Ambigue descrizioni: feste devozionali e feste di precetto nell'inchiesta veneziana di fine Settecento

In 1772 the Venetian Senate intervened by passing a law to limit the exorbitant number of religious feasts that were happening in many places throughout the dominio da terra (the mainland) and Istria. Information collected in the 1770s is above all interesting as it formed a true and detailed ethnographic research of religious feasts, rich in descriptions pertinent to the cult of saints and the spreading of religious feasts in the mainland and Istria. Entrusted to a preliminary enquiry by parish priests, these descriptions, far from being uniform and provided with precision offer a colourful frame of popular religiosity and of the difficulties, if not impossibility, of tracing a homogeneous framework of the world of customs which, with its cultural traits, still intensely pervaded religious life of subject populations. The title Ambiguous Descriptions reflects therefore the fact that the information collected by parish priests could hardly provide an adequate answer to the questions formulated by an act which was built on a prospective that was decisively foreign to the world of customs and its numerous aspects.