SANTA SINFOROSA. ARCHEOLOGIA e CULTO Solo testo

Santa Maria presso San Satiro, a cura di F. Repishti, 2012

Spoletium, 2017

In an important new study published in 2012 by the Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo researchers claimed that San Salvatore had two major building phases, one in the mid 5th century when a three-aisled basilica rose in an early Christian cemetery on the Colle Ciciano outside Spoleto's city walls, and a second designed to repair and magnify the earlier building after its partial destruction during the Byzantine-Gothic wars in the mid 6th century. The researchers announced that they had been able to date this second phase by the Carbon-14 method sometime during a 110-year span running from A.D. 531 to 641. In this essay I report on my long study of San Salvatore which I began with yearly campaigns on site between 1978 and 1984 to measure and survey the building. I argue that the basilica had **one great historic phase** and that that must be the church that the C-14 evidence applies to. This building with its elaborate east end---with a domed presbytery on giant columns---was damaged by fire and repaired, then damaged by fire or earthquake and again repaired, then reduced to an Augustinian monastery in modern times. San Salvatore does not appear to be the product of any Umbrian early Christian culture, but instead, fruit of an early medieval civilization in the Longobard Duchy of Spoleto. Its scenic columnar displays, presented in 2012 as a pastiche (as the result of an awkward phase-two repair), now emerge as the product of careful planning. I argue that the design forms part of a long Hellenistic and ancient Roman tradition that only now do we begin to understand.

Confraternitas 16:1 (2005): 3–18., 2005

Bollettino dei Musei e Gallerie Pontificie, 2008

L. Bombardieri, A. D'Agostino, G. Guarducci, V. Orsi and S. Valentini (a cura di), “Identity & Connectivity”, Proceedings of the 16th SOMA (Florence, 1-3 March 2012), Oxford, British Archaeological Reports, Series 2581 (II), 2013, Archaeopress. Oxford, pp. 909-918 [ISBN 978 1 4073 1205 7], 2013

"The Christian sanctuaries were structured to enhance the value of the relics and house the believers and martyrial liturgies. The solutions adopted to create confessional spaces were different, according to the places, ages and needs. The aim of this study is to analyze the main characteristics of the Christian sanctuaries of Rome and to consider the relationship with the Late-Imperial funerary architecture. During the 2nd and the 3rd century, some humble memoriae on the venerable tombs were built, such as St. Peter’s edicula in Vatican. In the catacombs, we can find some privileged burials grouped together into cubicula or simple loculi. Emperor Costantine built a magnificent basilica in Vatican and some funerary circiform basilicas in the suburban cemeteries, close to the hypogeal sanctuaries; the saints’ graves weren’t radically transformed. Pope Damasus looked for the venerable graves, enriched them with some marble decorations, dedicated to the saints some touching poetic compositions and enlarged the confessional spaces to make the pilgrims circulation easier; the most important damasian restorations dealt with the Crypt of the Popes. In the second half of the 4th century, the privileged burials ad sanctos became common. After Damasus’ papacy, the building activity in the catacombs was quite limited."

"Remains of an Early Christian basilica, in today’s church of San Lorenzo in Lucina in Rome, were identified in the 1930s by Richard Krautheimer during his work on the second volume of Corpus basilicarum Christianarum Romae.1 In the Corpus, Krautheimer made a detailed survey of all the elements belonging to the Early Christian basilica which were known in those days. More recent excavations and research since the early 1980s have uncovered previously unknown elements of the Early Christian basilica, which make it possible to make a more detailed reconstruction of its original shape. While it is possible to trace the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina back to circa AD 600 in various sources, it is not possible to identify it with certainty in sources earlier than this date, but the basilica, often attributed to Pope Sixtus III (432–440), could instead be identified with the basilica Lucinae where Pope Damasus was elected in 366."

Proceedings of 3th International Landscape Archaeology Conference (Rome 2014). Amsterdam, pp. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam [ISBN 978-90-825296-0-9], 2016

In the early Christian period the birth and development of relics’ cult led to the transformation of urban, suburban and rural Italian landscape. Indeed, the deposition of venerated bodies in extra-muros cemeteries led to the gradual Christianisation of the whole peninsula. The link between territories and martyrs’ cults is shown by Christian Calendars, which reported just the dies natalis and the place of depositio. The saints were so territorially well established that their burials were simply considered as loca by ancient Christians. The gradual monumentalisation of martyrs’ tombs led to the birth of huge sanctuaries. They were composed of funerary and religious buildings but also service facilities, accommodations for pilgrims and monasteries. The most important sanctuaries were those of Saints Peter in the Vatican, Erasmus in Formia, Alexander in Nomentum, Felix in Cimitile, Januarius in Naples, Felix in Venosa, Marcianus in Syracuse and the Apostles in Concordia. They became so popular that Jerome said: ‘movetur urbs sedibus suis’. It seems that sometimes there was a coincidence between sanctuaries and episcopal palaces, such as in Sardinia, in some part of Latium and probably at Cimitile, Venosa and Concordia Sagittaria. In the fifth and sixth centuries some sanctuaries spread also in rural areas, usually along important routes. Suburban and rural sanctuaries led to the development of new settlements, as shown by the birth of new villages. The current word “Cimitile”, for example, derives from “Cimiterium” and even Paulinus of Nola wrote about a vicus nearby the sanctuary. At Saint Peter’s tomb, a Civitas was born in the Early Middle Ages. At the end of the Early Christian era, the traslationes broke the tie between relics and their locus depositionis, causing new urban sanctuaries to form.

Sixteenth Century Journal, 1999

2013