Ritualizing the City

The city has always been, and remains, the ideal place of collective rituality. It is the city that has hosted, since Antiquity, collective celebrations of victory, important religious ceremonies, but also ritual consecrations of the elite. Based on these essential notions, the aim of this book is to reflect on a specific issue: the interaction between ritual and city space. Our wish is to understand, in a multidisciplinary and cross-epochal approach, how a collective liturgy, civic or religious, can unfold within the public space and transform it. In addition to sacred buildings and seizures of power, the square and the streets become in this sense important identity-shaping loci. Bringing places of power to the street or the square – which are by definition liminal spaces – means entering into a dialogue constructed between those who organise the ritual, those who perform it and those who witness it. It seems that it is in compromise between the different components of society that collective rituals can happen within the public space. Therefore, it is no surprise that the crucial question for this book is the way in which this same space is adapted to the requirements of the ritual, or, on the contrary, how the ritual adapts to the space.

• Ivan Foletti, Adrien Palladino, Introduction. Performativity and Construction of the City: An Archetypal Question?
• I. The Ritual Construction of Rome
• Sible de Blaauw, Urban Liturgy: The Conclusive Christianization of Rome
• Antonín Kalous, Through the Gates and the Streets of the City: Cardinals and Their Processions in Rome in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries
• II. Tourism as Ritual
• Zeynep Aktüre, Ephesus as Ritual Space: From Roman Civic to Modern Tourist Processions
• Olena Kovalenko, Following Ilyich’s Footsteps: Soviet Pilgrimage Tourism and the Moscow City Space
• Alexandra Lichá, Rites of Colonial Past-age
• III. Constructing Space and Identity Through Ideology
• Thomas Renard, Collective Performances and Architectural Restorations: Image Creation and Historical Identity in Unified Italy
• Maria Axenti, Urban Transformations as an Ideological Tool of Political Regimes: The Case of the Chisinau City Centre
• Franco Frescura, The Farmer, the Preacher and the Freemason: Dutch Colonial Settlement at the Cape of Good Hope
• IV. The Movement of Persons as Vector of Unity
• Tomáš Malý, Civic Ritual, Space and Imagination: The Coronation of the Icon from Brno (1736)
• Tamara Elena Pérez Hernández, Religious Festivities or Collective Performances: The “Creolization” of European Liturgies in Puerto Rican Urban Space
• Antonio Lavarello, Beijing as a Built Ritual
• Index of Names
• Index of Places

• Ivan Foletti

• Adrien Palladino

• Zeynep Aktüre

• Maria Axenti

• Sible de Blaauw

• Franco Frescura

• Antonín Kalous

• Olena Kovalenko

• Antonio Lavarello

• Alexandra Lichá

• Tomáš Malý

• Tamara Elena Pérez Hernández

• Thomas Renard

• Copertina ad alta risoluzione
• Scheda PDF