Few places in the world have a religious history as long, visible, and politically consequential as the Italian peninsula. Ancient temples still stand beneath or beside Christian churches. Medieval monasteries overlook towns where Jewish communities have lived for centuries. Rome remains both the capital of the Italian Republic and the city surrounding Vatican City, the center of the Roman Catholic Church. Sicily carries evidence of Greek, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Latin religious cultures, while the Alpine valleys of Piedmont preserve the history of one of Europe’s oldest surviving Protestant traditions.
Yet speaking of the “religion of Italy” requires an important qualification. Italy did not become a unified kingdom until 1861. For most of its history the peninsula was divided among Roman territories, Lombard duchies, papal lands, republics such as Venice and Genoa, kingdoms in Naples and Sicily, and states such as Tuscany and Piedmont-Sardinia. Religion therefore developed differently from region to region, even while Rome exercised an influence that reached far beyond the peninsula.
The story of religion in Italy is not simply the story of Catholicism. It begins with the gods and rituals of ancient Rome, passes through the rise of Christianity and the gradual construction of papal authority, and includes Muslims, Jews, Waldensians, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and other communities. Across more than two thousand years, religion in Italy has repeatedly been connected to government, identity, law, war, education, family life, art, and the question of what it means to belong to the wider Italian community.
The Gods of Ancient Rome
Long before Rome became the center of Christianity, it was the center of a religious system built around many gods, sacred places, priesthoods, sacrifices, festivals, omens, and obligations between the human and divine worlds.
Roman religion was closely connected to public life. The Romans did not generally separate religion from government in the modern sense. Magistrates performed sacrifices, priests held public offices, military commanders consulted signs from the gods, and the calendar itself was shaped by religious observances. Temples occupied prominent places in Roman cities because public worship was tied to the health and security of the community.
The Roman historian Livy placed many of these institutions in the legendary reign of Numa Pompilius, Rome’s second king. In Book I of his history, Livy described Numa appointing flamines for Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus and establishing the Vestal Virgins as publicly supported priestesses devoted to the service of Vesta. Whether every institution actually originated with Numa is impossible to prove, but Livy’s account shows how later Romans understood religion as something rooted in the earliest foundations of their society.
Roman religion also changed constantly. Gods and religious practices entered Rome from elsewhere in Italy and from the wider Mediterranean world. Greek influence became especially strong, while worship connected with deities such as Isis and Mithras existed beside older Roman cults. Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price have emphasized that Roman religion remained fundamentally polytheistic while continuously absorbing or developing new religious choices. Imperial Rome therefore contained traditional civic cults, foreign religious communities, voluntary religious associations, Jews, and eventually Christians.
Religion could also be debated. Cicero examined the nature of the gods and divination, while Ovid organized much of his Fasti around the religious calendar and the traditions associated with Roman festivals. Ancient Roman religion was therefore not a frozen collection of myths. It was a living system whose practices were discussed, reinterpreted, defended, and changed across generations.
Christianity Comes to Rome
Christianity entered a city already filled with temples, cults, philosophical schools, and an established Jewish population. The earliest Christians in Rome belonged to a small religious movement originating in Judaea, but by the first century they had become visible enough to attract the attention of Roman authorities.
One of the most important non-Christian sources is Tacitus. Writing about the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, he stated that Emperor Nero blamed Christians for the disaster and subjected members of the community to brutal punishments. Tacitus clearly disliked Christianity, describing it in hostile terms, but that hostility makes his account particularly valuable as evidence that Christians were present in Rome and recognized as a distinct group by the time of Nero.
Christianity nevertheless survived periods of persecution and continued spreading through the Roman world. By the beginning of the fourth century, imperial policy changed dramatically. Constantine and Licinius agreed at Milan in 313 to permit Christians and others to follow the religion they preferred and to restore Christian property that had been confiscated during persecution. The text preserved by Lactantius is important not only because of Christianity’s new legal position but because it framed religious toleration broadly, allowing individuals to choose their religious observance.
The transformation did not occur overnight. Traditional Roman worship remained deeply embedded in the senatorial aristocracy and civic identity. One of the clearest windows into the conflict comes from the dispute over the Altar of Victory in the Roman Senate during the fourth century.
