Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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soon led the Time-Life group to abandon the project. The magazine was taken over by

Arnoldo’s son Giorgio, who transformed it into a weekly newsmagazine modelled on the

American Newsweek; by 1968 it was selling over 100,000 copies per issue. In a climate

of accelerating political and social change, the magazine came to focus ever more on

news and current affairs, significantly adopting the subtitle ‘I fatti separati dalle opinioni’

(the facts separated from opinions). As the 1970s progressed, Panorama became more

politically active, denouncing terrorism and government corruption, uncovering scandals

and supporting progressive liberal campaigns in favour of divorce and abortion.

Given its new direction, the magazine soon became locked into fierce competition

with its rival newsmagazine, L’Espresso (by 1980 both magazines were selling close to

300,000 copies each). A series of financial takeovers in the late 1980s brought Panorama

under the control of television and media magnate Silvio Berlusconi. During the 1990s

the magazine became ever more closely identified with his political line, in the later

1990s waging an open campaign against both the Ulivo centre-left governments and

Berlusconi’s nemesis, Antonio Di Pietro.

GINO MOLITERNO

Paolini, Giulio

b. 5 November 1940, Genoa

Artist

Paolini briefly exhibited under the rubric of arte povera in the late 1960s. From his debut

in 1961, his activity explored the structures and rationale of making art, working on the

rudimentary materials—canvas, frame, pots of paint—rather than on representations. He

then focused on the figure of the artist and the viewer. His Young Man Looking at

Lorenzo Lotto (1967)—a photograph of the portrait—wittily reversed the position of

artist and spectator. It anticipated a career-long dialogue with art history in which canonic

works appeared in photographs or plaster reproductions, suggesting a circularity whereby

the past is continuously reinterpreted. Often associated with conceptual art, Paolini’s

historicism displays a European if not an Italian sense of artistic language. His interests

also draw him to stage and costume design.

Further reading

Bonito Oliva, A. (1984) Dialoghi d’artista (Artists’ Dialogues) Milan: Electa.

ROBERT LUMLEY

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Pareyson, Luigi

b. 4 February 1918, Piasco, Cuneo

Philosopher

Professor of philosophy at the University of Turin since 1964, Pareyson was one of the

first interpreters and commentators of existentialism in Italy. From existentialism,

Pareyson develops an original elaboration of an ontology of the self which permeates his

most seminal work, Estetica (Aesthetics) (1954). In opposition to the Crocean aesthetic

based on ideal intuition (see Croce), Pareyson proposes an aesthetic based on the actual

process of ‘making’, of transforming matter into artefact. It is only by focusing on the

different stages and moments of this process, he argues, that one can gain insight into the

essence and meaning of the aesthetic object itself. This processual knowledge is arguably

subjective and changes according to the agent of creation. Subjectivity is fundamental to

Pareyson’s philosophy and central to his discussion of interpretation which is based on

the capacity of the individual to decode meanings. It follows that interpretation, and the

meanings arrived at through interpretation, are plural and multifarious and forever

susceptible to change. The influence of Pareyson’s philosophy of interpretation is clearly

visible in the works of some of his most illustrious students, among them Gianni Vattimo

and Umberto Eco.

PAOLO BARTOLONI

Parise, Goffredo

b. 8 December 1929, Vicenza; d. 31 August 1986, Treviso

Novelist and journalist

The literary career of Goffredo Parise (born Goffredo Bertoli) began with the 1951

publication of Il ragazzo morto e le comete (The Dead Boy and the Comets). Given the

prevailing neorealist imperative at the time, the fairy-tale qualities of the novel marked

Parise as eccentric and affiliated to no recognizable literary school. After the success of Il

prete hello (The Handsome Priest) (1954) and the less popular Il fidanzamento (The

Engagement) (1956), Parise published the satirical Il padrone (The Boss) (1965), which

abandoned the provincial settings of his earlier works in order to broach the broader

theme of alienation in a metropolis of the ‘economic miracle’. His journalistic writings

were collected in Cara Cina (Dear China) (1966) and Due, tre cose sul Vietnam (Two or

Three Things on Vietnam) (1967), while his two Sillabari—alphabetically arranged

vignettes on love and life—also found great critical favour, the second winning the

coveted Strega Prize in 1982. L’odore del sangue (The Smell of Blood), a study of sexual

jealousy written in 1979, was published posthumously in 1997.

