I have not read the book "Virgin Trails" by Robert Ward, but perhaps it might be helpful to you.
The following comments taken from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca:
Virgin Trails: A Secular Pilgrimage Hardcover – May 1, 2002
by
Robert Ward (Author)
In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, humble journeyman painters would depict the Virgin Mary in city walls and cobblestones. Their identities have long been erased by time, and they are remembered today only as madonnari, the Madonna painters.
In Virgin Trails, author Robert Ward sets out to become a modern-day madonnaro, painting a contemporary portrait of the most beloved figure in Catholic theology. As Ward points out, Mary has little to say in the Bible itself and our image of her has been built piece by piece over two millennia. To understand how we have come to view her, then, we must return to the great Marian cathedrals, shrines and pilgrimages of Christian Europe. So from Paris to Lourdes, and from the
Camino de Santiago to Loreto, Ward's curious, wry and intelligent quest to find the truth of Mary unfolds.
And it unfolds with true Chaucerian delight. Full of colour, character and conversation, Virgin Trails is as much a portrait of the people Ward meets and the places he visits as it is of Mary. At once a thought-provoking examination of the nature of spirituality and belief, and an affirmation of the beauty of the human spirit.
Virgin Trails is a fascinating, colourful and often mesmerizing journal of one man’s quest to understand the sacred and profane. It is a story that takes us along thousands of miles of streets, roads and alleyways, following the routes taken by thousands of devout travellers each year to the legendary shrines of the Virgin Mary in Paris, Lourdes, along the
Camino de Santiago to Barcelona and Rome. Why do they do this? What is it that propels so many people each year to forsake the comforts of home, to face inclement weather and the travails of travel? Writer Robert Ward takes to the hills to answer that very question, encountering pilgrims, priests, sages and sightseers. His journey is a ceaseless series of epiphanies — probing the shadowy reaches of his own soul and the lives of his fellow travellers — ending where all roads lead: Rome.