The pagan senator Symmachus asked Emperor Valentinian II to restore the altar and the privileges attached to traditional worship. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, responded in Letters 17 and 18, insisting that a Christian emperor should not support the older cult. Their exchange reveals a Roman world in transition, with defenders of ancestral religion and increasingly powerful Christian bishops competing over the religious meaning of the state.
By the end of antiquity, Christianity had moved from a persecuted minority to the dominant religious institution of the Roman world. Temples were abandoned, converted, dismantled, or preserved in changing forms, while churches, shrines to saints, monasteries, and episcopal institutions increasingly shaped the religious landscape.
Rome and the Rise of the Papacy
The decline of Roman imperial government in the West did not diminish Rome’s religious importance. Instead, the bishop of Rome gradually became one of the most influential figures in European Christianity.
The development of papal authority was neither immediate nor uncontested. Bishops of Rome had to negotiate with emperors, Gothic rulers, Lombards, Byzantine officials, local Roman aristocrats, monasteries, and other bishops. The papacy that later dominated medieval Western Christianity emerged through centuries of institutional growth.
Pope Gregory I, commonly called Gregory the Great, provides one of the clearest examples. His enormous surviving correspondence from the late sixth and early seventh centuries reveals a pope concerned not only with doctrine but with bishops, monasteries, church estates, charity, political disputes, diplomacy, missions, and the practical administration of Christian communities.
As political authority fragmented on the peninsula, churches and monasteries often became enduring institutions within communities whose secular rulers repeatedly changed. The religious map of medieval Italy filled with cathedral cities, monasteries, pilgrimage shrines, rural churches, confraternities, and local cults of saints.
Rome remained exceptional. The tombs associated with Peter and Paul attracted pilgrims, while papal claims about the authority inherited from Peter became increasingly important to the identity of the Roman Church.
Papal Reform and the Struggle for Authority
By the eleventh century, disputes about who controlled the Church became central to European politics. Reformers attacked simony, clerical marriage, and secular interference in episcopal appointments. The resulting movement produced one of the most consequential confrontations between religious and political authority in medieval history.
Pope Gregory VII became its most famous figure. The document known as the Dictatus Papae, entered into Gregory’s register in 1075, contained a series of propositions asserting extraordinary authority for the Roman pontiff. Among them were claims concerning the pope’s ability to depose and restore bishops and the exceptional position of the Roman Church.
The conflict between Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV led to excommunication, rebellion, political crisis, and the famous encounter at Canossa in 1077. Although the broader Investiture Controversy continued long afterward, it permanently raised questions about the boundaries between spiritual and secular authority.
Medieval Italy also became the setting for major church councils. The Fourth Lateran Council, held in Rome in 1215 under Pope Innocent III, issued legislation dealing with doctrine, clerical reform, confession, heresy, Jews, crusading, marriage, and ecclesiastical administration. Its canons demonstrate how extensively the medieval Church attempted to regulate both belief and Christian society.
Yet medieval Italian Christianity was not only a history of popes and councils. Religious life took shape in cities and villages through confraternities, monasteries, shrines, preaching, charitable institutions, saints’ cults, pilgrimages, and new religious orders. Recent scholarship on medieval Italy emphasizes precisely this mixture of papal institutions and local religious life.
Francis of Assisi and the Mendicant Revolution
Among the most influential religious figures produced by medieval Italy was Francis of Assisi.
Born in the Umbrian town of Assisi in the late twelfth century, Francis rejected the commercial aspirations and social standing of his family in favor of poverty, preaching, prayer, and service. His movement developed at a moment when European towns were growing rapidly and many Christians were searching for forms of religious life that seemed closer to the poverty of Christ and the apostles.
Franciscan communities did not remain confined to monasteries. Friars preached in towns, worked among ordinary people, traveled, and participated in the intellectual and pastoral life of medieval Europe. Other mendicant movements, especially the Dominicans, similarly transformed urban Christianity.
The rise of mendicant religion shows why medieval Italian religious history cannot be understood solely through the papacy. The same centuries that saw stronger institutional claims from Rome also witnessed experiments in poverty, lay devotion, preaching, mysticism, charitable work, and new forms of religious community.
Waldensians, Cathars, and Religious Dissent
Not every movement remained inside the boundaries that church authorities considered acceptable.
