ITALO-GRECI. — These are the Greek or Byzantine merchants, ecclesiastics, soldiers, and public officials who moved to southern Italy and Sicily, conquered by Belisarius (535) and Narses (553), to the Exarchate of Ravenna (568–752), and to Rome itself, where they had churches and monasteries in such numbers that for several centuries they predominated in councils and in the election of the Popes: within 110 years, 12 of the 19 Popes were Eastern Greeks. The Greek rite also spread among the populations that spoke Greek and conformed to Byzantine religious and civil customs, still recognizable today in Calabrian-Sicilian folklore.
It is estimated that more than 50,000 faithful, religious and laypeople, took refuge in Italy at the time of the iconoclastic persecution that raged in the East for more than half a century (725–87). The Arabs (9th and 10th centuries), the Lombards, Otto I and II, and finally the Normans brought Byzantine rule in Italy to an end. The populations of Calabria and Apulia preserved the Greek rite for many years longer, resisting the Normans, who, although for reasons of prudent policy they favored the Basilian clergy and monasteries for a certain period, gradually replaced the Greek rite with the Latin rite wherever Greek priests became lacking. The efforts of Cardinal Bessarion and other learned men to revive Catholic Hellenism in Calabria and Sicily through the foundation of schools and of the famous Academy of Messina, to which Bessarion himself and Costantino Lascaris went from 1462 to 1493, were fruitless. The Academy attracted a host of disciples, including some of the best-known humanists, but achieved nothing in the religious sphere sought by its founders and patrons, among whom were Callistus III, Pius II, and King Alfonso of Aragon. Equally fruitless had been the efforts of Urban V in 1370 and of Martin V and other Popes who attempted to revive religious life and studies in the Basilian monasteries, already on the ruinous decline of Byzantine civilization in Italy. There, from the 14th to the 18th century, the Greek rite disappeared entirely, although the work of an educated and Catholic Greek clergy would have been of great value for the reunion of the Church of the East. The sole survivor of so much ruin is the exarchal monastery of Grottaferrata (v. GROTTAFERRATA), an outstanding monument of the Greek rite in Italy.
I.-G. is also improperly used to designate the Greeks who came to Italy from the East when the Turks invaded the Balkan peninsula and, in larger numbers, after the fall of Constantinople (1453). At the time when the Byzantine Greek rite was coming to an end through the passage to the Latin rite of the principal Italo-Greek centers (Gerace in 1467, Oppido in 1472, Gallipoli in 1550, Benevento in 1567, Policastro in 1572, Bova in 1573, Reggio in 1611, Taranto in 1622, Melfi in 1697, and thus all the other dioceses), these new emigrants arrived in Italy, in groups or singly, settling in the principal coastal cities: Venice, Ancona, Barletta, Bari, Brindisi, Lecce, Taranto, Reggio, Messina, Naples, Livorno, etc. There they formed communities of varying size around churches or parishes with their own Eastern clergy, enjoying the privileges granted by the Council of Florence (1439) to those who declared themselves Catholics.
Legal and disciplinary divergences soon arose, because the Latins, ignorant of Eastern rites and discipline, sometimes prompted inappropriate measures, thereby embittering the emigrants, among whom there were also elements deeply prejudiced against the Roman Church. Thus the Greek-Latin discord grew increasingly aggravated.
A few years after its establishment (1622), the Congregation of Propaganda Fide sought to remedy so many evils by founding two seminaries for the I.-G. at Reggio and Messina; but the time was not yet ripe. A century later the two institutions and Italo-Albanians (v.) were established, and only in our own day has their juridical organization been achieved, with their own Ordinaries. From this, the hoped-for fruits may be expected for the revival of the Greek rite, with a view to the apostolate for Union, since there is no longer any reason to speak of I.-G.; nor are the Greek College of S. Atanasio and the other institutions established in Rome for Eastern Christians to be so designated.
For the Italo-Greek rite, V. SORA.