Saint and Screen: The Strangeness of Venerating a Saint through YouTube

by: Emily Jay , February 6, 2024

As I watch the 399^th Festino di Santa Rosalia from my computer and phone, observing live streams and Instagram posts to get a sense of the festivities, circumstances beyond my control keeping me from Palermo at this time, I cannot help thinking about the relationship between technology and the divine. Or, more specifically, how both screens and saints permeate and shape my life as they shape one another, despite how incongruous this statement may seem. There is an inherent paradox in venerating and connecting to a saint using social media platforms, which through aggressive and expert advertising also push me to constantly consume material goods that I do not actually need. Rosalia, the saint I most actively engage with, left the social order to not be told what she should and could do. Yet here I am watching her on a platform that is trying to tell me what to buy, using algorithms to sell me goods ever-more skillfully with the promise of bettering my day-to-day life. But in fact it is technology that has allowed me to deepen my relationship with the saint.

Weather Sicily, a local weather channel, has livestreaming webcams placed in strategic (and perhaps not so strategic) locations across the island, their feeds played through YouTube channels. One of these cameras happens to be placed within Rosalia’s chapel in Palermo’s Cathedral, where the majority of her relics are contained. Nearly every day for the past two years I have had this camera open and running on my computer; I can gaze upon Rosalia whenever I desire. The camera runs, even after the lights have been turned off and the doors to the Cathedral shut, and due to the time difference between Ohio and Sicily I am often watching her and her chapel after hours. The page, which tracks and discloses numbers of viewers, often tells me that I’m the only one there: ‘1 watching now’ is displayed below the video feed. I am comforted to be in relationship with her in a private and intimate way in these moments. I am with her beyond the confines of a patriarchal power and physical structure; though she is kept within the Cathedral I can access her without having to be harangued to cover my shoulders, without having to see priests, and without having to follow predetermined ways of moving throughout a space controlled by the Catholic Church. My body, my being, is free and safe within my own spaces (often my office at work), reminding me that as much as the Church attempts to control her, Rosalia is free and safe within her own spaces as well: her reliquary ark, her grotto-cave, and her icons and likenesses. There is both tension and freedom here: the tension of what seeks to control and contain (both the Catholic Church and the companies behind the technologies I use) and the ability to find freedom to move beyond that in quiet, and not so quiet, ways (watching a saint when a church is closed, using Google-owned apps to commune with a saint and do research for a paper that suggests ways of interacting with technologies that are antithetical to their intended purpose, for example). This tension-freedom afforded by a webcam on a chapel belies something larger to uncover; something that speaks to Rosalia in particular, and perhaps to my relationship with technology as prescribed by her more generally. In this paper I will unravel these threads as best I can, using not only historically aided analysis of Rosalia and her veneration, but also posthuman and new materialist feminist theories that may shine a light on new ways to interact with both saints and screens, ways that might indicate new modes of dreaming, worshipping, and being.

To begin, I should explain a bit about the Festino, about Rosalia, and Palermo, and why I’m so interested in all of this. Rosalia is Palermo’s most beloved and famous patron saint. There is almost no documentation of the historical figure of Rosalia; what we know about her human life is based entirely on legend and retellings of her story. She is said to have lived between 1130-1170, a daughter of the noble Sinibaldo family, who were members of King Roger II’s court (Solomon 2012: 34-35). Legend says that she renounced the world at the age of fourteen, likely to avoid an arranged marriage, in order to devote herself entirely to her faith, first living as a hermit in inland Sicily, from there moving to Monte Pellegrino, the mountain that watches Palermo’s northern border, where she died around the age of 30, alone in a watery mountain grotto (Solomon 2012: 35).  After this the gentle flow of water that had made the grotto such a comfortable home consumed Rosalia entirely; her body—her relics—became part of the cave.

