Tracing Footsteps: Ritual, Place-Making, and Negotiating Identity in Italian-Canadian Processional Landscapes

Abstract

This thesis examines how Italian patron-saint processions operate as spatial practices that shape community identity across geographic and cultural contexts. At its core, it asks how ritual movement transforms urban space into meaningful place, and how these practices are carried, adapted, and sustained through migration. Focusing on two case study processions from Calabrian towns – San Nicola da Crissa and Torre di Ruggiero – and their diasporic counterparts in Ontario, the research traces the continuity of these traditions as they move between homeland and diaspora.

The study employs a multi-layered methodology combining archival research, oral histories, photographic analysis, and architectural drawing. Through plan obliques and detailed vignettes, processional routes are mapped and analyzed revealing the relationships between bodies, ritual objects, and the built environment.

The findings show that processions do more than move through space, they transform it. Streets, piazzas, and neighbourhoods become temporarily redefined as sites of devotion, memory, and collective presence. At the same time, these rituals operate as place-making practices and transnational anchors, reproducing the logics of the hometown within new urban forms – where churches take on the role of piazzas, and statues become fixed markers of diasporic identity. In diasporic contexts, processions adapt to local conditions, reshaping their routes, soundscapes, and ceremonial rhythms while continuing to carry the traditions of their places of origin. In this way, they create what can be understood as “double towns,” where past and present, here and elsewhere, are held together through movement.

The thesis concludes that architecture extends beyond static form, emerging instead through the relationships between people, movement, and place. Through procession, communities actively produce space as lived and meaningful, demonstrating how identity, memory, and belonging are not only preserved, but continually made and remade across landscapes and generations.