From Religious Sites to Cinematographic Sets: Symbolism of Religious Cultural Heritage in the Italian Series

Cinema and television, as core components of the creative industries, play a crucial role in transforming cultural heritage into meaningful narrative and symbolic resources. This study explores how religious cultural heritage is reconfigured from sacred sites into cinematographic sets, focusing on the Italian television series Le Indagini di Lolita Lobosco, set in Apulia. Drawing on the cultural and spatial turn in geography and media studies, the research examines the symbolic, aesthetic, and spatial functions of religious architecture and sacred landscapes within the series. Churches, monasteries, and coastal sacred spaces are not treated as mere backdrops, but as narrative devices that contribute to the construction of cinematic space and to the articulation of territorial identity. Through a qualitative spatial-semiotic analysis of selected screenscapes, the study shows how religious heritage participates in shaping both the fictional world of the series and the real world cultural image of Apulia. The findings highlight the role of television fiction in mediating cultural memory and reinterpreting religious heritage as a dynamic element of contemporary spatial storytelling.