2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

gacs (NYU), and Antonella Pelizzari (Hunter College/CUNY), and
in attending many initiatives related to the critical area of ​Italian
studies. Useful stimuli and reflections also grew out of my attending
the Seminar on Modern Italian Studies, held at Columbia, as well as
seminars and lectures held at the Department of Italian and introduced
and commented upon by Paolo Valesio.
Briefly, my research project focuses on the relationship between
a work of art from the eighteenth century, a Via Crucis or
Sacro Monte made by Beniamino Simoni, and a contemporary passion
play that uses the entire local population of the small village of
Cerveno, in Valcamonica, in the Northern Italian province of Brescia.
Combining the theoretical and methodological tools of cultural
and social anthropology, and of the history of art and of Christianity,
my study reconstructs the story of the relationship briefly
summarized above, from its eighteenth-century origins up to the
2012 representation. I’m considering: a) the relationship between
counter-reformation preaching as expressed for example in Leonardo
di Porto Maurizio’s sermons, and popular religion in the first
half of the eighteenth century, as it emerges from archival sources;
b) the dynamics of the commission, design and construction of the
artwork as recorded in the complex existing documentation in parish,
episcopal, notarial, and state archives and numerous personal
testimonies transcribed in printed sources which have survived to
the present day; c) the structure of the work as a whole and in its
details, reconstructed through a detailed analysis of photographs
and video graphics; d) contemporary popular memory, organized
in mythological forms, and arranged on a generational basis (the
elderly, the young), relative to the construction of the Via Crucis of
Simoni; e) historical evidence of the living representations of the
past, through printed texts, photographs, films, and videos; f) the
preparations for the modern representation during the biennium
2011-2012; and g) the performance of the Passion in 2012.
I pay particular attention to outlining the social dynamics that
govern the contemporary event, from the critical perspective of the
centrality of the festival as a symbol of identity and means of building
community social roles and status, and as a means of relating the
local and global dimension. My study will also focus on the relation-
| 44