The Waldensians originated in the religious awakening surrounding Valdes, or Peter Waldo, and his followers during the twelfth century. Their commitment to apostolic poverty and lay preaching brought them into conflict with ecclesiastical authority. Over time, Waldensian communities survived particularly strongly in the Alpine valleys of Piedmont.
Other forms of religious dissent developed across northern and central Italy. Cathar communities became important enough in some cities and regions that medieval church authorities regarded them as a major threat. Modern scholarship on medieval Italian heresy stresses that the peninsula contained a complicated mixture of reform movements, evangelical enthusiasm, anticlerical criticism, and theological dissent.
The response could be severe. Canon 3 of the Fourth Lateran Council formally condemned heresy and created expectations for secular authorities to act against those judged heretical.
Inquisitorial records therefore became one of the most important sources for studying medieval religious dissent. They must be read carefully because they were produced by institutions attempting to identify and suppress heresy, but they preserve testimony about religious ideas and communities that often left few records of their own.
The Waldensians proved unusually durable. Their communities in Piedmont survived centuries of restriction and persecution and later became connected to the Protestant Reformation. Their continued presence made them an important part of the struggle for religious toleration when the modern Italian state began to emerge.
Jews in Italian Religious History
Jewish history in Italy stretches back to antiquity and cannot be treated merely as a footnote to Christian history. Jewish communities lived in Rome before Christianity became the religion of the empire, and Jewish life continued across the peninsula through periods of relative stability, restriction, expulsion, segregation, and emancipation.
Different Italian states treated Jewish communities differently. Cities such as Rome, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Florence, and Livorno developed distinctive patterns of Jewish settlement and communal life.
Venice created one of the most influential institutions in the history of European Jewish segregation. On March 29, 1516, the Venetian Senate ordered Jews residing in the city to live together in the area known as the Ghetto Nuovo. The surviving decree explicitly required Jews scattered through different parts of Venice to move into the designated quarter. The name of that neighborhood eventually supplied Europe with the word “ghetto.”
Rome followed with its own system of compulsory segregation. In 1555, Pope Paul IV issued Cum nimis absurdum, ordering Jews in Rome and other papal territories to reside in designated quarters and imposing restrictions on synagogues, property, employment, clothing, and interaction with Christians. The language of the bull itself demonstrates the theological hostility underlying those restrictions.
At the same time, Jewish life within Renaissance Italy remained intellectually and culturally vibrant. Jewish communities maintained synagogues, charitable institutions, schools, legal traditions, commercial networks, family structures, and rabbinic scholarship. Robert Bonfil’s study of Renaissance Italian Jewry emphasizes both the richness of this religious culture and the insecurity that Jewish communities faced within Christian society.
Islam and the Religious World of Sicily
Another major chapter unfolded in Sicily.
Muslim armies began conquering Byzantine Sicily during the ninth century, and Islamic rule transformed portions of the island politically, economically, linguistically, and culturally. Palermo became a major Mediterranean city, while Muslim communities developed institutions and religious life that connected Sicily to North Africa and the wider Islamic world.
Arabic writers such as Ibn Hawqal and al-Idrisi are especially important for reconstructing this world. Al-Idrisi’s geographical work is particularly striking because it was produced in the twelfth century at the court of the Norman Christian king Roger II.
The Norman conquest did not instantly erase the Muslim population. Norman Sicily remained home to Latin Christians, Greek Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and royal administration could operate in Latin, Greek, and Arabic. Scholarship on Muslims under Norman rule has increasingly emphasized the importance of documentary evidence for understanding this unusually complex society rather than imagining the conquest as an immediate religious replacement.
Over the following generations, however, the position of Sicily’s Muslim communities deteriorated through conflict, migration, rebellion, forced movement, and political pressure. By the thirteenth century, the distinctive Muslim society that had shaped medieval Sicily was largely dismantled.
Its legacy remained embedded in the island’s language, agriculture, architecture, place names, intellectual exchanges, and material culture.
The Reformation, Trent, and the Roman Inquisition
The Protestant Reformation brought a new religious crisis to sixteenth-century Italy.
Lutheran and Reformed ideas circulated through books, universities, merchants, humanist networks, religious circles, and cities such as Venice. Some Italians explored evangelical ideas about Scripture, salvation, and church reform without initially thinking of themselves as members of a separate religion.
Church authorities responded through a combination of reform and repression. Pope Paul III established the Roman Inquisition in 1542, creating an institution that investigated suspected heresy and became increasingly important in policing religious boundaries.