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Further reading

Crotti, I. (ed.) (1997) Goffredo Parise, Florence: Olschki.

DAVE WATSON

Parliament

For practically the entire postwar period, Parliament, together with the political parties,

has been the source of power in Italy or rather, Parliament has been the main stage where

the parties’ power has been exercised. The Republic has seen thirteen legislatures from

1948 to 1996, in addition to the original Constituent Assembly (1946–8) which acted as

a single chamber legislature.

The Italian Parliament is composed of two chambers: the upper house or Senate is

located in Palazzo Madama while the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, is in

Palazzo Montecitorio. Both houses have equal legislative powers so that bills have to be

passed with the identical text by both houses before becoming law. Originally the number

of deputies and senators was proportional to the electorate, but since 1963 the number has

been fixed at 630 for the Chamber and 315 for the Senate. The retiring President of the

Republic automatically becomes a life senator, and presidents may create up to five life

senators from men or women of distinction in the arts (Eduardo De Filippo and Eugenio

Montale), in industry (Gianni Agnelli—see Agnelli family) or in politics (Giulio

Andreotti).

Until 1975, the age of voters for the Chamber of Deputies was set at twenty-one years

but was then lowered to eighteen. Deputies are elected for five years and candidates must

be at least twenty-five. Originally the Chamber was elected through a system of

proportional representation with preferential votes, but in 1993 it was changed to a mixed

system with three-quarters of the seats allotted on a first past the post basis and one-

quarter allotted proportionally with a 4 per cent threshold.

Senate electors must be twenty-five and candidates at least forty. Originally the Senate

had a sixyear mandate, changed to five years in 1963. In practice, the Senate electoral

system has followed that of the Chamber. The Speaker of the Senate is the second highest

office in the land, with the Senate Speaker taking over if the President of the Republic

is unable to carry out his functions. Despite this, and in spite of theoretically equal

powers, the Chamber has more prestige than the Senate and almost all prime ministers

have come from the lower house.

The speakers of both houses are expected to show fairness but are not required to be

completely above party politics; they are elected as part of the powersharing mechanism

for the distribution of posts in government and the public service. Given the lack of a

strong executive, at least until 1994—and in practice later—this has meant that

parliamentary business was not controlled by government as in most other parliamentary

democracies but by the Speaker together with party secretaries, parliamentary group

chiefs and faction leaders.

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There are two other characteristics of the Italian Parliament which distinguish it from

most others and which have coloured its work. The first is that if Parliamentary groups

agree, bills may be passed by a committee rather than the whole assembly; second, until

1988, most votes were secret. The first provision has resulted in a high number of

sectorial and micro-sectorial laws (leggine or ‘little laws’) while at the same time, given

the lack of clear leadership and parliamentary direction for most of the Republican

period, major issues were rarely debated. The secret vote was intended to free

parliamentarians from the iron grip of the parties, but in effect allowed secret dissenters

or so-called franchi tiratori (sharpshooters) to block a measure or even bring down the

government without having to bear any responsibility.

Debate in the chambers can often appear heated but in fact, especially from the early

1980s to the mid1990s, the tension between government and opposition was more

apparent than real since the PCI (later the PDS) supported the majority of bills passed.

This was known as ‘consociationalism’, a term which by the mid-1990s had become an

insulting epithet associated with the ‘First’ Republic and indicating underhand, perhaps

criminal, compromises. Characteristic of the period was the high number of both

government and private members’ bills tabled and the high number actually passed, often

with also a high number of amendments.

As part of the general fear in allowing any single individual, party or state organ to

gain too much power, the Italian Parliament has never developed satisfactory ways of

dealing with obstruction either in form of filibusters or quite simply tabling thousands of

amendments. This has meant that government business has suffered relative to private

members’ business and has left successive governments with little option but to issue

decree laws which need to be converted into parliamentary laws within sixty days. If this

is impossible then the decree is reissued, possibly many times, and finally converted into

law with a vote of confidence on the whole measure so that no discussion actually takes

place. This procedure has been severely criticized since the early 1980s but has continued

to be used by governments, even after the 1994 reforms.