Because of this, Rosalia remains a relatively unknown figure until 1624, at which point she explodes upon the religious landscape of the city with an intensity that has not been diminished. It was at this time that she was called upon to combat the plague which ravaged Palermo, after her relics within the cave were discovered on July 15, 1624. There are a number of incongruous accounts of what led up to the discovery of Rosalia’s relics. The stories revolve around Rosalia appearing to someone in a dream and giving directions about where to find her remains; often you will see her appearing to a young male hunter. Recent scholarship asserts that it was in fact an ill woman, Geronima La Cattuta, who was first visited by Rosalia and who ultimately traversed the mountain, finding her relics (Mazzola 2018:8). Rosalia directed La Cattuta to her remains in order to have them brought into the city centre and processed to combat the spread of disease. After the relics were found the city of Palermo dutifully followed Rosalia’s orders and held a grand procession for her on the ninth of June 1625, after which the plague appeared to cease (Mazzola 2018:9).  I say appeared because it is difficult to know the exact numbers of plague-related deaths after this procession, though we do know it was highly attended, and that the plague did not appear to continue aggressively into 1626 (Mazzola 2018:9). This, much like the reality of Rosalia as a historical figure, is shadowy at best, nevertheless it is a central part of the story of Rosalia today.

Ever since this momentous occasion, there has been a festival—the Festino—held every year during the week of July 15^th. The Festino celebrates Rosalia and culminates in a procession of her relics (held within a beautiful baroque reliquary ark) throughout Palermo’s historical centre.  In 2018 I happened to be in the city at the same time as the Festino and I fell, nearly instantly, in love with Rosalia. I was struck by the joy and devotion she inspired in the city, and the fact that a young woman who chose to leave the social order behind in order to live her own life was now the central focus of an entire city for a week (and, I would later learn, for the entirety of the year). The tension between this self-removal and reappearance of her gripped me, and I became aware of all of the ways that she lived; within herself in her grotto-cave, as a badge of honour for the diverse peoples of Palermo, as a thread that bound the physical city together. I was enchanted and have been building a relationship with her ever since.

To build a relationship with a saint is nothing new. Many scholars working across disciplines—including but not limited to religious studies, art history, and history—have explored the ways that medieval and early modern peoples understood themselves to be in relationship with holy figures, and how images and relics mediated and expanded such relationships. For example, Carolyn Walker Bynum’s 2020 Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe looks at the ways that objects mediated experience and interaction with the holy in northern Europe, revealing that people communed with divine figures, such as Christ and the Madonna, through holding, eating, and gazing at particular objects such as cradles and communion wafers. Likewise, art historian Louise Marshalls makes the case that images of particular saints, such as San Sebastiano, produced in the wake of the 1347 plague were devotees’ ways of ‘manipulating the sacred’ in order to call upon the saint and sooth themselves in the wake of horror (Marshall 1994: 506-520). I feel connected to and in communion with Rosalia; her presence is apparent to me when I visit Palermo or when I watch her chapel, when I look at images of her or write about her. I call upon her in times of need, and celebrate her in times of plenty, much as the medieval Europeans did with Sebastiano. How Rosalia connects to the divine and exists is, for me, perhaps slightly different.

I understand Rosalia as an entangled network of relations, materials, and affects that change, evolve, and reach into the past, present, and future. In this way, Rosalia is constantly becoming. When I speak of becoming, I mean as inspired by the way that Deleuze and Guattari spoke of it: ‘[w]hat is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes’ (2003: 35-77). Becoming denotes a way of seeing that all of life, including the material, discursive, human, and non-human, are entangled and affective and are in process through this entanglement; edges are always porous, and nothing is monolithic. Rosalia is entangled with Palermo, me, other devotees, etc; she would not be who she is without these entanglements. Because of this, she evolves and changes constantly, she is not a static entity. As Palermo changes, so does she, she also changes as new images of her emerge and older ones change due to weather, and she evolves as people develop their relationship with her. Put another way, Rosalia performs and participates, thereby co-producing the boundaries that define her. In this way Rosalia also has agency, and throughout this musing I think this will become clear. As Karen Barad explains in ‘Posthumanist Performativity,’ ‘the universe is agential intra-activity in it’s becoming … This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world’ (2008: 135). She lives, affecting humans, animals, objects, and ideas who she encounters and entangles with—myself included.

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cause this place is full of people who have eyes and choose to see nothing, who all talk into their hands as they peripatate and all carry these votives, some the size of a hand, some the size of a face or a whole head, dedicated to saints perhaps or holy folk, and they look or talk to or pray to these tablets or icons all the while by holding them next to their heads or stroking them with fingers staring only at them, signifying they must be heavy in their despairs to be so consistently looking away from their world and so devoted to their icons.

 -Ali Smith, How to be Both, 195.