The surviving records of the Roman Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index preserve investigations, denunciations, theological judgments, censorship decisions, correspondence, and trials. These documents reveal that early modern religious regulation involved far more than famous cases. Authorities investigated books, preaching, Protestant belief, magic, mysticism, popular religious practices, clerical conduct, and private theological opinions.
At the same time, the Council of Trent, meeting intermittently between 1545 and 1563, produced the most important Catholic reform program of the era. The council addressed Scripture and tradition, justification, the sacraments, the Mass, clerical education, marriage, saints, relics, sacred images, and church discipline. In its twenty-fifth session, for example, the council explicitly defended the invocation of saints, the veneration of relics, and the proper religious use of sacred images.
Trent therefore represented both a response to Protestantism and an extensive effort to reform Catholic institutions. Seminaries, religious orders, episcopal oversight, missionary activity, preaching, confession, censorship, and devotional life all became important parts of what historians variously call the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation.
Because Rome stood at the institutional center of these developments, religious changes taking place in Italy affected Catholic communities around the world.
The Risorgimento and the Roman Question
The nineteenth century transformed the relationship between religion and political power more dramatically than any period since late antiquity.
Before Italian unification, the Papal States placed large sections of central Italy under the temporal government of the pope. At the same time, Piedmont-Sardinia was developing constitutional institutions that would eventually provide the political framework for unified Italy.
The Statuto Albertino of 1848 showed the tension between tradition and change. Its first article declared the Roman Catholic faith the sole religion of the state while stating that other existing forms of worship were tolerated according to law.
Yet the same revolutionary period brought important advances for religious minorities. In February 1848 Charles Albert granted civil and political rights to the Waldensians, and Jewish emancipation followed as Piedmont-Sardinia moved toward a broader conception of citizenship.
The conflict with the papacy proved much more difficult.
As nationalist forces unified the peninsula, the Papal States steadily disappeared. Rome was finally incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. The pope no longer ruled a large central Italian territory, and relations between the Holy See and the Italian government entered a prolonged crisis known as the Roman Question.
Religion had become intertwined with one of the central problems of modern Italian identity. Could a unified Italian national state coexist with a papacy whose authority reached Catholics across the world?
For decades the answer remained unsettled.
Mussolini, the Lateran Pacts, and Fascist Italy
The Roman Question was formally resolved under circumstances that gave the settlement lasting controversy.
On February 11, 1929, representatives of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government and Pope Pius XI concluded the Lateran Pacts. The agreement included a treaty establishing Vatican City as a sovereign state, a concordat governing church-state relations, and a financial settlement.
Article 1 of the treaty reaffirmed the principle that Roman Catholicism was the religion of the Italian state, while Article 3 recognized the sovereignty of the Holy See over Vatican City.
The settlement ended nearly sixty years of formal conflict between Italy and the papacy. It also gave the Fascist government political prestige, while securing the Catholic Church’s institutional position in education, marriage, clergy, and public life.
The relationship between Catholic institutions and Fascism remained complicated and changed over time, but the Lateran settlement became one of the central legal landmarks in modern Italian religious history.
The Fascist period also produced one of the darkest chapters in the history of Italian Judaism.
In 1938 the regime introduced racial legislation targeting Jews. Royal Decree-Law No. 1728 prohibited marriages between those classified by the Fascist state as belonging to different races and created a body of legal restrictions aimed particularly at Italian Jews.
The laws stripped away rights that Jewish Italians had gained during the nineteenth-century emancipation process. They affected education, employment, marriage, property, public life, and citizenship. Under German occupation after 1943, persecution escalated into arrests and deportations to Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
The history of Italian religion during Fascism therefore contains a striking contradiction. The regime simultaneously reached a historic settlement with the Catholic Church while dismantling the legal equality of Jewish citizens.
The Republic and Religious Freedom
The collapse of Fascism and creation of the Italian Republic established a fundamentally different constitutional framework.
The Constitution of 1948 addressed religion directly. Article 7 declared the state and the Catholic Church independent and sovereign within their respective spheres while recognizing the Lateran Pacts as the foundation of their legal relationship.
Article 8 went further in defining religious pluralism, stating that all religious confessions are equally free before the law and providing a mechanism through which non-Catholic communities can establish agreements, known as intese, with the state.
