medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Okay, so Verona's Sant'Anastasia really had a lot more to do medievally
with saint Peter Martyr than with saint Anastasia of Sirmium and
elsewhere. By way of compensation, herewith some further Anastasiana
from medieval Italian territory.
The abbey church of Santa Maria in Sylvis, an eighth-century foundation
(762) at today's Sesto al Reghena (PN) in Friuli-Venezia Giulia
contains in its crypt this sarcophagus of St. Anastasia:
http://tinyurl.com/dryn3
Considered a masterpiece of Lombard sculpture, it may be a reworked
abbatial throne.
Today's Zadar in Croatia, probably still better known to many under its
Italian name of Zara (Latin: Iadera), was under Venetian "protection"
and then rule intermittently from 1097 to 1193 and was again Venetian
from 1202 to 1358. Its italianate cathedral of Sv. Stosija (S.
Anastasia), housing a sarcophagus containing A.'s supposed remains
(translated from Constantinople), was built in two phases, one in the
twelfth century and one in the thirteenth. The facade, incorporating
an earlier rose window under the smaller upper one, dates from 1324;
the belltower is chiefly modern. The church was levelled by bombing in
World War II; most of what one sees today is therefore reconstruction.
A few exterior views follow:
http://branimir.com/photos/zadar/donat/Pages/Image7.html
http://www.zadar.hr/data/263/b_stosija2.jpg
http://branimir.com/photos/zadar/donat/Pages/Image6.html
http://branimir.com/photos/zadar/donat/Pages/Image13.html
http://branimir.com/photos/zadar/donat/Pages/Image10.html
http://branimir.com/photos/zadar/donat/Pages/Image8.html
Apse view (the polygonal church on the left is Sv. Donat):
http://www.globalgeografia.com/album/croazia/zara.jpg
Interior view:
http://www.zadar.hr/data/263/b_stosija3.jpg
At Sale San Giovanni (CN) in southern Piedmont is a rural chapel
dedicated to A. but now also called that of Sant'Anna:
http://tinyurl.com/cqerk
A Benedictine foundation from the year 1050, this is said to contain
frescoes much older than the late fifteenth-century ones for which it
is known. A very brief, Italian-language account is here:
http://www.comune.salesangiovanni.cn.it/PercorsiT.asp
In Sardinia, the town of Tissi (SS) boasts an orginally twelfth-century
"Pisan romanesque" church of Sant'Anastasia:
http://www.ilportalesardo.it/monumenti/sstissi.htm
Further south on the island, the much rebuilt church of Sant'Anastasia
at Sardara (CA) is also said to be twelfth-century in origin:
http://tinyurl.com/7msfr
http://www.paradisola.it/foto-sardegna/pic.asp?iCat=83&iPic=1372
http://www.paradisola.it/foto-sardegna/pic.asp?iCat=83&iPic=1376
A brief mention and an Italian-language and an English-language page:
http://www.romecity.it/Santanastasia.htm
http://roma.katolsk.no/anastasia.htm
suffice for Rome's titular (and stational) church of Sant'Anastasia.
A late antique structure heavily rebuilt in the early modern period,
this is said to contain a chalice possibly used by saint Jerome. The
name of the church is thought to derive from that of its ancient
founder, an Anastasia, and was later adapted to the developing cult of
A., perhaps through an intermediate intitulation to the Holy
Resurrection (in Greek: Hagia Anastasis) in the fourth or fifth century.
In the former territories of the Regno but now in Lazio is the town of
Borgorose (RI; until 1960, Borgocollefegato), whose church of
Sant'Anastasia at what was known medievally as Collefegato (for those
who know some Italian, I hasten to point out that this toponym is
sounded as a paroxytone and is said to signify 'infeudated hill'),
already recorded in 1182, was massively rebuilt after an earthquake in
1703. A "romanesque" portal and rose window survive in this building
but the only pertinent web-based view I could quickly find is of a
gilded silver crucifix from 1397 formerly in the possession of this
church:
http://tinyurl.com/7z7u5
The early ninth-century frescoes in the Crypt of Abbot Epiphanius at San
Vincenzo al Volturno in Molise's Isernia Province include a scene of
four virgins:
http://www.infinito.it/utenti/davimon/loadvinc/epifanio30a.jpg
The art historian Pietro Toesca, who examined these paintings at the
beginning the last century, reported that one of them bore the faint
legend SCA ANASTASIA. (A. also figures in the Procession of Virgins
[later 560s] in Ravenna's Sant'Apollinare Nuovo.)
In Campania, Sant'Anastasia (NA) on the north slope of Vesuvius is
locally said to be first recorded as Sanctus Nastasius (vel sim.) but to
be documented under its present name by around the year 1000***; despite
our A.'s reported designation by Leo XIII as its patron saint, in ca.
