PAVIA. - A city and diocese, the capital of the homonymous province in Lombardy.
Covering an area of 290 km², it has a population of 141,348 inhabitants, of whom 141,298 are Catholics, distributed across 98 parishes (15 of them urban); it has 200 diocesan priests and 25 regular clergy, a seminary, 6 male religious communities and 73 female ones (*Ann. Pont. 1952*, p. 313). It is a suffragan of Milan.
I. HISTORY
The origins of the city are to be traced to the Ligurian tribes of the Levi and Marici, who merged with later-arriving Gauls before the Roman conquest, which made it a distinguished *municipium* enrolled in 23 BC in the Papiria tribe.
Christian origins are traced to the arrival of the first bishop, St Syrus, whom a tradition identified with the boy who offered Jesus the loaves and fishes of the multiplication; but this bishop does not antedate the 4th century, and he was buried in the cemetery church of SS Gervasius and Protasius until the 9th century. In the 5th century, St Epiphanius, “father of the fatherland,” brought renown to the see by saving the city when King Odoacer captured the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus (476). During the Gothic rule, the see was held by Ennodius (512–521), the rhetorician and poet, while Severinus Boethius (v.) composed his *De consolatione philosophiae* in the “pater Calventianus” prison and suffered his final execution there (525). When the Lombards occupied Pavia (572), it had an Arian bishop, the last of whom, Anastasius, converted to Catholicism; and at the end of the 7th century Bishop Damian promoted the reconciliation of the dissident Aquileians (cf. *Carmen de synodo Ticinensis*: Filche-Martin-Frutaz, V, p. 425). The city, which the Lombards made their capital, attained great political and economic power thanks also to its flourishing market, which grew further under the Italic kings and the Saxon emperors. After the devastation wrought by the Hungarian invasions (924) had been repaired, Pavia became the seat of diets, councils and royal coronations. In 825 it became a centre of learning, “Second Rome” and “Head of the imperial world”; the bishop enjoyed the use of the pallium and the raised cross, which are still preserved, though he did not attain the political primacy elsewhere enjoyed by bishops. Sometimes popes themselves attended the celebratory councils (John VIII, Gregory V, Benedict VIII, Leo IX).
After the destruction of the royal palace at the death of St Henry II (1024), the commune slowly began to take shape, and the bishop, in whose Curia the citizens had for centuries held their assemblies (“Curia episcopi ubi Papientes faciunt contionem”), was granted some powers and issued diplomas of a certain feudal solemnity, so that this was, albeit within modest limits, the greatest political authority attained by the bishop in his city. During this period the diocese reached its widest extent on the Oltrepò, in conformity with those of the Ghibelline commune, which obtained from Barbarossa a charter of recognition that is like its “Magna Carta” (1164). To this period may also be ascribed the definitive drafting of the *Charta consuetudinum*, which for centuries regulated the activity of the cathedral chapter, rival in importance to that of the distinguished basilica of St Michael the Archangel; and again, through donations by sovereigns, the power of the bishop, so limited within the city, extended instead to several lands on the Oltrepò, in the Piacentine and Milanese areas, which swore loyalty to him as their lord. Finally, in these same centuries there flourished churches in the new Lombard style, which in Pavia assumed a character all its own. Just as, within the city alone, there were counted among collegiate and parish churches a hundred churches in 1250, so hospitals were built for the poor and for wayfarers, the city being at the intersection of major Roman roads. Yet, as the commune gradually
As it consolidates and new needs for offense and defense against neighboring cities arise—first and foremost Milan—the bishop finds his clergy’s and monasteries’ immunities increasingly contested, and even his own residence, bordering the ever-more-imposing commune, is disputed. Hence the voluntary exile and death of Bishop St. Lanfranc (1198), and the stern admonitions addressed to the Pavesi by Innocent III (1208). Yet if the bishop’s political power seems to revive at the dawn of the 13th century—when St. Fulco is appointed head rector of a triumvirate over the city—it is of imperial origin and thus subject to the rapid decline of imperial authority in Italy, even in Ghibelline Pavia itself.
With the inevitable decline of the commune and the rise of the signorie, the city—long contested between the Marquis of Monferrato, the Langoschi, and the Beccaria—finally falls under the Visconti, who inaugurate the early Renaissance, to which the origins of the Certosa and the Castle belong.
In the early period, the predominance of the Ghibelline faction, favoring Louis of Bavaria, over the Guelf “fallabrina” faction provokes the indignation of John XXII, who lays an interdict on the city (1327), lasting a century and a half. Despite these political divisions, however, no trace of any of the thousand heresies then abroad appears to have taken root in Pavia, as is clear from a valuable Descriptio Papiae drawn up in 1330 by the Pavesi Guelf priest Opicino de Canistris, an exile in Avignon with John XXII, before whom he seeks to vindicate his fellow citizens.
To the incalculable damage wrought by the wars at the close of the 15th century and the first decades of the 16th—crowning with the Battle of Pavia (1525), where Francis I was taken prisoner, and the Sack of Pavia (1527)—were added the baleful consequences of a century-long vacancy of the see (1460–1560). Among the bishops of this period were Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, who, with his brother Lodovico il Moro, laid the first stone of the present cathedral (1488), and Cardinal G. B. del Monte, later Julius III.
