Rome — During the 11th International Congress on Pastoral Tourism, Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi, archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church, opens with a disarming prompt: “Let’s talk about home—the place where each of us was formed.”
Born in Crema in 1965 and trained in ecclesiology and family studies, Pagazzi is the author of essays including Feeling at Home and In Peace I Lie Down: Sleep and Faith. His method begins with lived experience and anthropology rather than abstraction. Speaking about tourism, rest, and the sense of journey, he starts where life begins: at home.
The womb and the threshold
Why begin with the home to talk about travel?
“We are never without place. Never. It is an ontological condition of being human. Life begins in a very particular ‘house’: a mother’s body. The womb is our first home, and birth—if you think about it—is our first journey. A dramatic passage from a warm, liquid, protected world into air, light, cold, and the unknown.
“Immediately after that first migration, we are welcomed into a physical home. Foundational things happen there, shaping the rest of life. As children we learn that people can be trusted. How? By repeating a simple experience: we called our mother and she came; we called again and she returned. Repetition built in us something extraordinary: trust, and the capacity to wait.”
Trust is learned at home
“The home is a laboratory of trust. There we learn we are not abandoned to chaos; that a response is possible. And this trust extends beyond people to things, to the world itself. A child who experiences trust at home develops a fundamental orientation: the world can be habitable; others can be encountered, not only feared.”
Economy and ecology: Rules and bonds of the house
How does this shape the way we move through the world?
“Consider the roots of two words. Economy comes from the Greek oikos (house) and nomos (rule): the norms by which a house functions. In that sense, home becomes a criterion for judging actions. If an action honors the promises of the original house—care, reliability, relationship—it is just.
“Ecology joins oikos with logos (discourse, relation): the bonds of the house. Ecological conduct respects the fidelities learned in our first home. We often imagine economy as cold technique and ecology as a distant ‘nature out there.’ Both are relational at their core; when they forget that, they become inhuman.”
The promise of home: The world as dwelling
And travel enters here?
“Our earliest home makes a promise: that the world can gradually become a house. Watch a child: from womb to crib, room, apartment, courtyard, neighborhood, city. Expansion becomes possible because trust was lit within.
“Tourism extends that movement. We leave home, region, even continent because we believe—consciously or not—in the promise of our first house. Tourism would not exist if we did not believe we could feel at home elsewhere. In practical terms, a tour operator’s fundamental task is to help those away from home feel at home.”
That sets a high bar for the sector.
“It is an anthropological responsibility. Welcoming someone from afar is not merely selling a service; it is honoring the promise: ‘The world can be a home.’ When a traveler is treated as a wallet, deceived or exploited, the promise is betrayed: the world is not habitable; others are a threat.”
The interruption of habits
Home stabilizes habits—but travel interrupts them.
“Precisely. Home is the realm of repeated gestures and steady rhythms. Travel suspends them: meals at odd hours, unfamiliar beds, unknown streets. Disorientation arises—and with it, a measure of fear.
“But disorientation need not be negative. Many creative breakthroughs begin in a moment of chaos, of unformedness. Foundational texts evoke chaos at the beginning of things; creation emerges from it. The point is not to flee chaos at all costs, but to learn to inhabit it long enough for something new to appear.”
Sabbath, ‘continuously,’ and freedom
You describe travel in terms similar to sabbath rest.
“Not by accident. Shabbat means cessation—an interruption that frees time from monotony. Unbroken time is the time of enslavement: repetitive, breathless, alienating.
“There is a striking scene in the Gospel of Mark (chapter 5) describing a man in torment who cries out ‘continuously’, day and night. That adverb is revealing. The inability to stop—always doing, speaking, producing—signals possession, if not in a literal sense then certainly existential. Travel interrupts the continuously. As interruption, it liberates; it shows that life could be otherwise.”
Counting days, inhabiting time
Can travel itself become another form of “continuously”?
“Yes. We rush from site to site to escape work’s continuously, and tourism becomes another duty—a performance, a checklist. Then travel no longer rests; it distracts.
“The difference lies in the quality of time. If travel truly interrupts, it teaches us to pause and contemplate. It awakens awareness that our days are numbered—a classic wisdom motif: ‘Teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart’ (Psalm 90:12). Finitude lends weight to each moment; it helps us feel at home in the world.”
The blessing of the present
So, understood well, travel becomes a school of presence.
“A school of presence—and of benediction in the original sense: to speak well of what is encountered. Real travel is not conquest or consumption; it is receiving. Gratitude becomes the traveler’s posture.
“The true traveler is not the collector of experiences but the pilgrim shaped by encounters. If I return unchanged, something failed. Travel should teach us that we are guests—on earth, in time, in life. None of us owns it absolutely. Recognizing this paradoxically makes us feel more at home, because we need no longer dominate; we can inhabit.”
A closing thought
Pagazzi concludes with a note on hospitality’s ancient language:
“In Greek, xenos means both ‘stranger’ and ‘guest.’ Perhaps this is the secret of travel and of life: to learn to see every stranger as a guest—and to recognize ourselves as welcomed strangers wherever we go. Only then does the whole world become home. Only then do we honor the promise of our first house—that warm, sheltering place where everything began: that we will not be alone, that there will be a way back, that somewhere a door remains open.”
1 Comment
Vicki Irene
Brilliant!