The slavish devotion which I have given to my phone and computer has dominated my adult life and is frequently a point of frustration, fear, and anxiety for me; like so many people I often—despite my best efforts—stay up too late scrolling, am too easily swayed to purchase things that I do not need, and watch both my phone and my TV at the same time. Yet in my present moment these screens afford me a connection to a saint I love in a way I would never otherwise get to experience, and a connection that is outside the bounds of church and landscape. These screens, in a pivotal moment, have interceded in my life without it even being their or their creators’ specific intention to allow me to continue my research from afar. It is a strange miracle that has enriched my life, a mirror of how the miraculous saints and holy figures of many religious traditions interceded, and still intercede, on people’s behalf, making lives better, easier, and more meaningful. Our technologies, smart phones, tablets, Siri, Alexa, these handheld ‘votives’ or ‘icons’ as we could call them, also intercede for us today, making our lives easier and more meaningful when interacted with carefully. These two types of ‘saints’ are not in opposition, though. Rather than positing the world as made up of binaries, and thus our present moment as a time whereby we must choose between saints or ‘technological saints’ such as our smartphones, Siri, and Alexa, Rosalia (and other saints like her) invite us to reject a binary as something that is a naturally occurring eventuality of existence. Our screens and our saints are not in opposition, and it is also not that one or the other is either simply good or bad for us.

As Carissa Turner Smith writes in Cyborg Saints: Religion and Posthumanism in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction, ‘[i]n the contemporary context, saints still exercise a mediatorial function, though God is not necessarily one of the parties in this exchange. Rather, contemporary saints mediate between binaries established by modernity—binaries between people and things, between religion and secularity. And between past and present’ (2019: 3). The vitae of saints—and Rosalia is no exception—are rife with stories of the embodied transformation of bodies, of faith, of space, and of time (Smith 2019: 5). Saints posit challenges to traditionally held understandings of autonomy, subjectivity, and agency in all corners of their vitae (Smith 2019: 5). Borders are never quite set, and ‘the body,’ ‘the mind,’ and ‘the human’ as we may understand these concepts today are far more fluid, ambiguous, and embodied than we might expect. Saints’ agency and their autonomy is distributed across various bodies, forms, and sites, human and otherwise, and they fully embrace their bodies in all of the miraculous and extreme forms they might take or become. For example, Rosalia departs from the social order of Palermo in the 12^th century to live in a mountain cave, a cave whose walls, through the process of calcification, will eventually consume her body. Rosalia became the mountain cave upon her human death and the cave became Rosalia in that instant; she was and still is understood to inhabit or be accessible through the mountain and the cave. In 1624 her remains are dug out of the cave and dispersed into hands, homes, and reliquaries throughout Palermo, where she then and there becomes present and accessible (Cabibbo 2004: 97-116). [1] Rosalia collapses time in this way as well, thereby dismantling a binary way of understanding it, a then versus now mentality, through her very existence as an actor in today and in the past. She has lived and still lives in different ways, in Medieval Palermo in a human existence, in Early Modern Palermo as an emerged saint from the mountain, and today, as an ever-present presence throughout the city, revealing the past as not an ‘other’ but rather a part of what constitutes the present. Likewise, Rosalia was and still is understood to be present and situated within her transformed ‘body,’ whatever the form it has taken or continues to take: in her relics held within various reliquaries, in the cave where she died, which she became a part of, as well as in icons of her. Her body is all of these things, and her being, her mind we could say, is tied into and a part of all of them as well. The Cartesian body-mind duality is thereby dismantled in hagiography (Smith 2019: 3), as both a saint’s body and mind are dispersed and contained together within multiple forms and sites.

