Documentare la frattura. Archivi, satire e il lungo dissenso sulla Etsi Pastoralis

Abstract

Tensions between Italo-Albanian communities and Latin hierarchies in nineteenth-century Sicily found expression in multiple archival records, ranging from official petitions to accounts of episodes of public contestation. Among the latter, the 1844 carnival masquerade in Piana dei Greci stands out as an emblematic moment, in which satire in the Arbëresh language served as a tool for delegitimizing Latin authority and as a veiled act of opposition to the bull Etsi pastoralis, promulgated in 1742 by Benedict XIV. The epistolary testimony reporting the event – conceived as a denunciation and preserved in the collection of the Apostolic Nunciature in Naples at the Vatican Apostolic Archive – reveals the political and symbolic dimensions of dissent, where ridicule becomes a language of resistance and the public square a space of identity confrontation. The edition of the letter, accompanied by historical commentary, thus provides a framework for understanding the value of documentary sources in reconstructing strategies of opposition to Latinization within the nineteenth-century Arbëresh context.