QUARANTORE. — To honor Jesus Christ during the forty hours in which He lay dead in the sepulchre, a practice of placing the consecrated Host, hidden in a special altar fashioned like a sepulchre, entered the liturgical usage at an imprecisely dated time.
This devotion, under the precise title of *Oratio quadraginta horarum*, was practiced by the *Battuti* of Zara even before 1214 in the church of St. Sylvester during the last three days of Holy Week; it was then inherited by the Franciscans of the Regular Third Order in that city from 1439 onward, where the Confraternity of the *Coena Domini* of the Forty Hours also arose. The transition from this form to the present form of exposing the Blessed Sacrament for forty continuous hours for the adoration of the faithful, to beg the Lord’s mercy—especially in times of calamity such as plagues and wars—occurred in 1527 in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Milan, at the initiative of the Augustinian Antonio Bellotto of Ravenna (d. 1528), who established the School of the Holy Sepulchre for this purpose and arranged for the devotion to be repeated there even outside Holy Week. The Spanish Dominican Tommaso Nieto introduced the same practice in the cathedral of Milan and had it repeated several times in 1529 in the form of a three-day Eucharistic procession.
The most solemn form, introduced in 1537, of exposing the Blessed Sacrament on a special altar in the cathedral of Milan and arranging for turns among the city’s churches, came from the simultaneous initiative of St. Anthony Mary Zaccaria (q.v.) with his Clerics Regular (Barnabites), his spiritual son, the independent hermit Fra Buono of Cremona (d. 1547), and their Capuchin friend Giuseppe Piantanida of Fermo, who promoted it during his preaching in the cathedral that same year. Paul III approved the practice with an apostolic brief of 28 August 1537, requested by the vicar general of Milan, also on behalf of the governor and the Milanese people. In 1567, St. Charles Borromeo regulated its observance, and in 1577 he prescribed it for all the churches of the diocese.
The Capuchins, enthusiastic about the new practice of the Forty Hours, became its promoters in other Italian cities. The aforementioned Giuseppe da Fermo (d. 1556) brought it to Pavia in 1537 and later to Gubbio, Borgo San Sepolcro, Arezzo, Bologna, Faenza, etc., and in 1571 published in Milan the *Method* or instructions on the manner to be observed for celebrating devoutly and fruitfully the prayer of the Forty Hours. In 1564 they were introduced in Udine. Francesco da Suriano (d. 1567) spread them in Spoleto, Perugia, and other places in Umbria; Giacinto Natta of Casale and Bellinanti of Salò (q.v.) also published a *Treatise on the Holy Prayer of the Forty Hours* (Brescia, 1588). The Capuchins were joined by their confreres, the Friars Minor; it is known, for instance, that in Lucca the Forty Hours were introduced in 1562 by Fr. Giovanni Antonio da Busseto, a Friar Minor Observant. They were not surpassed by the Jesuits: Girolamo Ottello introduced them in Messina in 1553; Fulvio Androsio in Mendola in 1556; Giovanni Guerra in Amelia in 1559; Niccolò Bobadilla in Amatrice in 1566; Carlo Mastrilli in Palermo in 1591. From their respective colleges, the Society also introduced them in Macerata (1556), Siena (1563), and Manfredonia (1574). In Verona, in 1571, the College of the 300 Confraternity members for the Forty Hours was established, and in Venice at the beginning of 1584 the Company of the *Emeronetti*, i.e., the adorers of a temple and nocturnal adorers of the Forty Hours. In Padua, they were first held in the cathedral during the last three days of Carnival in 1600, promoted by Patriarch Marco Corner.
St. Philip Neri introduced the Forty Hours to Rome in 1548 in the church of the Most Holy Trinity of the Pilgrims, a well-known cenacle of his congregation. From there, in 1551, it passed to the church of St. Lawrence in Damaso, whose Company of Death added to its title: *and of Prayer*, committing to repeat the Forty Hours every third Sunday of the month; this practice was approved by a brief from Paul IV on 5 November 1560. Foreseeing imminent calamities for the homeland and the Church, Clement VIII, on 25 November 1592, with the bull *Graves et diuturnae*, prescribed the continuous daily and nocturnal observance of the Forty Hours in the principal churches of Rome, including those of the Regulars and confraternities, and he himself began it with his court in the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican on the 29th of the same month. The bull was accompanied by a list of the churches and the *Instruction for Making the Continuous Prayer of the Thirty-Five Hours*, quite distinct from the analogous *Instruction* of Clement XI of 20 January 1705.
Urban VIII, with the encyclical *Aeternus rerum Conditor* of 6 August 1623, imposed the celebration of the Forty Hours in all the churches of the world.
In Paris, they had been introduced by the Jesuit Edmond Auger as early as 1574; in Annemasse and Thonon in 1597–1598 by St. Francis de Sales; in Brussels in 1624 by the Capuchin Giacinto Natta of Casale, who had established the Congregation of the Cross of Gold and Flame for this purpose; in Spain, the Friars Minor were entrusted with them by Urban VIII with a brief of 8 March 1624.
With the passage of time, the rite of the continuous Forty Hours, including nocturnal adoration, has remained only in Rome, where the members of the Nocturnal Adoration, instituted by Canon Giacomo Sinibaldi in 1809, divide into two shifts and still recite the prayers proposed by Giulio Natalini (d. 1678), canon of St. Lawrence in Damaso. In other places, for various reasons, the custom has prevailed of exposing the Blessed Sacrament for three continuous days. The Holy See granted the remission of the attached indulgences even in this manner. These indulgences may also be gained where the “day of adoration” is instituted, which takes place in turn in all the parishes of a diocese.
QUARENGHI, GIACOMO — Interior of the church of the monastery of St. Scholastica, rebuilt in 1776 — Subiaco.