Tra nuovi percorsi e vecchie storie. Prime note sulla memoria storico-letteraria legata all’eruzione vesuviana del 1631

Abstract

Starting from the vesuvian eruption in 1631 emerge many cultural forms about some places adjacent to Vesuvius like rites, traditions, sounds, visual arts and writings that require a special scientific attention. This work investigates a human and social reality, historically modeled by Vesuvius and its eruptions. The plurality of communicative languages that has expressed all this from the modern age, is an essential element to understand Vesuvius and the places around it, not as a simple geographical but cultural area. An important objective of the research is to give voice to this area through documents we have found here in public, private and ecclesiastical archives. For example in Sant’Anastasia, a town near Naples, in the archive of Madonna dell’Arco Sanctuary, there are some important writings about the miracle of the Virgin during the eruption of 1631. Here there are some significant parts of these texts such as Il sacro Campidoglio in cui trionfano quindeci prodigi della miracolissima Imagine di Maria Sacratissima dell’Arco by Pietro Rosella and L’arco Celeste overo il trionfo di Maria dell’Arco e’ suoi miracoli by Ludovico Ayrola.