L'arte del ben confinare. Frontiere visibili e invisibili nelle diocesi del Piemonte napoleonico

[Machine translation] Borders, material and immaterial, visible and invisible, geographical and identity, state and administrative, have always been at the center of anthropology's attention and interest. In this book, using an ethnohistorical method, the parish and diocesan boundaries of Piedmont are investigated, read and interpreted in a complex framework, which takes into account both the historical and geographical dimension that determined them, but also and above all the cultural and social components that defined them. The saints of local devotion, the relics, the sacred and profane rites, the pilgrimages, the processional paths, the Carnival itself are all elements that contribute to explaining and defining the 'landscapes' of sacred identity. The book, while focusing on dioceses and their borders, entities characterized by a “long history”, observes and investigates them at a specific space-time moment, that of the Napoleonic years: a turning point in history in which epochal changes take place, a time of great and sudden changes, in which many old things die, and many new things are born.