• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 651 0

too, as state and municipality increasingly took over the management of public order, sanitation, and planning, the surviving shrines lost some of their intense association with locally remembered events and persons." Some disappeared simply because the families that had preserved the memory of their miraculous original appearance-for such was the alleged origin of many of them-had died out, leaving no substitute in the new bureaucratic landscape. Objects of pious veneration that had long resisted both the oppressive propinquity of the Vatican and the newly acquired status of national capital, other Madonnelle survive today, emblems of a still persistent and willful marginality, only through their adoption by the very institution they had so resolutely defied.C2 Many factors contributed to this radical change in their significance. Once the sole source of illumination at night, for example, their lamps were routed by the new urban lighting that arrived with Napoleonic planning; then again, the rationalization of city street names was but the prelude to the fury of "sanitization," spatial cleansing, that arrived with Mussolini's Fascist administrators, who sought to gut whole segments of the city, especially in Monti.63 Thus began a drawnout upheaval in which the newly monumentalized private homes that survived the slaughter-"little gems" in a guidebook of the Fascist era-came, in the hands of today's entrepreneurs, to be refractured as minute luxury apartments. The real estate agents' aggressive sales patter and brash banner advertisements drown out the fading laments that accompany the final, despondent trickle of departures. Today's battles are again particularly about noise, traffic, and the ownership of public space. The Madonnelle have become symbols of a lost past; they are recast as monuments to virtue rather than as the persistent stains of sins now forgotten.

Fig. 5. A Madonnella adorns a Palazzo

All these changes have disrupted, but have not immediately destroyed, the strong sense of local belonging among the relatively few, comparatively prosperous individuals who have been able to buy out their old abodes or purchase new ones. And so it came about that the local priest, born in Rome of parents from Friuli in the northeast of the country, could recapture for a modern and less locally focused age the traditional forms, suitably redi- mensioned, of local devotion. He recognized as the defining paradox of the shrines their testimony to a sanctity that could only subsist in a world of carnal desire, but recast their significance in terms that emphasized today's norms of respectability and religiosity; where once this devotional practice had been a means for the teeming poor of Rome's crowded center to transcend the meanness of their houses but also to protest the heavy hand of clerical rule, today the priest's followers are decorous middle-class citizens who see themselves as defending the Vatican's presence in their midst. The "purification" of popular religion objectifies it as an activity set apart from the sacredness of the church itself.64 On the one hand, this process reinforces the church's paternalistic supervision of the working poor and their bourgeois successors. On the other hand, by orchestrating pilgrimages to the shrines, the priest has reified their significance in ecclesiastical terms that also fit well with the monumental pretensions of the municipal authorities.65

A published historian, the priest has recast the popular forms of worship in terms of both historical accuracy and respect for local tradition. His "affective tie" ~legame affettivo) with the physical space of the parish and its churches has intensified through his study of "every block of stone" ~ogni mattone) of which the parish church, in particular, is made.66 His historical studies are also motivated by a desire to know more about his predecessors in the parish. But he also acts decisively to tie the monuments of popular veneration more tightly to the parish church and thereby to reinforce and perhaps even extend the sense of