The controversial public display of Padre Pio's body is attracting a new kind of Irish holidaymaker who likes to combine sunshine and spirituality. Thousands of these 'tourist pilgrims' are travelling to view the mystic monk's remains in San Giovanni Rotondo, before heading off for some secular sight-seeing around the rest of Italy.

But the stigmatic saint, whose body has been exhumed 40 years after his death, is the main draw in these religious vacations to the Puglia region.

Tour operators are tapping-into this growing market for trips with a sacred flavour. Around 750,000 pilgrims from all over the world have already booked to visit Padre Pio's crypt.

Irishwoman Una Rosso was one of the first to see the saint this week.

"He was dressed in his Capuchin robes, with brown socks and sandals, and mitts on his hands. He had a big frothy beard, which really pleased me. He looked quite small," she said.

"He was in a coffin made of bullet-proof glass, and surrounded by hundreds of beautiful red and yellow roses."

Una, who lives in Tuscany with her Italian husband, Mario, regularly brings Irish groups to San Giovanni Rotondo for the Dublin-based travel company Joe Walsh Tours.

Donegal woman Nuala Slevin has been taking these pilgrim packages to Italy for 18 years in a row. She enjoys Italy's famous food, culture and weather but says her devotion to Padre Pio is what really draws her back year after year. Next month's trip, with 51 fellow pilgrims -- many of whom are by now old friends -- will be particularly emotional. "It'll be different this year because we'll have the privilege of praying at his body. It'll be very nice to put a face on this man we've been praying to over the years.

"I know when I see him laid out in his casket I'll feel even closer to him than I do now. It'll be nice to see him in the flesh, to have a person-to-person relationship, and to talk to him," she said.

If Italy is shaped like a boot, San Giovanni Rotondo nestles somewhere around its ankle. The hill-top town rises up out of the fertile Puglia countryside. Among the rows of olive trees, electricity producing windmills seem to turn lazily in the heat. Black-clad widows watch the many tourist coaches wind their way through the narrow streets.

Ageing monks shuffle between the Santa Maria delle Grazie church, which contains Pio's tomb, and the larger modern church designed by the famous architect Renzo Piano. With their bushy beards and brown hooded robes, the friars look like Padre Pio himself. One monk is busily blessing family cars with holy water in the piazza. When Padre Pio arrived here in 1916, there was little more than a humble monastery.