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This is one of the smallest crypts to be seen in Umbria, consisting of a single chapel, of which we see about half; its only altar is sacred to the memory of St. Medicus, a very ancient martyr, whose bones rest in the chest beneath the table. |
All of Otricoli is like this, by the way: recent stucco over — what? Roman inscriptions peep out, or bits of fine ornamental carving like these fragments of a monumental frieze under the more functional blocks: within the walls of the houses, thru the entire fabric of the town, who knows what might be found? In this very church, for example, it's clear that you can't shrink a whole cavernous space down to the size of a bedroom: when the technology becomes available to image clearly thru stone and earth, we have some discoveries ahead of us.
At any rate, as things now stand, on either side of the elegant little baroque faux-marbre reredos, we have two inscriptions, the physical disparity of which is unfortunate; since in terms of their content, they are almost exactly parallel.
D O M
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Deo optimo maximo
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To God the best and greatest:
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The church of S. Vittore, formerly a cathedral, and its 13c monastery are not much more than half a kilometer from Otricoli, in Poggio, the township's only frazione; I haven't yet seen them. The 19c Umbrian archaeologist Mariano Guardabassi (Monumenti dell' Umbria, p161) records that church as being partly built of Roman-era materials — sculpture, inscriptions, column bases, capitals: hardly surprising since it's even closer than the hilltop town of Otricoli to its Roman parent city of Ocriculum. It is exactly the kind of place where one might expect a Roman martyr to have been buried. On another note, according to Fr. Giovanni Cappelletti, Le chiese d'Italia della loro origine sino ai nostri giorni (1846), p566, Giambattista Tusco, a native of Reggio, was elected bishop of Narni on May 28, 1601 and was transferred "five years later" to the church of Tivoli, being succeeded in Narni by his nephew Giovanni Beroso on July 31, 1606. At Catholic-Hierarchy.Org, a listing of the bishops of Narni gives the bishop in 1613 as Giovanni Battista Bonetti, Giovanni Battista Toschi having been appointed bishop of Tivoli in 1606: details which do not agree easily with the inscription before us. |
The more important inscription, though, is the other one, that insignificant-looking little square patch in the middle of its blank plaster: it is an earlier grave marker of St. Medicus. The style of the attractive uncial letters dates it to the twelfth century, establishing provenance another 500 years or further back; my pen is for scale, exactly 14 cm long.
☧ · ω
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☧ · ω
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☧ · ω
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Here my commentary is all about the inscription itself; and the first thing that the attentive reader will wonder about is what appears to be a piece of prodigious mind-guessing on my part: how did I drag what I did out of i · p · c · q · e · s · t · b? Fortunately, i · p · c · q is frequently found in medieval inscriptions for in pace Christi quiescentibus. At first glance that leaves us with e · s · t · b, which ought to yield another four words; but I believe I have the right solution just the same: our stonecutter had a stone to fill as best he could, without unsightly blanks (good judgment on his part, just look at the effect of the unsightly blank wall around this inscription!), and, as in line 2, no qualms about using the interpunct inside a word. I parse the result as in · pace · Christi · quiescentibus. A guess, but a good one, I think. And the omega in line 1? Here I'm on shakier ground, but if in Christian inscriptions we are used to reading Α Ω or its commoner equivalent form Α ω — the alpha and the omega, referring to God — we also from time to time see them reversed in funerary inscriptions, ω Α, the notion being that for the Christian faithful the omega of death will be reversed into the alpha of life. Here mind you there is no final alpha, unless maybe in the final amen; but given the idiosyncratic and maybe not very well informed stonecutter, it's a possibility. (If you have better information or a better surmise, I'll be glad to hear from you.) |
The inscription propped up to the left of the altar tells the rest:
corpora
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The bodies
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If you've looked carefully at the photos on this page, you've noticed the plastic boxes, many containing fragments of stone. Archaeologists use them to sort out a dig; and a dig, in fact, is what I happened to stumble upon in 2004 when I visited this church. Against the wall behind us stands, or stood, a large handsome wooden cabinet with yet another inscription, to the effect that here were the bodies of those fifty-seven people. At the time of my visit, these people had been displaced, their skulls stacked against the left wall (photo), and the cabinet — it locks — contained instead, if I remember well, the expensive tools of archaeologists and some of their better finds. In an earlier age, most likely to be stolen would have been the relics; but we've become technological, and it looks as if soon the crypt of S. Maria in Otricoli will be reduced to an altar and three or four inscriptions.
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Page updated: 3 Dec 17