Confini (in)visibili: margini reali e immaginati dello spazio sacro

Sacred space as a category has encountered a renewed interest in recent studies. The essentialist view of early scholars has been questioned, and the produced reality of sacred space is now at the center of scholars' research. Sacred space is not anymore an immutable and fixed space in the environment: instead, it's recognized as a product of human activity, and continuously subject to transformation and adaptive processes. As such, its border is often porous, contended, shifted. In this article, I will clarify how the categories of sacred and sacred space have been studied in the last couple of centuries, and with the help of many examples from around the world, I'll discuss the many typologies of sacred space and the different borders it is defined from.