A piece of Saint Blaise’s tongue is at Carosino, near Taranto, an arm in the cathedral at Ruvo di Puglia, and his skull at Dubrovnik. We can find a tooth of Saint Apollonius in Porto Cathedral, the body of Saint Judas Cyriacus in Ancona Cathedral, the heart of Saint Alfius at Lentini in Sicily, the body of Saint Roch in the high altar of the Church of the Scuola Grande in Venice, part of the shoulder bone and another bone fragment at Scilla, part of an arm bone in the Church of San Rocco at Voghera, near Pavia, another piece of arm bone at the church of the same name in Rome, a tibia and other small parts of the massa corporis and what is said to have been his staff in his sanctuary at Montpellier, a phalanx bone in the parish church of Cisterna di Latina, part of his heel in Frigento Cathedral, and several bone fragments in the Basilica Mauriziana and the Church of the Confraternita di San Rocco in Turin.
Relics were venerated in Constantinople but dispersed after the Fourth Crusade, such as Our Lady’s mantle (the Maphorion), Christ’s sandals, the cloak of Saint John the Baptist, an ampoule of Christ’s blood used to sign certain solemn documents, the parapet of the well where Christ met the Samaritan woman, the stone on which Christ’s body was laid after his death, Solomon’s throne, Moses’ rod, the remains of the innocents slaughtered by Herod, a piece of dung dropped by the donkey on which Jesus entered Jerusalem, the icon of the Hodegetria (an image of Mary and child said to have been painted by Saint Luke), other icons considered miraculous since they were not painted by human hand (acheiropoieta), and the Mandylion, the cloth imprinted with the face of Christ (originally at Edessa, where it was famed for making the city impregnable when displayed on its walls).
I wouldn’t wish to give the impression that the conservation of relics is exclusively a Christian, or indeed Catholic, practice. Pliny tells us about the treasured relics of the Greco-Roman world, such as Orpheus’s lyre, Helen’s sandal, or the bones of the monster that attacked Andromeda. And by the classical period, the presence of a relic already provided a point of attraction for a city or for a temple, and was therefore a valuable tourist “commodity” as well as a sacred object.
The cult of the relic is to be found in every religion and culture. It depends, on the one hand, upon a sort of impulse that I would describe as mytho-materialistic—so that by touching parts of the body of great men or saints we are able to experience something of their power—and, on the other hand, upon a normal antiquarian taste for the past (so that a collector is prepared to spend money to have not just the first edition of a famous book, but also the book that belonged to an important person).
In this second sense (though perhaps in the first too) there is also a secular cult of the relic—all we have to do is read Christie’s auction catalogs to see how a pair of shoes belonging to a famous diva is being offered at prices higher than that of a picture by a Renaissance painter. These kinds of memorabilia can be the actual gloves of Jacqueline Kennedy or those simply worn by Rita Hayworth for the filming of Gilda. In that respect, I have seen tourists in Nashville, Tennessee, going to admire Elvis Presley’s Cadillac—which by the way wasn’t the only one, since he changed them every six months.
The most famous relic of all times is, of course, the Holy Grail, but I wouldn’t advise anyone to set out in search of that (or those) since past experiences haven’t been too encouraging—in any event, it has been scientifically proven that two thousand years aren’t long enough.
[An earlier Italian version, titled “Andare per tesori,” appeared in Milano: Meraviglie, miracoli, misteri, edited by Roberta Cordani (Milan: CELIP, 2011); a second expanded version (“In attesa di una semiotica dei tesori”) was published in Testure: Scritti seriosi e schizzi scherzosi per Omar Calabrese by Stefano Jacoviello and others (Siena: Protagon, 2009).]
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