The question of decree laws shows how inherently unchanging the Italian Parliament

has been. The reforms which have taken place to both it and the parties have been

brought on almost entirely by judicial action, as in the Mani pulite (Clean Hands) and

mafia investigations, and by popular initiative, mainly through the use of referenda. In

1991, a referendum reduced the preference votes for the Chamber from four to one, a

minor change to the system but one which attacked the basis of clientelism and

corruption. Two years later, another referendum converted the Senate electoral system to

first past the post, forcing Parliament to change the Chamber as well. Rather than the

single elements of the electoral engineering, voters were rejecting a whole system, and

indeed 1994 did see the beginnings of a two-party system.

Parliament has made various further attempts to reform itself and the constitution. In

1997, a seventy-member Bicameral Commission was established with the intention of

reducing the number of both houses and introducing a federal element into the Senate.

However, the Commission was terminated after two years with no agreement reached on

any reform.

Further reading

Cotta, M. (1994) ‘The Rise and Fall of the “Centrality” of the Italian Parliament: Transformations

of the Executive—Legislative Subsystem after the Second World War’, in M. Donovan (ed.),

Italy, Aldershot: Ashgate, vol. 1.

JAMES WALSTON

Parmiggiani, Claudio

b. 1 March 1943, Luzzara, Reggio Emilia

Artist

Lecturer in painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Parmiggiani is

also editor of the review Tau Ma and winner of the Premio Bolaffi in 1976. His early

works made extensive use of photography, but subsequently his art took a more

conceptual turn, often using sculpture to examine the process of dismantling and

reinterpretation involved in cultural memory. His work typically contains a mass of

references and quotations, a strategy exemplified in works such as Lo studente di lettere

(The Student of Letters), which presents a series of interventions and ‘corrections’ of a

painting by Rembrandt of the same title. Also typical of Parmiggiani’s conceptual art are

his ‘de-locations’, a series of installations whereby absence itself is made present and

significant. Often he has accompanied his threedimensional works with delicate

preparatory drawings which have a fascination of their own.

LAURENCE SIMMONS

Partito d’Azione

The Partito d’Azione (Action Party) (1942–7) was created out of the active resistance to

Fascism by non-communists, but was destroyed by the postfascist obligation to choose

between liberal and socialist allegiances. Inspired by the Giustizia e Libertà movement of

Nello and Carlo Rosselli, its founders included intellectuals (Venturi, Bobbio, Lussu)

and future leaders of the PSI (Lombard!), PRI (La Malfa) and PSDI (Parri, Prime

Minister in 1945 in the single Action Party-led government). Without pre-fascist roots,

the Action Party’s emphasis on politics as an individual moral commitment rather than a

professional career did not equip it to create a mass party: it won just seven seats in the

Constituent Assembly. The Cold War split between the DC and PCI/PSI exacerbated

conflicts in the Pd’A over the design of post-Fascist institutions: once the liberal wing

had defected, the socialist rump merged with the PSI in 1947.

Further reading

De Luna, G. (1997) Storia del Partito d’Azione 1942–1947 (History of the Action Party 1942–

1947), Rome: Editori Riuniti.

DAVID MOSS

Pasolini, Pier Paolo

b. 5 March 1922, Bologna;

d. 2 November 1975, Ostia, Rome

Poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, scriptwriter and film-maker

During his troubled lifetime, Pasolini was Italy’s most prolific and most controversial

intellectual artist. His life and work were affected profoundly by his homosexuality and

by what some have suggested was an unresolved Oedipus complex. Following his brutal

murder, his works, liberated from the burden of his public persona, have become the

object of renewed interest both in Italy and abroad.

Pasolini grew up in the cities of Northern Italy where his father, an army officer and a

fascist, was stationed, and among the peasants of his mother’s native Friuli. Encouraged

by his doting mother, he began painting and writing poetry at an early age. By the time he

was twenty, Pasolini had published a volume of poetry in the difficult Friulan dialect. His

formal education at the University of Bologna was abruptly ended by the Second World

War. Because of his sympathy for the Friulan farm labourers and, incongruously, because

of the murder of his younger brother by Yugoslav communist partisans, he moved

towards the left and began to read Antonio Gramsci and other Marxist authors.

