42 LaCitadeSancta
Maria Maggiore was the staffing at the collegiate church of San Zeno at
Pistoia, with six priests, three deacons, and two subdeacons.^158 The collegiate
churches of the communes deserve a study in their own right.
The fabric of the Mother Church would be incomplete without the urban
monasteries. These played an important role in city religious identity. In
the early 1200 s, the Paduans called the Benedictine prior Giordano of San
Benedetto their spiritual father.^159 The religious houses were a public pres-
ence and not a mere cloistered preserve. When Cardinal Guglielmo Visconti
consecrated a new abbot for San Prospero at Reggio on 13 June 1272 , the
abbey gave a dinner in the streets for all the clergy and leading laymen of
the city.^160 Monasteries did not have formal congregations and normally did
not undertake pastoral care, unless they had responsibility for dependent
chapels. Although the monks were hidden behind a choir screen, anyone
could attend monastic services, and the splendor of their monastic Offices
attracted many. In thirteenth-century Bologna the Benedictine house of San
Procolo developed special connections to the university law faculty, provid-
ing classrooms for rent and becoming, in fact, their cappella.^161 Large ancient
monasteries were only the tip of the cloistered iceberg. The diocese of Bolo-
gna could count, inside and outside the city, some eighty-one monasteries,
convents, hospitals, and religious houses.^162 Giovanni Villani, in his famous
1340 passage on the glories of Florence, bragged that his city could count 55
neighborhood chapels, 5 large monasteries of men, 24 convents of nuns, 10
houses of mendicants, and some 30 hospitals.^163
Bologna to this day boasts a monastic complex that is simultaneously a
religious and a civic shrine, the Olivetan monastery of Santo Stefano (fig.
31 ).^164 This foundation was the shrine of Bologna’s patron saint, Petronio,
and its ‘‘seven churches’’ were a sanctuary duplicating the holy places in
Jerusalem.^165 A Bolognese did not need to go on pilgrimage to the Holy City
in Palestine to visit the sites of Christ’s Passion, death, burial, Resurrection,
and Ascension. The monastery of Santo Stefano dates at least to the ninth
century, when an imperial diploma of the emperor Charles the Fat mentions
it briefly, but it did not become an important institution until the 1000 s,
- Ferrali, ‘‘Pievi,’’ 45.
159 .Chronicon Marchiae Trevisinae et Lombardiae,ed. L. A. Botteghi ( 1236 ),RIS^28 : 3 : 12. - Alberto Milioli,Liber de Temporibus et Aetatibus,ed. Oswald Holder-Egger ( 1272 ),MGH.SS 31 : 542.
- Massimo Giansante, ‘‘Insediamenti religiosi e societa`urbana a Bologna dalxadxviiisecolo,’’
L’Archiginnasio 89 ( 1994 ): 214 – 16. - Sella, ‘‘Diocesi di Bologna,’’ 111 – 16.
- Giovanni Villani,Cronica(Rome: Multigrafica, 1980 ), 1 : 658 ; on this passage, see Anna Benvenuti
Papi, ‘‘Pubblica assistenza e marginalitafemminile,’’In Castro Poenitentiae: Santitae societa`femminile nell’Italia
medievale,Italia Sacra, 45 (Rome: Herder, 1991 ), 635. - On this complex, see now Robert G. Ousterhout, ‘‘The Church of Santo Stefano: A ‘Jerusalem’
in Bologna,’’Gesta 20 ( 1981 ): 311 – 21 , which summarizes the author’s M.A. thesis, ‘‘The Church of Santo
Stefano: A ‘Jerusalem’ in Bologna’’ (University of Cincinnati, 1977 ). - Albano Sorbelli, ‘‘La ‘Sancta Jerusalem’ stefaniana,’’L’Archiginnasio 35 ( 1940 ): 15 – 18.