Perugia, Archdiocese of

PERUGIA, ARCHDIOCESE OF. - City and archdiocese, capital of the province of the same name in Umbria.

It has an area of 1,600 sq km, but for the greater part it is hilly, furrowed in part by the Tiber and washed by the waters of Lake Trasimeno. It borders on the dioceses of Assisi, Foligno, Todi, Orvieto, Città della Pieve, Cortona, Arezzo, Città di Castello and Gubbio; it includes the municipalities of P., Castiglion del Lago, Tuoro sul Trasimeno, Passignano, Lisciano Niccone, Magione, Torgiano, Marsciano, Deruta. It has a population of 166,200 inhabitants, all Catholic, apart from a small Israelite minority. It has 194 parishes distributed among 16 rural vicariates, with 228 secular priests and 65 regulars, a minor seminary, 19 male religious houses and 49 female ones. It is the seat of the regional ecclesiastical tribunal. The cathedral is dedicated to the martyr St. Lawrence.

In Umbria, given its proximity to Rome, Christian communities must have formed very early, and one of the places that in good time became a regularly established diocese is P. (Perusium). It too had its martyrs, among whom is known Constantius, recorded in the Jeronymian Martyrology (Jan. 29). Around his body, buried in the place where the church dedicated to him now stands, there gathered the particular veneration of the Perugians, who later proclaimed him patron of the city. It is a trustworthy tradition that St. Constantius was bishop of P. (Lanzoni, I, p. 548 ff.).

Once the bishop's ecclesiastical authority was firmly fixed within its limits, he also exercised those public powers that later Roman legislation had recognized for him. During the Gothic War, while P. was besieged by Totila's army, the bishop Herculanus was at the head of the city's resistance. When the city was taken, after a long and exhausting siege, he was beheaded by the king on the walls from which he had animated the defense. His body, later exhumed and solemnly buried, became a kind of palladium of the city's liberty and greatness; and the bishop Herculanus, venerated as a martyr, was taken as another protector of the city, and the Perugians continued in the Middle Ages to offer him a particular devotion.

In the 5th century the Christian cult was in full vigor also in its outward expressions: this is attested by the temple of St. Michael the Archangel, still in its typical architectural structure with a circular plan, which arose outside the built-up area, to the north of the city, at a distance from the Etruscan-Roman circuit within which P. was still contained; while to the south, likewise outside the walls, on Monte Capraro, in the place where the monastery of St. Peter was later erected, was the primitive cathedral, which was transferred in the 10th century by the bishop Ruggeri to the hill of Porta Sole, in the center of the city, into the very ancient church of St. Lawrence; hence this saint too became one of the city's protectors. There in the 15th century work was begun on the construction of the cathedral that exists today and is dedicated to him.

In P., the first administrative district of the Exarchate, after a brief Lombard interlude become a Byzantine Duchy, and with the fall of the Exarchate passed to the Church, while the bishop, until the establishment of the Commune, continued his intervention in civil affairs, even without having the government of the city, the episcopal palace must also have been a seat of study and teaching. It has been argued that law was still taught in the episcopal school, from the fact that from time immemorial there was found in the capitular archive, together with the sacred texts, the Summa codicis, known by the name of Summa Perusina, a legal compilation for forensic and also didactic purposes, earlier than the year 1000. But the frequent comings of the pontiffs must have contributed to increasing the importance and prestige of the Church of Perugia, beginning with the first historically attested one, that of Pope Zachary, who by the authority of his word, in the year 749, succeeded in having the siege laid to the city by the Lombard king Ratchis lifted.

P. is Guelph, not far from Rome, and in a secure position: the pontiffs gladly sojourned there; and indeed the Commune, ever jealous and wary of its own liberty even in the face of the Church, made entreaties and offers so that they would fix their stable residence there. At P. were held the Conclaves from which were elected Honorius III (1216), Clement IV (1265), Honorius IV (1285), Celestine V (1294) and lastly Clement V (1305). In the episcopal school it has likewise been thought to discern the first impulse of that civic cultural movement which in the 13th century led to the formation of the University of Perugia, declared a Studium generale by Clement V in 1308, and to which John XXII added the right to confer the doctorate in civil and canon law in 1318, in medicine and arts in 1321; while the Faculty of Theology was established there by Gregory XI in 1371, and it preserved the name for the university even after the decline of that of law, which had already had the great jurists Bartolus and Baldus.

