Per una storia dei santuari cristiani d'Italia: approcci regionali (review)

This is one of several collaborative volumes that have been published in Italy in recent years concerning the many shrines and sanctuaries that dot the Italian landscape. Medievalists and especially archaeologists have long been interested in these sanctuaries for what they reveal about travel and pilgrimage, the lives of individual saints, the history of the religious orders with which they were sometimes connected, and about religious continuities that in some cases stretch back to pre-Christian times. What is different about these recent studies is that they are characterized by a laudable ambition to be comprehensive, both chronologically and geographically. Thus the volume under review presents the provisional results of one effort to compile an historical census of the Christian sanctuaries that still exist or once existed within the territory of the modern Italian state. Regional research teams, directed by scholars at leading universities, were sent out to compile data concerning the founding of sanctuaries, their dedications, their relations with bishops, religious orders, and state authorities, and their longevity. In 1999 the scholars assigned to northern and central Italy presented their provisional results in papers read at a conference held in Trent. This volume publishes those papers, along with an additional series of papers concerning southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia that offers results that are much sketchier.

The volume begins with an illuminating introductory essay by Giorgio Cracco treating the history of the historiography of religious devotions in Italy. Its unexpected heroes are a seventeenth-century German Jesuit, Wilhelm Gumppenberg, and a nineteenth-century priest from Verona, Agostino Zanella. Gumppenberg was the learned compiler of the Atlas marianus, a catalogue of miraculous images of the Virgin Mary throughout the world; and his Atlas furnishes a splendid picture of the Catholic Church and its ambitions in the seventeenth century. Two centuries later, when Zanella translated Gumppenberg's work into Italian, revising and expanding it, the Atlas again reveals much about how the official church perceived its role in the world. Cracco doesn't quite convey the eccentric qualities of the Atlas and its compilers, but he offers a chronology of the changing attitudes of the church toward popular devotions that is rich and suggestive.

Apart from Cracco's essay, which might easily have been published independently, the remainder of the volume presents reports on work in progress. A brief paper by John Scheid describes a project to catalogue pre-Christian religious sites, while the other writers describe the results of the ongoing census, about which even the census-takers express some skepticism. Luigi Canetti, for instance, makes the obvious but necessary point that for most of the centuries covered the modern regione of Emilia Romagna has no particular historical identity worth investigating. Other writers remark on the similarity of the results from one region to another. Thus the overwhelming majority of Italian sanctuaries were dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but few explanations are attempted. (Unfortunately, there appears to have been no attempt to gather even impressionistic evidence concerning the gender and age of visitors to these shrines.) The most intense period of sanctuary-founding was from the mid-fifteenth century through the sixteenth century, but again the reader is struck by the absence of an explanation. (It is interesting that so many of the contributors are medievalists rather than early modernists.) Sanctuaries near and in the Alps are treated by several writers, all of whom agree in tossing out the older explanation that the sanctuaries were built as a cordon sanitaire against Protestantism. Local factors predominated, the authors assert, but what these were is not entirely clear. An impressive pair of essays by Andrea Piazza and Paolo Cozzo describes the sanctuaries of Piedmont in, respectively, the medieval and modern periods, with special attention given to the House of Savoy. But other writers appear to be restricted by the "census report" format. Some of the best work on sanctuaries and devotions in...