RIVISTA DI STORIA DELLA CHIESA IN ITALIA - 2009 - 1

From the 8th century at least and more over from the gregorian Popes, the organisation of processions in Rome takes a significant place in the political communication of medieval papacy. The pope recovered the antic imperial ceremonial and invested the urban space, especially between the Latran and the Vatican, to show his power as the spiritual father and the temporal master of the city and the world. He first took advantage from the movements linked to the stationnal liturgy, and extended the use of processions (usually on horses) for the day of the crowning and for the Advents, which implied to join spaces outside and inside the city, to organise a way across the decorated town, and to get the peaceful assistance of the clergy, the aristocrats and the population. From the middle of the 11th century and above all after 1304, the more numerous absences out of Rome caused important changes in the ceremonial and its meaning.

In Medieval Venice, urban space was not only the scene of the conflicts between mendicant orders and parishes chapters but, in real terms, a primordial actor. This paper whishes to put urban space in the centre of attention, using three examples which allow to understand its real place in the conflicts and the leading role it plays, especially at the end of the Middle Ages, in the deep modification of the spiritual and devotional opposition between mendicants and the laity.

Il racconto di fondazione (1606) fa risalire l’origine del santuario rupestre al 1567, anno della sua scoperta seguita ad una epifania. La sua genesi, però, è più antica e complessa e si affianca alla presenza dell’attigua cappella votiva, anch’essa ricavata da una grotta, dedicata a s. Margherita. Questo culto riservato alla santa sauroctona - sorto in prossimità di una lama - viene messo in relazione con l'esigenza di protezione dalla malaria, propagatasi in conseguenza del frequente ristagno delle acque.

The essay analyzes the figure and the action of cardinal Alessandro Farnese, then Pope Paul III, as bishop-administrator of the diocese of Parma, between 1509 and 1534. In spite of his almost continuative absence from the diocese to live in the Papal court, cardinal Farnese was able to create a series of relations with the local powers, laical and ecclesiastical – in a period of deep changements in the political life of the city – which allowed him to lay the foundations for the building of the Farnese duchy of Parma and Piacenza.

On the account of his membership of the Dominican Order and owing to his friendship with Noël Alexander, cardinal Vincenzo M. Orsini, archbishop of Benevento from 1686 until 1724 and later pope Benedict XIII (1724 –1730), was and is still labelled now as pro-Jansenist and deaf to the bull Unigenitus, now as anti-probabilist and opposed to Jesuits. This study, which is based on a plenty of unpublished archive material and mainly focused on Orsini’s long Beneventan episcopate, just goes to show how basically rash such assessments were and still are. As for contemporary problems, the Church worried about between the XVII and the XVIII century, Card. Orsini displaied indeed an unchanging attitude of sound balance and, above all, of genuine loyalty on Roman policy guidelines.