Domestic Religion and Connected Spaces: Isabella della Rovere, Princess of Bisignano (1552–1619)

The article focuses on the case of The princess Isabella della Rovere Dukes of Urbino, married to Nicolò Bernardino Sanseverino prince of Bisignano, one of the greatest barons of the Kingdom of Naples, and the blessed Geremia from Valacchia, one of the many "alive saints" that lived in the Spanish Naples when the Counter-Reformation was in full bloom. The connection between the Princess of Bisignano and Father Geremia is via a picture representing the Virgin with her Child, that, as we will see, was at the center of multiple sensorial experiences and object of transregional and trasnational forms of worship and devotion. Into the Princess's palace the picture brought a message of maternity and infancy and for the unhappy owner, a wife and a mother so many times disappointed, it had to certainly have had the function of a talisman. To those outside the Sanseverino of Bisignano's domestic space, the picture represented the visionary content of a venerable who come from far away and that was a miraculous object with manifold values. Since then the fortunes of this iconografic subject followed a multiform course which run between Naples and the Moldova, along a transregional and transnational run that followed the Geremia's pathway from the times of his first education received in Moldova up to his action of material and spiritual apostolate among the sick in the Spanish Naples. The episode puts well in evidence what we can include in the category and in the space of domestic religion. It was a space in which the differences of genders were rather marked. It was also a resilient and multifunctional space, translocal, transregional and transnational, a space in which the religious motions of some of the best reguarded Italian aristocratic éliteses, connected with those of the believers that gravitated around a small convent located in the overcrowded suburb of the Vergini, out the boundaries of the city of Naples and which echo, traveling on the routes of the Mediterranean, would reach up to Slovenia and in the distant Moldova, place of birth of our humble monk. Along the muliple threads and the manifold connections of that domestic religion and that domestic space are central the sensorial experiences of the visions and the contact with the religious objects and the material cultures of the pictures and the small talismans.