It is never an either/or but rather always an ‘and’ situation with saints:  as we can see it is not that Rosalia was the cave or her bones, but rather that Rosalia is the cave and her bones. It is not Rosalia that was alive either in the medieval period or today, but rather that Rosalia lives in the 12^th century and today. In this way, Rosalia has ‘distributed cognition,’ as critical post-humanist scholar N. Katherine Hayles conceives of the concept: her knowledge, being, and activity is distributed across and through forms and sites (Smith 2019: 7). She ultimately reveals how we humans have distributed cognition as well:  the human ‘subject’ is in no way contained within one neat form, we exist in multiple sites and our phones, computers, homes, friends, family members, mentors, etc. all retain knowledge and knowing for us, which ultimately suggests that, as Carissa Turner Smith states, ‘cognition cannot be used to police the boundaries of a singular human subject’ (2019: 7). Thus, saints question our contemporary understandings of subjectivity. In turn, they remind us that our technological ‘saints’—our phones and laptops, apps and Siri, etc—make up our own distributed cognition, and are now part of our own ever-evolving selves. As Donna Haraway writes in A Cyborg Manifesto, [l]ate twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines’ (2016: 11). As such, these technologies must be considered carefully, as behind them lies the (perhaps) greatest emblem of late-stage capitalism: algorithms which grow and become with us, intended solely to spur consumption. Just as saints can be used both by the Church and by those who wish to exist outside and beyond its boundaries, so too can our technologies.

The tight borders that surround and define what is ‘human’ and what is ‘agency’ are eroded when saints are examined critically.  The devotees that worship before Rosalia (in any of the iterations, forms, sites she embodies) are in her presence and in relationship with her, each ‘entity’ exercising its own agency and each affecting the other in turn. In this way, multiple agencies (worshippers, Rosalia) are acting, ultimately, together. Rosalia is always becoming, she is in the past and present, inhabiting many forms, and alive in the hearts of those who love her, evolving with and through all of these elements as they also become. This is perhaps best illustrated through the processions that were held for her in 1624-25; via the movement of Rosalia’s body (in the form of her relics or images of her) and the bodies of the Palermitani through (and) the city of Palermo, the plague was cast out of the city (Jay 2021). The relationship between devotees, Rosalia, and cityscape exist into the present as well. While there was no formally-organised procession in 2021 due to Covid-19, Rosalia was nevertheless in relationship with the city and the peoples within; many came to worship before her silver reliquary ark in the Cathedral, and she was, via her relics, flown over and around the city via helicopter as a way to re-sacralise the city and population on the 15 of July, (Sito Ufficiale Arcidiocesi di Palermo, n.d.). With Rosalia, her devotees, and the landscape of Palermo we can find a distributed agency; again, no longer are we in an either/or situation, but rather an ‘and’ one. Each of the constituent nodes of this entangled assemblage are brought into being through the multifaceted and always in flux relationships between one another: the landscape of the city, Rosalia in her various forms, and her worshippers.

All of this and more asks us to see the ways that our relationships with one type of saint might inform and enhance our relationships with another. Rosalia is not supplanted by Siri, rather Rosalia can help us to be in relationship with the technological saints of our everyday lives, in more meaningful and careful ways, ways that provide opportunities for imagination, knowledge gathering, and connection. While these technological ‘saints’ may appear to and do in fact intercede on our behalf in a myriad of ways and for a myriad of things, they are also—much like ‘traditional’ saints when not interacted with in a conscious manner—tools that maintain larger power structures. In the case of today it is the patriarchal, neoliberal late-stage capitalist system within which we are all entangled. For centuries people have been in relationship with saints through various forms of devotion and ritual, and in these relationships, saints have helped people to grow, evolve, and navigate difficulty. [2] This reminds us that as we inhabit an increasingly cyborg world we must also realise we are in relationship with what helps us to do this: we must be careful of who can and does manipulate our screens and saints, present always to the ways that we can interact and be in relationship with them in ways that are meaningful, life-affirming, and focused not on consumption but care. Again, Rosalia reminds me of Haraway’s hopeful thoughts on this: ‘a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints’ (2016: 15).

Rosalia and other saints, in their very instability and becoming-ness, can allow and inspire revolutionary actions while also insisting upon and necessitating an inward turning dimension to such actions. Again, we turn to hagiography to help us understand this. While there are tropes and common ‘plot points’ throughout many vitae, the lives of saints are nevertheless celebrations of difference, creativity, and the resistance efforts of the oppressed. Saints can be seen gathering information, creatively asserting themselves, and also making time for quiet contemplation. Rosalia protected, expressed, and continues to express herself. She decided to retreat from the world so that she could turn inward and focus solely on her spiritual life. In some versions of her vita that are told her decision to retreat from Palermo was because she did not want to marry the man her father had chosen for her; in other tellings she simply left. In either case, this was a radical act; she outright rejected the tightly bounded role that, as a female, she would have had to perform in the twelfth century: marriage and childbearing and childrearing.  This radical act of Rosalia’s, her assertion of herself through withdrawal, has ramifications for our increasingly frenetic world today. While we do not have to wholly depart from the social order in the way that she did, we can still learn from her:  rest, quiet, and contemplation are all still radical acts, and we must be in relationship with our technological saints in such a way that we do not lose sight of this.  We can find and create safe spaces for ourselves, and our technological saints can help us with this as much as Rosalia can; online communities, blogs, conversations with far off peoples, and more can be found and created through technology. Rosalia reminds us that we can use our technological saints in ways that are creative and expressive. We do not have to be shackled to them, rather they can be tools that help us to become the versions of ourselves we most want to be. In order to do this, though, we must be careful, and we must rest.