A critical study of the bishops of Perugia has yet to be made. Notable personalities have ascended the chair of Perugia, distinguished for piety, for the care of studies, for their interest in the city's monuments. Closer to our own times are to be remembered Fulvio della Corgna, bishop in 1550, later raised also to the cardinalate, who founded a seminary even before it was prescribed by the Council of Trent; Napoleone Comitoli, elected in 1591; Lucalberto Patrizi, an eminent jurist, elected in 1669; Anton Felice Marsigli, learned in law, letters and the sciences, elected in 1701; Gioacchino Pecci, later Pope Leo XIII, from 1846 to 1878, after having been there from 1841 to 1843 as apostolic delegate of the province of the Papal State. The seminary, which already boasted an illustrious humanistic tradition, having at its beginnings counted, as a teacher, after having had him as a pupil, Marco Antonio Bonciario, one of the major exponents of Perugian culture, owed to Pecci, surrounded by a most cultivated clergy, a revival of religious, philosophical and literary studies. Pecci also made P., with the Academy of St. Thomas, the forerunner in the rebirth of Thomistic philosophy. At present the seminary carries out the lyceum studies; the students of philosophy and theology attend the regional seminary for Umbria in Assisi.

The diocese was elevated to archiepiscopal see by Pope Leo XIII on March 27, 1882, without suffragan sees.

Through the work of Friar Raniero Fasani, the movement of the Disciplinati began in P. around 1260, from which numerous city confraternities took their origin, to which so many works of charity and so many works of art are owed; just as in their dramatic Laudi one can seek the dawn of Italian theater. In P., as its pictorial school testifies, entirely of sacred inspiration, religious sentiments regained fervor through the preaching of St. Bernardino of Siena, who renewed laws and reformed public and private customs; and in his honor the city erected some of its most beautiful artistic monuments. Even amid the sharpest political conflicts with the Papal States, into which the city, with its territory, was definitively absorbed in the 16th century and remained until 1860, religious faith has always remained operative there: in 1631, by decree of the city magistrate, the city was consecrated to the Virgin of the Rosary. Martyrs of the Roman era, hermits of the early Middle Ages, such as St. Bevignate, to whom a church also remains dedicated, cenobites like St. Pietro Vincioli, founder in the 10th century of the monastery of S. Pietro, and other citizens of P. have attained sanctity. The figure of Bl. Colomba remains in particular historical prominence who, though a native of Rieti, is entirely Perugian in life. With her ardor and her austerity, with her pacifying action in the city factions of the Oddi and the Baglioni, she follows the examples of her great Sienese sister. Before Alexander VI she knew how to maintain a severe respect, neither rebellious nor accommodating; yet she had to suffer from the malevolence of Lucrezia Borgia. She was the foundress of the monastery of S. Caterina, of the Dominican Tertiaries, called the Colombe. She died at 34 years of age, on May 20, 1501.

The Benedictine, Franciscan, Dominican Orders, among others, built in P. distinguished monasteries, places of study, and in their appearance monumental. The Benedictine abbey of S. Pietro was embellished for several centuries in its church and in its cloisters with artistic treasures; and in its vast lands of the Tiber Valley it earned merit for the agrarian reclamation of the region. The Preachers, who came to P. in 1220, erected the grand convent of S. Domenico, today destined for the Civic Museums, with its church always imposing, even in its 17th-century remodeling. The Friars Minor had two convents; that of the Conventuals of S. Francesco al Prato, whose church, today in ruins, was begun to be built in the same year as the upper basilica of Assisi and had become the Pantheon of illustrious Perugians; the other, of the Observants of Monte Ripido, rising on the hill where Bl. Egidio of Assisi had his hermitage and died. The Olivetans too built in the 18th century a majestic monastery, designated by the Napoleonic government and later confirmed by Pius VII, in 1815, as the seat of the University of Studies.

Within the diocese, among the sanctuaries of the countryside, toward which the devotion of the faithful converges most because of the prodigious events that stand at their origin, one must recall that of Castel Rigone and that of Ponte della Pietra. A goal of pilgrimages for several centuries was the cathedral of S. Lorenzo itself, for the custody of the Holy Ring, which tradition held to be the nuptial ring of the Virgin. With the cult of her, under the title of the Graces, in the beautiful image, the work of a pupil of Perugino, existing in the Duomo, the religious sentiment of the city has its most vivid expression.

« STRAGI » of P. - The campaign against Austria and the consequent uprisings in the Legations and in central Italy led on June 14, 1859 to the establishment of a provisional government in P. as well.

