Communal Republics & Maritime Trade Networks

Venice, Genoa, Ragusa and the communal maritime republics of the Mediterranean.

1 chapter

774 - 1099

Carolingian imperial rule replaced the Lombard kingdom but intensified the same forces: monastic expansion, pilgrimage infrastructure, and the Christianization of Alpine valleys. The Sacra di San Michele, founded around 966 on a dramatic rocky spur above the Susa Valley, became the most iconic monastery of the region and a major pilgrimage station. The Great St Bernard Hospice, documented from around 812–820, offered shelter to travelers crossing the Alps on what was now called the Via Francigena—the 'Frankish Route'—linking Canterbury to Rome. This era also saw Saracen raids from the Emirate of Fraxinetum into the Alpine passes (documented in Swiss and French sources for the mid-10th century), which the Baìo of Sampeyre commemorates as a community narrative—though no direct medieval documentation confirms a Varaita Valley-specific expulsion event around 975–980, and the claim rests on festival oral tradition. The Carolingian pilgrimage infrastructure created the routes and hospice network that would sustain festival travel and inter-valley connection for centuries. Walk the Via Francigena from Aosta to Ivrea today and you follow the same corridor that medieval pilgrims traced.

1277 - 1535

Renaissance signoria and ducal court culture, led by the Visconti and then the Sforza in Milan, transformed the communal republics into territorial principalities with courtly patronage that reshaped architecture, art, and civic ritual. The Visconti takeover of Milan in 1277 initiated two and a half centuries of dynastic rule; the Sforza continued it from 1450. The Milan Duomo, begun in 1386 under Bishop Antonio da Saluzzo with Gian Galeazzo Visconti's support, embodied ducal ambition on a cathedral scale. The Certosa di Pavia, founded by Gian Galeazzo in 1396, served as both a dynastic mausoleum and a Carthusian monastery—a fusion of spiritual and political power. Castello Sforzesco, rebuilt by Francesco Sforza, became the military and administrative center of the duchy. This era's festival legacy is ambivalent: ducal patronage codified and monumentalized civic ritual, but it also shifted palio traditions and public celebrations from communal self-governance to courtly spectacle, a shift that would later be repeated under the Savoy. The contrade and parish organizations born in the communal era survived, but increasingly as vehicles for dynastic display rather than civic autonomy.

568 - 774

The Lombard kingdom brought Germanic tribal governance and a new wave of monastic Christianization to the region. Pavia became the kingdom's capital and political center, while monasteries founded along the Alpine pilgrimage routes—most notably Novalesa Abbey (726)—anchored Christian observance in valleys that had retained mixed Christian-pagan practice. The Lombard period laid institutional foundations that persisted: Pavia's identity as a capital city, the monastic control of Alpine passes, and the parish network that would later scaffold festival calendars. The Benedictine community at Novalesa, founded by the Frankish governor Abbone at the Mont Cenis crossing, controlled a key passage and became a major stage on the pilgrimage route that would become the Via Francigena. Though Lombard-era ritual practice is largely invisible today, the monastic and parish structures from this period created the calendar scaffolding—saints' feast days, liturgical seasons—on which later festival traditions were built.

1480 - 1713

Counter-Reformation Catholicism reshaped the region's devotional geography through the Sacri Monti—mountainside complexes of chapels illustrating the Passion, the life of St Francis, or Marian devotion, designed as surrogate Holy Land pilgrimages for those who could not travel to Jerusalem. The Sacro Monte di Varallo, the oldest, was founded in 1491 by Franciscan friar Bernardino Caimi; Sacro Monte di Orta's twenty chapels narrate St Francis's life with sculpture and frescoes; Sacro Monte di Oropa venerates the Black Madonna in a mountain sanctuary above Biella. These complexes overlapped chronologically with Savoyard state formation (which begins 1562), and the two forces converged: the Counter-Reformation provided the devotional content while the Savoy provided political infrastructure. The Sacri Monti anchored new feast days—October 4 for St Francis at Orta—onto the Christian calendar, and their chapels preserved artisanal traditions of terracotta sculpture and fresco. Today, walk the chapel paths at Varallo, Orta, or Oropa and you move through a Counter-Reformation landscape that is still maintained by Franciscan and Salesian custodians and still draws pilgrims on feast days. This era's overlap with the Savoyard era (1562 onward) reflects the interdependence of religious and political reorganization.