In a way it could be argued that what Rosalia did when she went into the cave on Monte Pellegrino in the twelfth century was to create an ‘elsewhere space,’ as conceived of by feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis. De Lauretis’ elsewhere space is what is necessarily created by feminists in and through their work in order to counter hegemonic narratives and discourse surrounding the construction of gender (1987: 24-25). The space is elsewhere because it is one that is not seen by the hegemony (de Lauretis 1987: 24-25), and because of this, I believe the idea can be applied to more than just conversations about gender. It is what is in the margins, in borders, what is not represented, because it is new and not contingent on or even connected to patriarchal discourses (de Lauretis 1987: 24-25). This is not, though, a magical dream-space that is only in fantasy, ‘that “elsewhere” is not some mythic distant past or some utopian future history: it is the elsewhere of discourse here and now, the blind spots, or the space-off, of its representations,’ she writes in The Technology of Gender (de Lauretis 1987: 25). These elsewhere spaces, though initially theoretical and discursive spaces, can ‘take hold at the level of subjectivity and self-representation,’ ultimately being a part of people’s daily lives (de Lauretis 1987: 25). In being situated in the ‘here and now,’ an elsewhere space creates a new present, opening up agency for those who might not have it, thereby paving the way for different, better futures (de Lauretis 1987: 25).

In going into the mountain cave, literally inhabiting an unseen part of Palermo’s border (as the mountain is the protective wall to the city in the north), Rosalia was able to exercise her agency and become herself in a way she would not otherwise have been able to as a woman living in 12^th century Palermo. She created an elsewhere space, and in creating this elsewhere space for herself, she has invited me (and I imagine countless others), to join her there, or to create our own elsewhere spaces. For example, throughout the lockdown period of the Covid-19 pandemic I would sit my desk daily and watch the live feeds of Rosalia’s chapel and the views of Monte Pellegrino; I would read and write about medieval Palermo and study the lives of other Sicilian female saints to better understand Rosalia. Studying Rosalia afforded me the ability to move through a pandemic; imagining her in her mountain cave, cozy and safe, helped me to feel safe while the world around me became more and more fraught; I understand my research with Rosalia was (and still is) an elsewhere space that was naturally created while I was on lockdown within a tiny two-room apartment. Listening to and witnessing her assertions of self helped me to assert myself when I felt small (as I know it will help me to do again in the future).

This witnessing of which I speak is, potentially, strange to some. But I feel that to stand in the grotto on Monte Pellegrino is to witness Rosalia’s assertion of herself. This damp, cool opening in the earth on high is where she chose to live, where she chose to die, and what she chose to become. To go there is to bear witness to her self-determination to live as she wanted to live, to practice her faith as she wanted to practice it. She controlled her body and thereby controlled her fate in a way that was very much discordant to what was allowed in the 12^th century in Europe. I love her for this. And this love is genuine love, one that opens out of my heart in a roaring, joyous warmth. The image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with the flames around it, is for me not the heart of Jesus but my heart in love with Rosalia and her resolve. Rosalia is to me strong through her gentleness and fragility—this is after all a woman who allowed herself to be swallowed whole into a cave! She was gentle in that space, and let her fragility live, and then merge with the earth around her. It is this vulnerability, this acceptance and melting into what as most fragile and gentle of herself, that enabled her to become a cave and thus become a saint. We must remember that she did not perform any miracles in her lifetime; only after 1624 do we have any recorded. This is not to say, though, that her leaving everything behind and living her faith on her own terms is not a kind of miracle. The Church may not consider it as such, but I believe it to be a miracle, and I know many others who do as well. It is this action, this walking away from Palermo into the landscape, that is the beginning of the road to sainthood. She was able to live alone on her own terms in her grotto. That moment of death, depicted in marble by Giorgio Tedeschi so beautifully, the giving of herself into the earth, joyfully, that is yet another miracle—she allows herself to become-with in yet another way in this instance. This embodied delicacy protected her and protects her still. Because while we can reach out to her and be in relationship with her, call and pray and ask, she also always has her privacy. We cannot know her fully, we cannot hold her (as much as the Church tries to): she appears always elsewhere, in another small miracle or in a votive image or painting, emerging and manifesting herself within and with her city and landscape, infinitely.

