Montalto Uffugo

The Calabrian Church barely adapted, or not at all, to the changes and the forms which came out of the Council of Trent. The regional clergy was, in fact made up, in the most part, by men for whom the priestly state constituted the only path to avoid a future of hardships and misery. People of humble origins but also cadets of aristocratic families often gave rise to the controversial figure of the “savage clergyman”, the protector of bandits if not himself a bandit, more prone to taking up arms and to money than to prayer. Aside from some pastoral visitations which proposed combatting the widespread ignorance among the clergy and to favour the application of the Tridentine decrees, the main novelties in the Calabrian Church were guaranteed by the entrance and proliferation of convents and schools of Religious Orders. In particular, the Jesuits (important Jesuit houses sprang up in Catanzaro, Reggio, Cosenza, Tropea, Monteleone and Paola) which penetrated throughout the territory from the last decades of the sixteenth century onwards, while female convents, especially those of the Clarisses, dominated the region. The firm reaction espressed by the Church of Rome to the spread of Protestant doctrine was, however, at the origin of the best known and ferocious religious persecution in Calabrian history: 1560-61, the abundant Waldensian community, which had taken refuge in the alpine regions in the thirteenth century, and established itself in Calabria, was completely exterminated after having adhered to the reform and having dedicated itself to proselytism.

In a region characterized by great religious complexity, borne out by the permanence of Greek-Orthodox communities in the diocese of Cassano and Bisignano, there are numerous testimonies of the Baroque period in Calabrian religious architecture. Montalto Uffugo, the old feud of the Moncada princes of PaternòA Sicilian city located in the current day province of Catania, Paternò was crown land which was sold to Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada in 1456. In 1565 Paternò was made a principality by Philip II of Spain (1527-1598). From Francesco I Moncada onwards, the first prince of Paternò, the family of Catalan origin governed the city until 1812. and a current town of the province of Cosenza, was a place of vivacious intellectual debate (as evinced by the foundation, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the Accademia Montaltina, The Academy of Montalto, and the Accademia degli Inculti, The Academy of the Ignorant) and of intense religious life. It is located, in fact, in the zone where the Waldensian communities lived until their extermination in 1560-1561 and afterwards where Religious Orders such as the Clarisses and the Carmelites established themselves, founding churches and convents (aside from the ones which were already there). Among the numerous vestiges of the Baroque period are the Carmine Church, that of San Francesco and of Santa Maria della Serra.

<<<—previous page   next page—>>>