Following the end of the war, upon receiving his degree in Italian literature in 1946,

Pasolini began to teach in a junior high school. He also became increasingly involved in

leftist activities, and in 1947 he joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI). In 1949 he was

accused of corruption of minors and of obscene acts. Convicted on 28 December 1950, he

was fired from his position as teacher and expelled from the party. On 8 April 1952,

when Pasolini was absolved of all charges for lack of evidence, he had been living with

his mother in abject poverty in the slums of Rome for over two years.

Confronted by a world which was alien to his petty bourgeois upbringing, Pasolini

began a study of the inhabitants of the borgate and their dialects. The novels that resulted,

Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi) (1955) and Una vita violenta (A Violent Life) (1959),

depicted a brutal milieu that was unknown to the Italian middle class and brought

Pasolini both notoriety and work. Between 1954 and 1962 he contributed to the scripts of

fifteen films by directors such as Mario Soldati (La Donna del fiume (The Woman of the

River), 1954), Federico Fellini (Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria), 1956),

Mauro Bolognini (La notte brava (The Bold Night), 1959) and Franco Rossi (Morte di un

amico (Death of a Friend), 1960). In 1961 Pasolini began his own career as a director

with Accattone, the story of a two-bit Roman pimp and hustler who eventually dies in a

motorcycle accident. Following this, and while continuing to write volumes of poetry,

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novels, tragedies in verse, essays on subjects ranging from Dante to semiotics, and

translating Greek and Latin plays, he also directed twenty-one films.

The response to Pasolini’s work during his life was in large measure a function of the

political attitudes of his critics and of the controversy that constantly swirled around him.

His earliest films, which seemed to foreshadow a rebirth of Italian neorealism, were

welcomed initially by leftist critics. However, they began to have second thoughts when

they perceived the political irrelevance of the characters and their Christian symbolism.

Pasolini’s notoriety reached new heights when he was arrested and given a suspended

sentence for blasphemy for his La ricotta (The Ricotta Cheese), one of the episodes of

RoGoPag (1963), a composite film with contributions by Roberto Rossellini (Ro), Jean-

Luc Godard (Go), Pasolini (Pa) and Ugo Gregoretti (G). Thus the announcement that

Pasolini was going to film the Vangelo secondo Matteo (Gospel According to Matthew)

(1964) caused apprehension. However, the film, which adhered closely to the text of the

Bible, was an international success praised, with few exceptions, by Catholic and Marxist

critics alike.

In Pasolini’s next film, Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows) (1966), a talking

crow attempts to educate politically a man (Totò) and his son (Ninetto Davoli) and is

eaten by them for his troubles. This frequently funny and always intellectual commentary

on the passing of faith in grandiose ideological solutions to the problems of humanity

contains, amongst other things, a highly entertaining disquisition on the semiotics of the

languages of birds.

In the late 1960s, Pasolini raised his intellectual indictment of capitalism to new levels

of abstraction with Teorema (1968), in which a strangely Christ-like figure seduces and

destroys the members of a rich bourgeois family. During the same period he reinvented

prehistory in Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex) (1967) and Medea (1969). These two trends came

together in a little-known, difficult but fascinating film called Porcile (Pigsty) (1969) that

favourably compares cannibalism and bestiality to capitalism. However, while the

director received the plaudits of progressive critics, he alienated the general public.

Unlike so many other left-wing intellectuals of the time, Pasolini regarded the 1968

student uprisings (see student movement) as little more than temper tantrums by spoiled

brats. At the same time he began to question the political validity of avantgarde cinema as

a means of reaching the masses. Thus he turned away from his earlier difficult films in

favour of a more popular and accessible cinema based on three narrative masterpieces. In

these films, Decameron (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (Canterbury Tales) (1972) and

Il fiore delle milk e una notte (Arabian Nights) (1974), Pasolini once again recreated the

past by analogy, and once again he intended it to be a metaphor for the present. As he had

already done on several occasions, in these films Pasolini foregrounds his favourite

weapon, sex, the more unconventional the better, in his attack on what he considered to

be the cornerstone of bourgeois capitalism, the family. According to some, these films,

which Pasolini collectively called his ‘Trilogy of Life’, revealed a new optimism on his

part. According to others, they barely concealed a profound pessimism which found its

fullest manifestation in his last film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò) (1975). This

very controversial film is loosely based on De Sade’s novel. It is set in Salò, the Northern

Italian town on Lake Garda where Nazi Germany established the Fascist republic after

Mussolini was deposed in 1943. As in all his historical films, Pasolini depicted the past to

comment on the present, a present which he had come to consider intolerable. Salò

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depicts the gruesome, graphic torture and murder of a number of young persons by

representatives of the establishment. It is an extremely disturbing, almost unwatchable

work that has been the object of legal proceedings for obscenity in Italy, the United States

and Australia.