And now, from far away, to observe her city from a webcam, to observe her chapel, is another form of this witnessing for me. While I cannot be, physically, in Palermo and in front of her, I can still see her, and hear Palermo, allow its sounds to mix with the sounds of my life in rural Ohio, and allow her to permeate—through web feeds and the images that I have made—my daily life. To watch her through a webcam from my campus office between art history and visual literacy classes where I work to not teach the same old canon that I was taught, this is to me a bearing witness and a stepping forward with what she has taught me. This is all yet another space I am allowed to inhabit with her; a space of strangeness and glitches; the feeds frequently break and freeze and disappear and yet return; [3] all the while, I dream and write and think and expand.

Female saints, in their challenge to binaries, do more than help us to re-navigate our relationship to technologies, they have also inspired the creation and inhabitation of elsewhere spaces (and continue to do so). There is a long history of female saints and the Madonna being ‘utilized’ by devotees in ways that not only honour the life and agency of both the saint and devotee, but in ways that also, subtly, and not so subtly, subvert (in particular highly gendered) power structures, such as the Catholic Church. Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued that popular religion often worked to counter hegemonic narratives by asserting the presence of subaltern groups (who are not just rural peasantry, but in Gramsci’s own understanding, also constitute any group of discriminated-against peoples), and this can be seen in the ways that various communities interact with female saints today (Piraino and Zambelli 2015: 267). Popular religion, defined as ‘distinguished from the cultured religion of Church hierarchies and Christian intellectuals—as a particular expression of spiritual experience, vision of the world, and values and beliefs within popular classes’ by Francesco Piraino and Laura Zambelli, though certainly in dialogue with the Church (2015: 267),  thus affords the saints who feature prominently in particular traditions (as we will see momentarily) life and agency. These saints are actively in flux, and it could be argued are popular because of this, as they evolve across space and time along with their worshippers. Through their relationship, worshipper and saint together actively avoid a stasis that larger power structures might attempt to trap them within. The worshipper and saint become in their shared elsewhere space.

As Brenda Sendejo writes regarding her own experience, as a Chicana feminist scholar-educator, of reclaiming Our Lady of Guadalupe in ‘Methodologies of the Spirit: Reclaiming Our Lady of Guadalupe and Discovering Tonantzin Within and Beyond the Nepantla of Academia,’ there is ‘a difference between one’s personal faith and the man-made institution of the church’ (2014: 83). There is no denying that these structures and institutions exist, though, and that they still exert considerable influence in maintaining rigid binaries which leave many groups of peoples at disadvantages. What Sendejo writes about, though, is how despite these systems, she and other women are, through conscious and dynamic practices, allowing their relationships with Our Lady of Guadalupe to flourish, grow, and nurture their resistance to patriarchal systems. Describing a mentor who helped her on her reclamation journey, Sendejo writes, ‘[s]he said I could reject attempts by the Church to subjugate women and still hold on to Guadalupe as a symbol of feminine power, strength, and liberation’ (2014: 92). Beyond this, Guadalupe is part of the process, for many Chicanas, of reclamation of indigenous roots, in ‘a part of “spiritual mestizaje” that combines Catholic imagery and Indigenous practices,’ as she is understood to be related to various Nahua deities, such as Tonantzin and Tlazolteotl (Elenes 2014: 45). The Chicana spiritual practice which sees this interconnection enables women to connect the past and their Indigenous heritage into their everyday life; thereby re-activating a henceforth forgotten, elsewhere, past while forging a new present, and thus future (Elenes 2014: 46). Scholars have also argued that in adopting Catholic figures into spiritual practices, Indigenous traditions were concealed and consequently carried on (Elenes 2014: 46). A past that has long been told only by the colonizers is now being retold through daily spiritual practices centred on divine female figures that attest to the resilience and presence of Indigenous communities across space and time.

