TheHolyCity 125
Like the duomo, municipal chapels provided tempting space for profane
meetings, detentions, storage, and secular business. The heightened religious
sensibilities of the thirteenth-century communes demanded protection for
these holy places, much as they did for the duomo. Concern for the purity
of the communal chapel seemed, if anything, greater than that for the cathe-
dral. At Bologna, three years after the palazzo chapel’s completion, the com-
mune forbade all secular business there, specifically mentioning detention of
prisoners.^160 A Franciscan or Dominican friar was to be engaged for daily
Mass. Like Bologna, Reggio enlisted mendicants to say Mass at the commu-
nal chapel. Dominican, Franciscan, Augustinian, and Saccati friars served
on a rotation for Mass each week. The city provided the priests with twenty-
four loaves of bread a week as Mass alms—to be baked at a bakery of the
friars’ choosing.^161 The Bolognese treasurer (massarius) had responsibility for
equipping the city chapel. He maintained the votive lamp (a sketch in city
statutes showed the style the fathers preferred [fig. 43 ]—the anticipated cost
was £ 5 bon.) and provided the two Mass candles and, on solemnities, incense
for the Divine Offices. Each February, on the Feast of the Purification, the
treasurer provided the podesta with three pounds of wax for chapel use and
made certain that the altar linens had been washed, Mass Hosts provided,
vestments furnished, and palms procured for Palm Sunday.^162 By 1288 , the
chapel was so well supplied with vestments, altar cloths, books, and fine silver
chalices that the fathers enacted special measures to provide security.^163 Nor
did the city ignore the ministry of the Word. The year the chapel opened,
the city arranged for a preacher to edify the public at least once a month at
city expense.^164
Erection of the communal palazzi did not end city presence in the cathe-
dral complex. That most potent civic talisman, the carroccio, stayed there.
No city moved its war wagon to the new Palazzo Comunale. More than any
other object, it reflected the union of sacred and civic in communal life. The
first known carroccio appeared at Milan in 1039 , when Archbishop Ariberto
devised a chariot bearing a crucifix and the standards of the city to serve as
a rallying point for troops in the war against the emperor Conrad.^165 From
the beginning it was a simultaneously religious and republican emblem.
Whether kept in the duomo itself, as at Brescia, Bologna, or Siena, or in the
baptistery, as at Parma, this wagon was the center of a religious cult.^166 At
- Bologna Stat.i( 1252 – 53 , 1259 , 1260 – 67 ), 7. 146 , 2 : 159 – 60 ; the temptation to hold prisoners in
city chapels seems to have been widespread: Modena Stat. ( 1327 ), 4. 196 ,p. 494 ; Parma Stat.i( 1242 ), pp.
76 – 77 ; see also the provision for a city-jail chaplain in Florence Stat.ii( 1325 ) 5. 111 ,p. 438. - Reggio Stat. ( 1265 ), 1. 48 ,p. 141.
- Bologna Stat.i( 1259 , 1260 – 67 ), 7. 146 , 1 : 160 – 61 —Bologna, Archivio di Stato,msComune Gov-
erno, vol. 4 , fol. 36 v( 1259 ). - Bologna Stat.ii( 1288 ), 2. 18 , 1 : 94.
- Bologna Stat.i( 1250 ), 5. 5 , 1 : 443.
- Webb, ‘‘Cities of God,’’ 115.
- Brescia Stat. (before 1277 ), col. ( 185 ); for Bologna, see Pietro Cantinelli,Chronicon,ed. Francesco
Torraca ( 1272 ),RIS^228 : 2 : 11 ;Chronicon Parmense( 1282 ); on the carroccio, see Hannelore Zug Tucci, ‘‘Il