Pasolini’s violent murder in 1975 has continued to generate controversy in spite of the

confession of a young Roman hustler who was charged and subsequently imprisoned for

the crime. Because a number of odd features of the crime were never resolved, rumours

that Pasolini may have been the victim of a right-wing conspiracy have continued to

circulate since his death and have resulted in several books and films.

Further reading

Greene, N. (1990) Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press (a very intelligent and readable study of Pasolini’s films).

Pasolini, P.P. (1988) Heretical Empiricism, trans. B. Lawton and L.K.Barnett, ed. L.K.Barnett,

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press (the only English language translation of Pasolini’s

major essays on language, literature and film).

Schwartz, B.D. (1992) Pasolini Requiem, New York: Random House (this fascinating biography of

Pasolini reads like a mystery novel).

Siciliano, E. (1982) Pasolini: A Biography, trans. J. Shepley, New York: Random House (for over

a decade this absorbing, impressionistic work was the definitive biography of Pasolini).

BEN LAWTON

pasta

Pasta, or more precisely in Italian pasta alimentare, is the generic modern term, by now

international and widely used, to indicate a range of ‘pasta’ types (spaghetti, lasagne,

tagliatelle, rigatoni, bucatini and so on). The origin of pasta appears uncertain. Some

Etruscan mural paintings show tools that can be connected to pasta making, but there is

little evidence of, or reference to, pasta eating among the Romans. However, a

description of lagana found in De re coquinaria (The Art of Cooking) (230 AD) by

Celius Apicius, suggests a close similarity with modern lasagne. It has also been argued

that the spread of pasta in Italy could be linked to the Arabs, who conquered Sicily in 827

(Robb, 1996:76–7). On the other hand, it has been shown that noodles, the Italian

tagliatelle, were widely used in China from the eleventh century onwards, and Marco

Polo’s Il Milione (1298) reports the existence in China at that time of a food similar to

lasagne. The obvious conclusion would be that both the Chinese and the Italian

civilizations created a product which in time evolved and is by now the modern pasta.

Whatever its origins, pasta has long been a staple food throughout the peninsula and it

has remained the key and most characteristic element of the Italian diet. Furthermore,

Italian pasta has gained international renown and is an extremely successful export

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product (around 1,700 billion lire annually). A contribution to the diffusion of pasta has

certainly been made by Italian emigrants who have taken their culinary traditions—

among which a love of pasta—to their host countries. Pasta thus came to be widely

imitated and manufactured outside Italy, though not always successfully because,

according to the experts, too often the wheat varieties used are not appropriate so that the

consistency of the pasta obtained is not comparable with that made in Italy.

Until the invention of pasta-making machines in the first decade of the nineteenth

century, pasta was made by hand, at home, by skilled women. The homemade or

handcrafted varieties of pasta fresca (fresh pasta) are made with a type of soft wheat

semolina, while industrially manufactured pasta (which involves a complex series of

operations, for example, a lengthy drying procedure) predominantly uses durum wheat

semolina to obtain pasta secca.

The cooking of pasta does not require special skills. It needs boiling water—

approximately 1 litre per 100 gr of pasta—and when the water reaches its boiling point

salt must be added, before the pasta is also added two minutes later. Stirring gently while

cooking helps to prevent the pasta from sticking together. Cooking times vary, depending

on the pasta type; tasting is probably the wisest way to satisfy personal preferences.

Over-cooking pasta is a major culinary (and cultural) heresy for Italians; the expression

al dente identifies the ideal consistency of the pasta in whatever recipe is presented. After

being cooked, the pasta must be carefully drained. Pastasciutta (the term derives from the

elimination of all water) is a general label covering dishes of pasta cooked as described

above and then seasoned with various sauces. Widely popular and always in demand,

both in the motherland and abroad, are dishes such as pasta alla bolognese, pasta alla

marinara, penne all’arrabbiata and pasta all’amatriciana, all of which originated in the

rich traditions of regional cooking.

