Feste pubbliche a Palermo nell’età degli Asburgo. Istituzioni, architettura, città (1516-1700)

With the death in 1516 of Ferdinand the Catholic, king of Aragon and Sicily, the island was incorporated into the galaxy of the Hispanic crowns under the leadership of Charles of Habsburg, the future emperor Charles V, in a political and institutional framework that would last until the Utrecht agreements of 1713, which sanctioned the passage of the Kingdom of Sicily to the Savoy. It was precisely the entry into the Carolingian imperial dimension that proved decisive for Sicily, and for Palermo in particular, setting the starting point for a total rethinking of the city's urban and architectural system, with respect to which public celebrations would constitute the ephemeral and occasional alter ego of the gradual and complex process of monumentalization of the city: both obey the same needs of officialdom and magnificence, which must be satisfied in the perspective of a capital city. In particular, the decisive event that constitutes an authentic break in the Sicilian festive tradition is the crossing of the island by Charles V, in 1535, returning from the victory of Tunis. In the triumphal entries organized by the main cities of the island in his honor, one can feel the leap in quality with previous experiences, inevitably pushing the Sicilian cultural models to fit into a framework of ideological references and artistic experiences of a supranational nature: the various passages of Charles V in Italy, in the thirties of the sixteenth century, constitute an extraordinary opportunity for the production of the ephemeral, with an acceleration in the experimentation of figurative models, in the development of ceremonial structures, in the valorization of monumental routes, which, going beyond the specific scope of individual cities, manages to involve the most avant-garde artistic and cultural environments of the moment. The long process of projects that will involve the city of Palermo from that moment on will materialize in a total redesign of the urban structure and in a substantial renewal of the architectural and monumental heritage, which constitute, in a certain sense, the indispensable premise from which to start to understand specific themes, times and methods through which, between the 16th and 18th centuries, the culture of celebration develops in this city. If, in fact, the "construction of the capital" was carried out by necessarily reconciling needs of a different nature, not least the monumental and representative ones that were pursued with particular incisiveness by institutional clients, especially after the mid-16th century. In this sense, the rectification and extension of the ancient Cassaro constitutes the most significant operation and the most dense with consequences regarding the theme proposed here, since the new straight road, named after the viceroy Toledo, with the magniloquent terminations of Porta Nuova and Porta Felice and the sumptuous epicentre of the Quattro Canti, will become the ‘place’ of the main celebrations in Palermo, the privileged route of parades, processions and cavalcades, without a substantial distinction between civil and religious celebrations. Built city and ephemeral city, therefore, will move along similar paths, often intertwining and overlapping, certainly influencing each other. In fact, while the city, during the second half of the sixteenth century, was undergoing a radical process of urban and architectural modernization, a series of important festive events (Entrance of Don Giovanni d’Austria returning from the victory of Lepanto (1572), entrance of the viceroy Marco Antonio Colonna (1577), sacred triumph of Santa Ninfa (1593), etc.) allowed for the experimentation of many of those essential elements in the organization of public celebrations, which in the first decades of the seventeenth century would find a definitive ceremonial structure, both with regard to the festive practice and with regard to the definition of the places chosen for such events. An almost perfect device on which the story of the election of Santa Rosalia as the new patron saint of the city would be grafted, after the “miraculous” discovery of her relics in 1624. From that moment on, the “festino” would establish itself as the most important collective event in the capital; the ephemeral apparatuses, increasingly more sumptuous, created for the occasion will constitute an irreplaceable testing and experimentation ground for the entire community of artists and architects linked to the Palermo Senate, responsible both for the material organization and the cultural elaboration of the celebratory program, as well as for the publication of the punctual festive reports, often accompanied by engravings of the apparatuses prepared for the occasion.