1595 an historian of Matera, writing of the latter's early
sixteenth-century count who hailed from here, could still refer to the
town as Santo Nastaso. Its oldest church now is Santa Maria la Nova,
built in 1546 on the site of a thirteenth-century predecessor also
dedicated to the BVM. That building's apse, seen here, is shown for
purposes of comparison with those of the Chiesa Madre of Motta
Sant'Anastasia (CT):
http://utenti.lycos.it/neapolis/santa_trivio1.jpg
The town's present patron saint is Francis Xavier.
A small Greek monastery dedicated to A. near Matino (LE) on the
Salentine Peninsula is first attested from 1099; in the later Middle
Ages it was a dependency of the larger Greek house of San Mauro near
Gallipoli. The monastery was dissolved in the fifteenth century but
its chapel survived until the seventeenth (when it was replaced by a
fairly standard rural church). A recent study is Aldo De Bernart's
_Una fondazione bizantina nel basso Salento. Santa Anastasia a Matino_
(Galatina: Congedo, 1990).
A more substantial deep southern dedication to A. is the cathedral of
Santa Severina (KR) in Calabria, built from 1274 to 1295 over an early
eleventh-century predecessor and repeatedly rebuilt from the seventeenth
to the early twentieth century:
http://tinyurl.com/bcgtv
http://www.i-m-patron.gr/news2/images/italia_patriarch_04.jpg
The adjacent eighth- or ninth-century baptistery (not its original
function) preserves an early medieval baptismal font. Herewith an
exterior and an interior view of this structure, considered the oldest
surviving building from Byzantine Calabria (but the entrance shown is of
course late medieval):
http://tinyurl.com/aakvs
http://www.ilpetilino.it/paesi/img/ss2.jpg
This distinctly non-medieval reliquary in Santa Severina's Museo
Diocesano is said to contain a relic of A. donated by the city's late
eleventh-century Norman conqueror, Robert Guiscard:
http://www.zeromedia.it/santaseverina/galleria/Braccio1.jpg
Santa Severina is perched on a cliff:
http://web.tiscalinet.it/siberene/santa.htm
and is notable not only for its big church but also for its castle:
http://tinyurl.com/8ym7t
The same is true for Motta Sant'Anastasia (CT) in eastern Sicily
(that's Mt. Etna in the background):
http://www.siciliatourist.tv/etnatv/sud/mottanastasia47.jpg
http://www.babbidamotta.it/ingiro/img24.jpg
The 'Motta' part of its name is the equivalent of French 'motte' and
has the same basic meaning. The most probable explanation of
the 'Sant'Anastasia' part is that it too once referred to the eminence
upon which the town sits and that its original form, in Greek, was
Anastasis (not Resurrection this time but rather the more generic
Upstanding). In Sicilian Arabic it was Nastasiah. The conversion to a
"saintly" toponym, already attested in the eleventh century, will have
been analogous to the development of Santa Severina from ancient
Siberene. Although our Anastasia is the town's patron saint, her relic
in its Chiesa Madre (now dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary) arrived
only in 1703, officially replacing an earlier one dubiously claimed to
have been brought to the town in 1408.
Motta Sant'Anastasia's Chiesa Madre is a thirteenth-century building
that underwent considerable modification in the later fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, when the extension on the rear and and the
addition of the lateral apses converted it to a Latin-cross plan:
http://tinyurl.com/cfmok
http://www.scuolamotta.it/medmotta/images/mura6.jpg
The facade and belltower are from the eighteenth century:
http://www.prolocomottasantanastasia.it/images/chiesa.jpg
http://www.babbidamotta.it/ingiro/page9.html
The castle is really a Norman keep, constructed between 1070 and 1074
and given to the bishop of Catania in 1091. In the later Middle Ages
it became a baronial possession. Renovated in the fifteenth century,
it was restored in the twentieth and now serves as a hall for
gatherings and special events. Some views follow:
http://www.prolocomottasantanastasia.it/images/dongione.jpg
http://www.icastelli.it/regioni/sicilia/catania/Mottasanta_hr.jpg
A sequence of views is here:
http://www.siciliatourist.tv/etnatv/sud/mottacastello.htm
This is how it looked in the early twentieth century, when the town had
just acquired it from its former baronial family:
http://tinyurl.com/dn8wh
Best,
John Dillon
*** Paul Arthur, _Naples, From Roman Town to City-State: An
Archaeological Perspective_ (London: British School at Rome, 2002), p.
94, asserts that the place was named for the female saint A. of Sirmium.
But -- in striking contradistinction to his usual practice -- he
neither cites an early medieval name-form for it nor provides a date of
the locality's first attestation.
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