Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Italy gathers eight cities, among the atlas's largest country groupings, tracing Latin Christianity from its imperial founding through the councils that defined its doctrine to the relics, saints and rival currents running alongside the papacy.

Rome is the center: its state religion of Jupiter and the Capitoline Triad gave way over four centuries to Christianity, and it has served as the seat of the Roman Catholic Church ever since, its churches built on temples built on tombs. Milan gives its name to the 313 edict extending imperial toleration to Christians, and its bishop Ambrose, who baptized Augustine there, gave it a distinct liturgical rite still used today. Trent hosted the twenty five session council of 1545 to 1563 that fixed the Catholic biblical canon and defined justification against the Reformers, giving the Tridentine Mass its name. Florence hosted a shorter council in 1439 attempting union with the Greek church, and under Medici patronage Ficino's translations of Plato and the Hermetic corpus shaped Renaissance magic.

Assisi is the birthplace of Francis and Clare, who founded the Franciscans and Poor Clares there, and the site of John Paul II's 1986 interreligious World Day of Prayer for Peace. Naples keeps a public devotional life around Saint Januarius, whose blood is exposed and reported to liquefy three times a year. Turin holds the Shroud, radiocarbon dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century but never formally affirmed as genuine. Venice built its identity on relics of Mark the Evangelist and, through its 1516 Ghetto, gave the word ghetto to every language that later borrowed it.

Together the eight trace one church's authority founded, defined, contested and, in Venice's ghetto and Florence's Hermetic texts, pushed against from outside.