Lasagne deserves its own special attention and, as already mentioned, is a very old

variety of pasta, which can be homemade using light flour and eggs. Of course there are

also excellent manufactured lasagne, which only require a longer amount of time in

boiling water. Cut into large rectangular strips, after boiling and draining at the al dente

stage, they are placed in buttered oven dishes, covered with sauces and layers of other

ingredients such as meat balls and mozzarella cheese and are then baked and eaten hot,

after a settling period of approximately ten minutes. The recipes for lasagna are numerous

and may vary from region to region. There is an original but hardly known variety

created for the Bourbon royal family, in eighteenthcentury Naples, which uses a

bechamel sauce (of French ancestry), egg yolks and artichoke hearts. However, in the

North, lasagna sauces almost always include meat.

There exist literally hundreds of dishes based on pasta, each region having its own

specialities. New recipes are also constantly being created and, at times, new fashions

dictate contingent rules (for example, the trend for fresh pasta dishes flavoured with

cream-based sauces combined with other ingredients, or the craze for old recipes of rural

ancestry). However, the witty remark that the most conspicuous sign of Italy’s unification

was not language, but the ceremony taking place every day when in all the kitchens of the

peninsula, around midday, pasta is plunged into the boiling water, probably reveals more

than a touch of truth about the Italian identity.

Classic recipes for pasta dishes are known to travel across mountains and oceans and

have acquired worldwide approval. This phenomenon, however, conceals potential

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dangers: the genuine recipe is filtered through the interpretation of its cooks, who may

add or subtract some ingredients and make the kind of changes that are likely to please

his/her clients, with the result that the same name is given to a different dish. An example

of this phenomenon is the amount of meat used in pasta alla bolognese. While in the

original dish the meat in the sauce (and the sauce on the pasta) are used in a discrete,

almost frugal, manner, outside Italy a plate of spaghetti alla bolognese implies a towering

layer of a thick meaty sauce, surely nutritious but quite different in the balance of

flavours when compared with the same dish on Italian soil.

Further reading

Cattaneo-Jarrat, E. and Jarrat, V. (1969) 230 modi di cucinare la pasta (230 Ways of Cooking

Pasta), Milan: Mondadori (see in particular the introduction by Italian writer and journalist

Paolo Monelli).

de‘Medici Strutti, L. (1993) Pasta, Sydney: RD Press.

Penta de Peppo, M. (1996) La nuova cucina mediterranea (The New Mediterranean Cooking),

Rome: Newton & Compton Editori.

Piccinardi, A. (1993) Dizionario di Gastronomia (Dictionary of Gastronomy), Milan: Rizzoli.

Robb, P. (1996) Midnight in Sicily, Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove (for a number of insights into

pasta and Italian food in general).

MARIELLA TOTARO GENEVOIS

patron saints

Patron saints protect places, professions and people in every kind of physical and spiritual

condition, according to a complex but rarely exclusive division of spiritual labour. Italy

has three national patron saints (Bernardino of Siena, Catherine of Siena and Francis of

Assisi) and has produced more saints (eighty-two) than any other nation. Bestknown

among those canonized since 1945 is Santa Maria Goretti, a twelve-year-old peasant girl

murdered during a rape attempt in 1902, whose piety provided a model for many postwar

upbringings. In cultural response to African immigration, mayor Leoluca Orlando has

placed Palermo under the extra protection of Sicily’s only black saint, Saint Benedict the

Moor, patron saint of American blacks and now also joint guardian of the city with Santa

Rosalia.

Most patron saints have large and assorted caseloads. The especially popular Saint

Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of barren women, lost articles, political prisoners,

the shipwrecked, the starving and travellers. Saint Mark, who protects Venice, watches

over lawyers, notaries, prisoners and glaziers and provides defence against impenitence

and scrofulous diseases. Saints are generally preferred to the Virgin Mary and Christ as

community protectors, but the popularity of individual saints varies from region to

region. In the continental South, Nicholas of Bari and Rocco are the most favoured:

Joseph ranks a lowly nineteenth there, but emerges as the top choice in Sicily.

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