It was in these years that the celebrated Hospital of St. Matthew was founded in 1449 by Fra Domenico da Catalogna, OP, and the Mount of Piety in 1493 by Bl. Bernardino da Feltre, OFM, to counter Jewish usury. In the second half of the 16th century the diocese was governed by Cardinal Ippolito de’ Rossi, who established the seminary, and St. Alessandro Sauli, both reformers in the light of the Council of Trent. Religious life was purified, and the founding of two free colleges for university students—the “Borromeo” and the “Ghislieri”—by the zeal of St. Charles Borromeo and St. Pius V respectively (1564 and 1569) bears witness to the reform of morals and the defense of Catholic doctrine. An attempt by Caelius Secundus Curio, a reader at the university, to introduce heretical doctrines had already been thwarted after some resistance from the students.
Alongside the Benedictines, the oldest residents, the Augustinian Hermits, the Lateran Canons, the Dominicans, the Humiliati, and the Franciscans, newer orders took root: the Capuchins, the Barnabites, the Somaschi for orphans under the direction of St. Jerome Emiliani himself and the Pavesi patricians Marco Gambarana and Vincenzo Trotti; and the Jesuits for the schools.
The long Spanish domination (1535–1714) saw the labors of good bishops such as Landriani and Francesco Biglia, renowned for his victorious resistance to the Franco-Savoyard besiegers who vainly attacked the city in 1655; Pertusati and Cardinal Durini, intent on implementing the Tridentine decrees and especially fostering the Schools of Christian Doctrine.
Among more recent bishops are remembered Mons. Tosi, L. M. PARROCCHIA (v.), later a cardinal, G. BALLERINI, PAOLO (v.), and Riboldi.
After the Austrians succeeded the Spanish in Lombardy, they introduced civil jurisdictionalist reforms into ecclesiastical affairs, epitomized by the creation of a General Seminary in which Joseph II gathered all the seminarians of Austrian Lombardy under professors Tamburini, Zola, and others. This seminary, which lasted only five years (1786–91), proved a grave material loss to the diocese, which in that quinquennium had to erect another seminary beyond the Ticino at Valenza in Alessandria for its clerics who were subjects of the King of Sardinia, who would not tolerate their attending school in a foreign state where, moreover, the “genuine Thomistic doctrine” was not taught.
In consequence of the political events that had brought the Piedmontese frontier to the Ticino, the diocese—which had extended as far as the Siccomario, the Lomellina, the Oltrepò almost to Bobbio, and into parts of the territories of Asti, Acqui, Alessandria, Tortona, Piacenza, Lodi, and Milan, embracing 187 parishes—was dismembered in favor especially of Vigevano and Tortona and reduced, on its southern flank, within the boundaries marked by the Ticino and the Po.
During the sack of 1796, recalling the horrors of 1527, Bishop Bertieri, together with the municipality, sought clemency from the Adriatic Bonaparte for the wretched city, where some citizens and peasants, rising against the Jacobins, had for a few days held the French garrison at bay.
II. SACRED MONUMENTS
The diocese of Pavia is rich in monuments notable for antiquity and art.
1. Basilicas
Among the Lombard basilicas, the first is St. Michael’s, originally entirely in sandstone, with three naves, a Latin cross plan, and three façades adorned with bas-reliefs. The interior, with galleries over the side aisles and an octagonal lantern on two levels, contains frescoes and a silver crucifix (9th or 11th century). The present church, dating from the 11th and 12th centuries, preserves the memory of the royal coronations of Berengar II, Hugh and Lothar, Arduin, Henry the Saint, and Frederick Barbarossa.
St. Peter in Cielo d’Oro (“in the golden sky,” so called from its gilded ceiling), successor to a 5th- or 6th-century basilica, the present structure of which was consecrated by Innocent II in 1132, is recalled by Dante (Par., X), Petrarch (Sen., V), and Boccaccio (Dec., X, 9). Built of sandstone and brick, it has three naves; in the crypt a small marble area in the Ravenna style houses the relics of Severinus Boethius, venerated as a martyr (d. 525). In the presbytery, the ark containing the relics of St. Augustine, dated 1302, is probably the work of Campionesque masters influenced by Pisan styles.
St. Theodore, entirely of brick, with three naves, dates from the late 12th century and contains frescoes by Bernardino Colombani (16th century) depicting the lives of SS. Theodore and Agnes, as well as a view of Pavia from 1522; its crypt extends beneath the side aisles.
St. Lanfranc, outside the city, is a Latin-cross brick church of the 13th century, housing the ark of St. Lanfranc by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo (15th century) and a delightful 15th-century cloister of terracotta, also by Amadeo.
Of notable importance are the Gothic churches of the Carmine (14th century), entirely of brick with rich Renaissance decoration, and of St. Francis (13th–14th century). On the periphery stands the basilica of the Savior, formerly a Benedictine abbey (15th century).