VENTIMIGLIA, DIOCESE OF. - It has an area of 715.50 sq km., with 101,000 inhabitants, of whom 155 are non-Catholics. It has 82 parishes and an autonomous vicariate curata; 254 churches and oratories public, 5 sanctuaries, 3 basilicas, 2 collegiate churches, 133 diocesan priests, 50 regulars; it has a seminary, 11 male religious houses with 120 professed religious, 60 female religious houses with 384 professed religious, 1 female generalate of pontifical right; 10 male colleges and schools with 400 pupils, 17 female colleges and schools with 2000 pupils; 2 charitable institutes with 50 inmates.
I. ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE DIOCESE
V. (Albium Intemelium of the Ligurians, Albium intemelium of the Romans) was one of the most flourishing municipia of maritime Liguria and, because of its position along the Via Julia Augusta between Italy and Gaul, was naturally open to the first evangelizing currents directed toward the West. The Roman city stood on the plain of Nervia, east of the present center; but at the decline of Roman civilization it was destroyed and gradually abandoned, between the 5th and 8th centuries, and ended by transferring itself, with all its urban and ecclesiastical prerogatives, to the fortified hill west of the Roia, where it lived until the last century and where the bishop's see still is.
The city's earliest religious vicissitudes are still obscure; they must have unfolded in the center of the Roman city at Nervia, the seat of the first bishops and of the first cathedral, which has disappeared. A local martyr of very doubtful origin and pertinence is St. Secondus, ascribed to the Theban legion, whose cult acquired importance especially from the 17th century onward. The cult of St. Ampelius as well, localized on Cape Bordighera, is embellished with legendary particulars and cannot be documented before the 12th century. The first known bishop is John, present at the Roman Council of the year 680; one must then come to 1045 to find another securely documented bishop, Thomas. Given the great power assumed in this period by the counts of V., independent lords of the Comitatus that extended over the entire territory of the diocese, it does not appear that the bishops ever had any appreciable influence in temporal power. From the 12th century onward, the Benedictines of the abbey of Lérins, on the Provençal coast, held extensive possessions in the diocese. When, in the 13th century, V. fell under Genoese conquest and the Comitatus of V. was divided between Genoa and Provence (Treaty of Aix of 1261), the bishop maintained unchanged his jurisdiction over the territory of several states and lordships (Genoa and Provence until 1388; thereafter Genoa and Piedmont, besides the Marquisate of Dolceacqua and the Principality of Monaco); the bishop thus found himself in a very delicate position, and among the rival powers he long maintained the spiritual unity of the diocesan territory. The most notable repercussion of the centrifugal forces that nonetheless operated within the diocese occurred on the occasion of the Western Schism, when, V. having remained faithful to the Roman Pope together with the parishes subject to Genoa, a bishopric was created by the antipopes of Avignon at Sospel, which had its own bishops from 1360 to 1411, for the territory under Angevin dominion. Once the unity of the diocese was restored, the bishops of V. often exercised a balancing and pacifying function in relations among the neighboring states, not without suffering, especially in the 18th century, the consequences of the struggle between Genoa and Savoy, down to the French Revolution.
In 1802 the diocese was dismembered, with the western half of its territory (formerly belonging to Savoy and now passed to France) being assigned to the diocese of Nice; it was left reduced to only 15 parishes and ran the risk of suppression; in 1806 it was also detached from the Milanese Church, of which it had remained a suffragan, and assigned to the archdiocese of Aix. In 1820, however, after Napoleon's fall, the diocese was reassigned to the archdiocese of Genoa; and it was then reconstituted in 1831 in a new form, with the restoration of the parishes of the Nervia Valley and with the assignment of a large territory taken from the neighboring diocese of Albenga (Sanremo and Taggia, with the entire Argentina valley and adjacent areas), in compensation for the parishes lost to the West to the definitive advantage of Nice. Tenda and Briga were restored to it in 1886, having remained Italian after the annexation of Nice to France; they were again detached from it in favor of Nice in 1947.
II. BISHOPS AND DISTINGUISHED FIGURES
The series of the bishops of V. is uncertain and full of gaps up to the 12th century, because of the general scarcity of documents from the early Middle Ages: those inserted by local historians between 680 and 1045 are doubtful or apocryphal. It becomes continuous beginning with Bishop Cornelius, who in 1146 intervened in the dispute between the Chapter and the monks of S. Michele. Worthy of special mention are: Benedetto Boccanegra (1382-1409), who struggled strenuously to save the prestige and unity of the diocese during the schism; the Milanese Carlo Visconti (1562-65), who took part in the Council of Trent and was one of the first bishops to establish the seminary in his diocese (1564); Msgr. Francesco Galbiati da Pontremoli (1573-1600), a disciple and intimate of Card. Borromeo, who devoted himself to restoring the prestige of Catholicism against the Reformation, which had become particularly established in the mountain territories of the diocese; Msgr. Mauro Promontorio (1654-85), who carried out great religious activity and at the same time intervened several times in the disputes between Genoa and the Duchy of Savoy; Msgr. Domenico Clavarini (1775-97), who courageously opposed the oppressive acts of the French revolutionaries and died of grief over them. Among the most recent, mention is still made of Msgr. Giovanni Battista De Albertis (1831-36), Msgr. Lorenzo Battista Biale (1837-77), Msgr. Tommaso Reggio (1877-93) and Msgr. Ambrogio Daffra (1893-1932), all men of elevated culture and distinguished piety, who helped raise again the fortunes of the diocese mutilated by political events and reconstitute its religious and spiritual unity in a new form.
V. has also given the Church certain blesseds, in the 15th and 16th centuries: the bl. Guglielmo da V., a Franciscan, who died apparently in 1430; the bl. Serafino da Castiglione, also a Franciscan and also dead in 1430; the bl. Tommaso Stridonio, a Franciscan, who died in 1520. Also to be remembered are Fr. Agostino da V., a Capuchin, who made a name for himself during the plague in Genoa of 1579, and finally Fr. Angelico Aprosio, an Augustinian, a seventeenth-century man of letters of great fame, who in 1647 founded in V. the first library of Liguria, the Biblioteca Aprosiana, still linked to his name.
III. MONUMENTS AND SANCTUARIES
The Cathedral is of Lombard origin; its present structures date from the 11th and 12th centuries, with later adaptations (it was restored on the exterior in 1950); it stands at the center of the medieval city, together with the Baptistery (11th century) and the church of St. Michael (11th-13th century), a Romanesque building of great importance also for its history. The basilica of St. Syrus in Sanremo (14th century, on earlier Romanesque structures) has become a co-cathedral; it is the center of the new part of the diocese, detached from the bishopric of Albenga: it was already the seat of a "chorepiscopus," dependent on the archbishop of Genoa, in the 6th-8th centuries, and is linked to the memories of St. Syrus and St. Romulus, bishops of Genoa.
Also in the newly acquired part of the diocese are the principal sanctuaries: the basilican Sanctuary of the Sacred Heart in Bussana; the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Costa in Sanremo, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Guard, also in Sanremo, and especially the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lampedusa near Taggia, which arose in the 17th century from a vow made by a shipwrecked man who had come by sea from the island of Lampedusa. The loss of the ancient territory to the north has deprived the diocese of two other greatly venerated sanctuaries: Our Lady of Poggio at Saorgio and Our Lady of Fontan at Briga Marittima.
The convent of St. Dominic at Taggia is the major center of monastic culture, with a notable artistic heritage, including the principal works of the most distinguished Ligurian painter of the 15th century, Ludovico Brea.