These constitutional principles did not instantly erase every inequality created by older Italian law, but they provided a foundation for a broader system of religious liberty.
A major additional change came in 1984, when the Italian Republic and the Holy See revised the Lateran Concordat. The new agreement declared the state and Catholic Church independent and sovereign in their respective orders, while the accompanying protocol recognized that Catholicism was no longer to be treated as Italy’s sole state religion.
The change marked an important point in the transition from a Catholic confessional state toward a constitutional system that recognized both Italy’s Catholic historical inheritance and the freedom of other religions.
A More Religiously Diverse Italy
Modern Italy remains profoundly marked by Catholic history. Churches dominate the centers of cities and villages, Catholic feast days remain part of community calendars, Rome is the episcopal seat of the pope, and the artistic heritage of Christianity is woven into the country’s architecture, painting, sculpture, music, literature, and landscape.
Yet modern Italian religious life is considerably more diverse.
The Italian government’s system of agreements under Article 8 now includes religious bodies representing Waldensians, Adventists, Assemblies of God, Jewish communities, Baptists, Lutherans, Orthodox Christians, Latter-day Saints, Apostolic Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Soka Gakkai Buddhists, the Church of England, and other communities. The government’s current register shows how far the legal structure of Italian religion has moved beyond the older model of one established faith surrounded by merely tolerated minorities.
Islam also occupies an increasingly visible place in contemporary Italy through communities shaped partly by migration from North Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East, and South Asia. Orthodox Christianity has expanded significantly, while Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Pentecostal, evangelical, and other religious communities have become increasingly visible.
This diversity does not erase Italy’s Catholic inheritance. Instead, it adds another layer to a religious landscape that has always been more complicated than a single tradition.
Why the Religious History of Italy Matters
Religion in Italy has repeatedly changed while leaving traces of what came before.
Ancient Roman temples did not simply disappear when Christianity arrived. Christian buildings reused spaces, columns, artistic forms, and civic landscapes created under pagan Rome. Medieval Catholicism developed within cities whose streets still followed ancient plans. Jewish communities maintained traditions that predated Christian political dominance. Islamic Sicily connected the island to Arabic-speaking Mediterranean worlds. Waldensians survived centuries of pressure in Alpine valleys before becoming participants in modern Italian religious freedom.
The result is a history built in layers.
The Rome of Jupiter and Vesta became the Rome of Peter and Paul. The persecuted Christians described by Tacitus eventually belonged to the religion favored by emperors. Bishops who once operated within the Roman Empire became leaders of an independent papal institution. The pope who ruled much of central Italy eventually became the sovereign of a state measuring only a small portion of Rome. A kingdom that once declared Catholicism its sole religion became a republic whose constitution guarantees freedom to multiple religious communities.
Even the legal language tells the story. The Statuto Albertino spoke of one state religion and tolerated alternatives. The Lateran Treaty reaffirmed Catholicism’s privileged position. The republican Constitution declared religious confessions equally free. The 1984 agreement formally abandoned the principle that Catholicism was Italy’s sole state religion.
Few countries allow that transformation to be read so clearly in monuments, archives, laws, churches, synagogues, manuscripts, ruins, and living communities.
To study religion in Italy is therefore to study much more than the history of belief. It is to follow the transformation of the Roman world, the rise of Christianity, the development of the papacy, medieval struggles over authority, the lives of religious minorities, the Reformation and Catholic response, the creation of the Italian nation, the compromises of Fascism, the tragedy of racial persecution, and the emergence of modern religious liberty.
Across all of those periods, the central question has repeatedly changed form but never entirely disappeared: how should communities with different beliefs live together while religion remains connected to culture, identity, and power?
Italy’s long history offers no single answer. Instead, it preserves more than two thousand years of attempts to find one.
