Organizzare il sacro. Studi di antropologia storica nel Monferrato

[Machine translation] The volume aims to offer a reading of the saints chosen as their guardianship numbers within a microcosm, Cocconato, in the hills of Monferrato. A collection of signs and traces useful for understanding how a community in Piedmont built and modified, imagined and populated, its own Paradise, ranging from the analysis of the patron saints of the peasant world, to the saints of the day, to a review of legendary figures such as Alessio, Giosafat and Genoveffa of Brabant, saints whose lives were read during winter vigils more for fun than for edification. The events that in 1663 led to the identification and choice, as patrons of the community, the saints Fausto and Felix are reconstructed: an exemplary case of community patronage, attributed to two saints with an adjective name, belonging to the group of baptized saints, created ex nihilum during the modern age, drawing uncontrollably from Roman catacombs. The devotion to Saint Anthony of Padua is analyzed through a series of supplications, rare attestations of popular prayers dating back to the first half of the twentieth century, messages written by the devotees and left at the foot of the statue of the saint., The book aims to offer a historical-anthropological contribution to the understanding of the processes that, locally, determined the preferences with which some heavenly figures were chosen for community worship and others for domestic worship, what public and hidden gestures marked devotional practices towards them, what was the collective imagination in which the farmers of Monferrato placed the saints.