Acknowledgments

The name of my friend Alberto Sestili should appear first in any list of people whom I thank for their help to me in my study of the diocese of Rieti. He has been in various ways my guide and host for many years; it was for example through him that I met the nuns of Santa Filippa Mareri, through him that I found the cavèdano . He made me feel at home in the Cicolano. He cannot be separated in my mind from three generations of the Colangeli family who were also hosts to me and my family at Rieti's Quattro Stagioni at the site of Giovanni Petrignani's San Giovanni Evangelista. To the convent of Santa Filippa itself I was first introduced, after being introduced to her by Alberto Sestili, by Suor Clotilda, my oldest friend in the convent; through her I met the archivist, Suor Gemma, and the abbess mother Margherita Pascalizi. They and the other nuns of their convent adopted me, fed me, chauffeured me about, talked to me and showed me their documents, and even let me talk about their saint at her shrine. I cannot ever thank them enough, but I hope that their redwood will grow very large as a sign of my thanks.

To Don Emidio De Sanctis who was canon archivist of the Archivio Capitolare when I first went to Rieti to check a document in the San Salvatore Maggiore dispute, to his memory, I owe very special thanks. Into the often closed archives he welcomed me, for many days in many years. When I came to Rieti with one or more of my children when they were small, Don Emidio welcomed them too and let them play in the archive room and draw at the table at which I worked, draw the views

(now unfortunately much less beautiful) that they saw from the tower windows. To Don Emidio's brother Don Lino, who was, until he died, priest at San Francesco, I am also grateful. The actual doorkeeper of Don Emidio's archives was the cathedral sacristan, my friend Franco Strivati, who became my protector and, for example, continually worried that I would be locked all night in the archive tower above the sacristy after the finish of evening service. These are, or were, old friends from my earliest days at Rieti. To theirs many other names should be joined; one which must appear is that of Cesare Verani, a wise and learned local art historian, who particularly connects my first with my last days of Rieti work, and thus with the new world of serious young Reatine research historians. Among them Vincenzo Di Flavio first helped me with information and advice and early modern material from the episcopal archives, material of the sort increasingly visible in his own published work. To his name should be joined that of Andrea Di Nicola; the quality of the research of the two men is suggested by their joint publication, the excellent Il Monastero di S. Lucia . I should also thank Henny Romanin for his kindness, and very specially Roberto and Claudia Marinelli, for their help both in Rieti and Borgo San Pietro, and for the particular delight of Roberto's mind and eye as they appear in his various kinds of history, for example in his Il Terminillo, Storia di una montagna . Roberto and his colleagues in Rieti's Archivio di stato have given the face of Reatine local history a new expression. Roberto Messina has helped me in the Rieti Biblioteca Comunale. Don Giovanni Maceroni and Suor Anna Maria Tassi, now keepers of the capitular as well as the episcopal archives at Rieti, have shown me many kindnesses.

I should like to thank Rita Di Vito and the families of the Case Galloni, and Barbara Bini, who not only carted me around the countryside as she took handsome photographs for me but also lent us her house between Contigliano and San Pastore, with its views across the conca to Tcrminillo, during one perfect Eastertide. The sindaco, Augusto Mari, took me on a tour of the mountain communities and uplands above Petrella Salto. The learned local historian Evandro Ricci advised me about Secinaro history and took beautiful photographs of the town for me. Don Antonino Chiaverini sat me down in his parlor in Sulmona and brought me the cathedral's records of the visitation of 1356 and of the canonization of Peter of Morrone. In Penne, the archivist of the cathedral archives of Penne-Pescara, Don Giuseppe Di Bartolomeo, heroically arranged for me to use those archives, from his hospital bed, immediately after a serious motorcycle accident incurred

during that priest's vigorous pursuit of the pastoral care of his widespread flock. The Marchesa Luigina Canali de Rossi, who made Rieti more resonant during my whole time there, talked to me about the Rieti that existed before it had had implanted on it its current road system and its post-World War I values. I should thank Canon Pietro Bedeschi for his help at Ìmola and Don Giorgio Fedalto for his help with Olema, Dottoressa Anna Maria Lombardo for her guidance among the notarial archives in the Archivio di stato at Rome and Richard Mather for showing me the archives of Vèroli.

Daniel Waley sent me encouragement and a valuable document from Siena. Arnold and Doris Esch made me sharpen my interest in the diocesan landscape. Charles McClendon took me back to Farfa. The art historians Gary Radke, Julian Gardner, and Luisa Mortari made me look better at the artistic relics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries at Rieti. Anthony Luttrell helped me in many ways and particularly in his insistence upon the importance of the Paris Rieti manuscript. Here I continue to be indebted, as I was in earlier work, to those major historians of Italy, my friends Charles Till Davis, Gene Brucker, Lester Little, Peter Herde, Edith Pasztor, Eve Borsook, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Stephan Kuttner, and Fra Leonard Boyle. But in this book I am also indebted to newer friends, mostly of Padua, whose example has much affected me and should have made me a much better historian than I am, first of all, Paolo Sambin, and men and women like Giorgio Cracco, Antonio Rigon, Fernanda Sorelli, Sante Bortolami, and, perhaps honorary Padovani, Giovanna Casagrande, and Mario Sensi. I very much wish that this long, long-awaited, and eccentric book could be a more decent reward for their efforts.

I want to thank Kaspar Elm for having lighted up Franciscan studies for us all, even when he is not being used directly, and David Burr for "showing" Franciscanism. And I particularly want to thank the young English evangelical Protestant missionary whom I met one dark Rieti afternoon as I waited for the archives to open and who told me of bringing Christ, now, to the thirsty hill villages.

I must thank William Bowsky, Duane Osheim, Randolph and Frances Starn, and Margaret Brentano for their very careful and generous reading of the long text, and for their many suggestions. I wish that I could have used their suggestions better. I also want to thank Gerry Caspary, Irv and Betsey Scheiner, Beth Berry, James Clark, Miriam Brokaw, Joanna Hitchcock, Jane Taylorson, Tony Hicks, and very specially Edith Gladstone, for their advice and help. Many of my col-

leagues in history at Berkeley have, with their warmth and tolerance, made it possible for me as for others to be, each of us, our own kind of historian (and use our own kind of grammar). Arnold Leiman has made me much more sophisticated in my thought about memory, and Steve Justice has in my thought about narrative, although neither may be overwhelmed by the level of sophistication I have actually achieved.

I thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies for the support they have given me, and for their patience.

This book is very much a family book. My children have grown up (and, two) of them, become parents themselves) living with it. But it has been an extended family, including particularly the Toesca-Bertelli and the Weyer Davis—the wise and richly subtle parents have advised me, and the children have joined mine: Frank and Bernie, early experts on Saint Francis and Saint Anthony, as well as bats; Pierino, on the central Italian countryside and its artifacts, as well as trains. All of them became Reatines. My children, James, Margaret, and Robert, have made everything in life to which they were or are attached a joy—and that includes Rieti.