Its inspirer had been the Sardinian dictator at Florence Carlo Boncompagni, at the instigation of Marquis Filippo Gualterio, with the connivance of about a hundred local innovators and the help of ca. 800 well-armed Tuscan volunteers. The great majority of the urban and rural population remained, as usual, entirely extraneous, but due to the scarcity of the forces of order the energetic apostolic delegate Msgr. Luigi Giordani was forced to withdraw to Foligno. The cardinal archbishop Gioacchino Pecci, later Pope Leo XIII, remained in his place instead, having repeatedly warned the Secretariat of State since the previous April of what was being prepared.

From Foligno, by timely instructions of Cardinal Antonelli, Giordani directed the work of subduing the city, availing himself of 1,700 Swiss commanded by Colonel Antonio Schmidt, of half a battery of artillery, and of ca. 60 gendarmes and 30 finance guards. The Councilor of State Luigi Lattanzi, another precious witness, a person well known in P. for his uprightness and pleasing even to the innovators themselves, was sent in vain to prevent, on June 20 and 21, a useless resistance. Thus, shortly after 3 in the afternoon of the 21st, the city was taken by assault and the Swiss succeeded in overcoming the outer defenses of the Frontone and of the monastery of S. Pietro.

At that very moment the commander of the insurgents, Carlo Bruschi, fleeing with his colleagues of the Provisional Junta toward the Tuscan border, entered the built-up area shouting loudly to those who had been posted on the roofs and at the windows of the houses to continue the resistance to the last drop of blood, firing and throwing upon the troops whatever came to their hands, and this precisely while the white flag was being raised on the town hall.

A bloody scuffle arose from it in the streets and in the houses, and some innocent people were also occasional victims of it. The papal troops, in three hours of fighting, had about 90 men put out of action, largely by treacherous blows; the revolutionaries about 70 dead, a hundred wounded and 120 prisoners. The fatal misunderstanding of continuing fire even after the signal of surrender — a misunderstanding attributable exclusively to the revolutionary leaders, to which were added the material damages suffered, through its own imprudence, by the American Perkins family lodged in the Storti inn, from whose roof the soldiers were fired upon — was widely and tendentiously exploited by Italian and foreign liberal diplomacy and press, and the alleged "massacres" of P. constituted for many years one of the "highlights" of the anticlerical polemic.

Paolo Dalla Torre

ARCHAEOLOGY

In the archaeological museum of P. several Christian inscriptions from Roman cemeteries are preserved: one bears the date 364; but the most notable is that of a child Eutychianus which ends with « Dei Servus » (Ἰησοῦς γρᾶν Ἰχθύς; Fr. J. Dölger, Das Fischsymbol in frühchristlicher Zeit, Rome 1910, pp. 192-97, n. 4). A Christian sarcophagus of the 4th century was reused for the burial of Bl. Giles of Assisi and found in S. Francesco in the 14th century. Known since the 18th century, it was published by G. B. De Rossi (Spicilegio d'archeol. crist. nell'Umbria, in Bull. di arch. christ., 2nd series, 2 [1871], p. 127 and pl. 8; G. Elisei, Di un sarcofago cristiano del sec. IV trovato a P. nel sec. XIV e servito di sepolcro al b. Egidio di Assisi, in N. Bull. di arch. crist., 4 [1898], pp. 9-23); it was re-examined by G. Wilpert (Beiträge zur christlichen Archäologie, in Römische Quartalschrift, 20 [1906], p. 1 ff. and in Sarcofagi, I, pp. 35, 126 and pl. 28, 3). It is divided by columns into seven compartments; Christ the Teacher is in the center, Saints at the sides, on the lid two scenes of Glory and in the titulus the inscription (15th century): « beati Egidi sepulchrum ».

In the eastern zone of P. in 1717, among the ruins of a building, a treasure was found with 61 gold coins of the emperor Justin and 77 aurei of Justinian together with fibulae, rings and a silver disc with the inscription « De donis Dei et Domini Petri utere felix cum gaudio » (CIL, XI, 2089). G. B. De Rossi supposed that it was a gift offered by Pope Vigilius to Belisarius (Bull. arch. crist. cit., p. 147). In S. Prospero in P. there is a ciborium supported by 4 columns dated to the end of the 8th century with the four faces decorated with interlace and rosettes and on the main face a cross and two peacocks. Inside was an altar with a table provided with a cavity to hold relics (Ph. Rohault de Fleury, La Messe, II, Paris 1883, see index). - See pl. LXXXI.

Enrico Josi