20 May Kinesis & Praxis: The Via Francigena Archive

In August 2017, I undertook a 1,000-kilometer bicycle expedition from Rome to Bergamo along the ancient Via Francigena. At the time, I was a theology student navigating rural Italy; the bicycle was a means of transit, but it quickly became an instrument of vulnerability, exposing me to the harshness of the August heat, the strict bureaucracy of pilgrim shelters, and the sudden grace of strangers.
Nearly a decade later, Kinesis & Praxis reconstructs this journey not merely as a travelogue, but as a Spatial Auto-Ethnography.
Using a custom-built AI-augmented pipeline, this archive synthesizes raw data from 2017: KML GPS tracks, private diary entries, and 898 DSLR photographs—into an interactive spatial narrative. It asks how distance rearranges the self, and how the “grand narrative” of pilgrimage is actually assembled from minor, everyday frictions: a misunderstood road sign, an exhausted negotiation for a bed, a shared meal in a valley.
Technically, this project is a rejection of fragile, proprietary platforms. Built entirely with Vanilla HTML, standard JavaScript, MapLibre GL, and Python, the architecture is designed for archival stability. It ensures that the memory of the road remains as legible and resilient as the road itself.