Orizzonti rituali: carri, campane, processioni, rogazioni

[Machine translation] The volume offers an overview of the ethnographic past of Piedmont through the analysis of a series of reports that the parish priests of the diocese of Turin, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, addressed to the archbishop in preparation for the pastoral visits. The result is a vivid portrait of a rural world populated, as a parish priest denounces, by “true emulators of ancient traditions.” The picture outlined is interesting for two reasons: on the one hand it provides a description of traditional practices that today have ceased or in any case are severely weakened and transformed, on the other hand it documents how parish priests lived their ministry among rural populations: not a passive observation of reality, but a pastoral commitment that daily combated “the wildness of the farmers”. The book contains a series of insights aimed at reconstructing, the “ethnographic horizon” within which to observe some specific traits of the Piedmontese ritual: the paraliturgical and apotropaic uses of bells, processions, Rogations and wagon races, an important and original distinctive feature of, Piedmontese festive ceremoniality.