Sources & Further Reading
Ambrose of Milan. Letters 17 and 18. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 10. Translated by H. de Romestin, E. de Romestin, and H. T. F. Duckworth. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1896. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/340917.htm
Beard, Mary, John North, and Simon Price. Religions of Rome. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/religions-of-rome/
Black, Christopher F. The Italian Inquisition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300117066/the-italian-inquisition/
Bonfil, Robert. Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/jewish-life-in-renaissance-italy/hardcover
Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea. “Le leggi antiebraiche dell’Italia fascista.” Fondazione CDEC. https://www.cdec.it/formazione/percorsi/per-la-storia-della-shoah/le-leggi-antiebraiche-dellitalia-fascista/
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Divinatione. Perseus Digital Library. Tufts University. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Natura Deorum. Edited by Otto Plasberg. Leipzig: Teubner, 1917. Perseus Digital Library. https://catalog.perseus.tufts.edu/catalog/urn%3Acts%3AlatinLit%3Aphi0474.phi050
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Legibus. Perseus Digital Library. Tufts University. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Council of Trent. The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent. Translated by J. Waterworth. London: Dolman, 1848. Hanover Historical Texts Project. https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/
Fourth Lateran Council. “Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215.” Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Fordham University. https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/source/lat4-select.asp
Gregory I. Registrum Epistolarum. In Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae. Berlin: Monumenta Germaniae Historica. https://www.mgh.de/en/mgh-publications/mgh-publication-series/epistolae-quart
Gregory VII. “Dictatus Papae.” 1075. Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Fordham University. https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/source/g7-dictpap.asp
Italian Republic. Constitution of the Italian Republic. Articles 7, 8, 19, and 20. Senato della Repubblica. https://www.senato.it/istituzione/la-costituzione
Italian Republic and Holy See. “Agreement between the Holy See and the Italian Republic Modifying the Lateran Concordat.” February 18, 1984. Vatican. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/archivio/documents/rc_seg-st_19850603_santa-sede-italia_it.html
Kingdom of Italy and Holy See. Lateran Treaty and Concordat. February 11, 1929. Vatican. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/archivio/documents/rc_seg-st_19290211_patti-lateranensi_it.html
Kingdom of Italy. “Regio Decreto-Legge 17 novembre 1938, n. 1728: Provvedimenti per la difesa della razza italiana.” Gazzetta Ufficiale. November 17, 1938. Normattiva. https://www.normattiva.it/uri-res/N2Ls?urn%3Anir%3Astato%3Aregio.decreto.legge%3A1938-11-17%3B1728%40originale=
Kingdom of Sardinia. Statuto Albertino. March 4, 1848. Wikisource. https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Italia,Regno-_Statuto_albertino
Kingdom of Sardinia. “Regie Patenti 17 febbraio 1848.” February 17, 1848. Wikisource. https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Regno_di_Sardegna_-_Regie_Patenti_17_febbraio_1848
Kertzer, David I. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. https://www.davidkertzer.com/books/kidnapping-edgardo-mortara
Kertzer, David I. The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe. New York: Random House, 2014. https://www.davidkertzer.com/books/pope-and-mussolini
Lactantius. De Mortibus Persecutorum. Chapter 48. “The ‘Edict of Milan,’ 313.” Internet Ancient History Sourcebook. Fordham University. https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/source/edict-milan.asp
Livy. History of Rome. Book 1, chap. 20. Translated by B. O. Foster. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919. Perseus Digital Library. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0151%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D20
Martin, John. Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.5973095
Metcalfe, Alex. The Muslims of Medieval Italy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv2f4vmbk
Ovid. Fasti. Perseus Digital Library. Tufts University. https://catalog.perseus.tufts.edu/catalog/urn%3Acts%3AlatinLit%3Aphi0959.phi007.opp-lat5
Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino, and Neslihan Şenocak, eds. A People’s Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050–1300. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023. https://academic.oup.com/cornell-scholarship-online/book/55666
Paul IV. Cum nimis absurdum. Papal bull, July 14, 1555. https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Cum_nimis_absurdum
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Pius IX. Nostis et Nobiscum. Encyclical, December 8, 1849. Vatican. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-ix/it/documents/enciclica-nostis-et-nobiscum-8-dicembre-1849.html
Pius IX. Nullis certe. Encyclical, January 19, 1860. Vatican. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-ix/it/documents/enciclica-nullis-certe-19-gennaio-1860.html
Pliny the Younger. “Letters 10.96–97: Correspondence with Trajan Concerning Christians.” Internet Ancient History Sourcebook. Fordham University. https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/source/pliny1.asp
Pollard, John. Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society and Politics since 1861. London: Routledge, 2008. https://www.routledge.com/Catholicism-in-Modern-Italy-Religion-Society-and-Politics-since-1861/Pollard/p/book/9780415758376
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