not only religious tourism but also the visibility of Italy’s food and wine heritage.
Italy is already a global benchmark for religious tourism, with thousands of related hospitality structures and a strong accommodation base. At the same time, food and wine tourism contributes more than 40 billion euro to the Italian economy. The intersection between these two systems is therefore strategically relevant.
Roberta Garibaldi highlights four macro-areas where faith and taste meet most clearly: monasteries and convents linked to traditional production, pilgrimage routes, religious towns and villages, and local religious celebrations tied to food traditions. This means that the impact of the Jubilee should not be read only through Rome, but through a wider network of territories connected to devotional travel.
Examples range from monastic sites producing wine, honey, infusions or pastries, to pilgrimage routes such as the Via Francigena and the Via di Francesco, where spiritual travel intersects with local PDO and PGI products, rural landscapes and place-based storytelling.
“The religious traveller seeks authenticity. They relate to a territory through experiences that create emotional and spiritual bonds while also offering cultural enrichment. In Italy there are many places where spirituality and taste naturally meet,” says Roberta Garibaldi.
The article argues that to maximise the potential of Jubilee 2025, Italy should act on three fronts: build integrated thematic itineraries connecting faith and gastronomy, continue investing in pilgrim-oriented infrastructure and strengthen territorial communication through tools capable of narrating this link in a clear and compelling way.
Handled well, Jubilee 2025 can therefore become more than a major event. It can be a catalyst for more distributed tourism, stronger local economies and renewed attention to the cultural value of food traditions rooted in places of faith.
