Religious Rituals and Territorial Transformations

This type of research has developed around the case of a party known exceedingly, both in its size folklore, and in its social implications: that of Santa Rosalia in Palermo held on separate days between July and September of each year. Such an analysis is developed both through the support of documents or through a series of field observations carried from 2007 to 2013. The case of Santa Rosalia in Palermo has several special features that place it in the foreground on the issue of territorial changes. The festival brings together different expressions and turns out to be a real container in which converge religious devotion, penitential rites, local identity, ecclesial and institutional presence. The feast of Santa Rosalia is also a stage on which transit institutions and civil society, a terrace from which one can admire the society in which this Palermo and admires herself. His being part of a centuries-old tradition raises questions about its significant transformation: this road the Feast of Santa Rosalia also functions as a detector, another, of the processes of cultural change that cross the society and culture of Palermo. The hypothesis on which orients the entire research then see the Feast of Santa Rosalia as a real container in which an institutional dimension secular converge, a playful and popular, an institutional dimension of the Church, and finally a form of devotion. These different dimensions take a dynamic and make it explicit through processions, altars, and the pilgrimage. The institutional dimension (secular and ecclesiastical) on one side and the popular play (also secular and ecclesiastical) on the other, are in mutual dependence between them and are constantly traced to a shift still provisional. For a change in institutional languages, which is expressed through a constant change of conceptual frameworks with which the event is reinterpreted, is counterbalanced by a similar transformation of languages recreational and devotional ones. These so end up opening new dimensions and new profiles constantly redrawing of the party.