Divine female figures helping to excavate forgotten pasts and/or assert peoples’ presence in order to forge different futures is also happening in Italy. [4] Scholarly focus on the lives of religious and holy women is helping to uncover histories that have long been forgotten or purposefully stamped out. Judith C. Brown’s Immodest Acts is an excellent example of this. It is the study of the life of Sister Benedetta Carlini, who was a Sister (and Abbess for a time) at a convent in Pescia in the 17^th century. In studying primary documents ranging from trial manuscripts to nuns’ journals found in the State Archive in Florence, Brown was able to tell the story of a woman who not only experienced visions and led her community before the church silenced her, but who was also in a relationship with another woman at the convent, Sister Bartolomea. Brown and Carlini, together, have opened up a past that the Church attempted to keep hidden, asserting feminine and queer presences in Renaissance Italy. Likewise, scholar Carolyn Walker Bynum has done research on holy women, such as the Blessed Colomba of Rieti and Catherine of Siena, and their relationship to food, in order to reveal that (some) women in the past were able to assert their agency and create spaces for themselves in creative and unorthodox ways, for example, by carefully controlling the food they put in their bodies. These women, Benedetta, Colomba, Catherine, and many more are still telling their stories, and today scholars and readers are listening to them; they are acting in our world by opening up the past for us.

The present moment is also being opened as these women continue to become. In Palermo, the worship of Rosalia is an important part of the religious life of the Romani and Tamil communities in the city and surrounding areas (Piraino and Zambelli 2015: 273-377). Scholars Francesco Piraino and Laura Zambelli have researched and written about how Rosalia has been incorporated into the Romani religious lexicon, with her and her mountain Sanctuary playing important roles in Romani-specific holy days, in particular the day of Saint George, May the sixth (2015: 273-274). Their invocation of Rosalia resides outside of the Catholic church’s ‘use’ of her (Piraino and Zambelli 2015: 273-274). By taking the most important figure of the city and making her their own, and then inhabiting her shrine (on the night of May the seventh people sleep there after worshipping and making offerings) the Romani assert their presence and identity within Palermo, despite the widespread xenophobia to be found in the mass media and many politicians in Italy (Piraino and Zambelli 2015: 273-274). This is not simply a contemporary assertion of presence, though. Through this tying together of their identity with Rosalia on the mountain that has since the medieval period been associated with the holy, the Romani are also asserting their place in Palermo’s past. While today the Romani people are separated from the daily cultural life of Palermo (and much of Italy), before the 20^th century they were integrated into the social, cultural, and economic fabric of the south of the peninsula (Piraino and Zambelli 2015: 273-274). By incorporating Rosalia and her shrine into their religious practices the Romani are also actively asserting their long and intertwined history within the city (Piraino and Zambelli 2015: 273-274). [5] Rosalia is helping to assert a better future by helping to uncover, or re-evaluate, the past. Likewise, the Tamil community of Palermo has incorporated Rosalia into their religious landscape, visiting her shrine on Sundays and actively participating in the scheduled festivities that surround her (Salerno 2022: 1-2); an assertion of their presence and life within the city. Here we can also see Rosalia’s life being affirmed and added to, her becoming acknowledged and participated with, by the Romani and Tamil peoples of Palermo.

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Through Rosalia’s invitation, three years ago I created a space that was expansive, creative, and safe. This space prompted me to reevaluate a number of aspects of my daily life, and as Rosalia rested, taking the time to engage with the world in her own way, it felt necessary that I do the same. Weary of disinformation and tired of seeing so many ads I removed the Facebook app from my phone and began to limit my time on Instagram. With the additional time this change afforded me I began a daily correspondence with an artist friend living in Italy. They and I shared our difficulties and joys while navigating the pandemic in a Facebook messenger chat that we maintain to this day. Though on the one hand we know that this space is owned and controlled via Facebook, it has been made by us into a sacred, safe space where we share our triumphs, challenges, the niche memes that no one else in our daily lives are able to appreciate, and where we continue to discuss any and all things—from our desires to see the patriarchy dismantled (and our exhaustion that comes from trying to dismantle it in our own, small ways) all the way to nail polish colours and styles. Through this writing space that we have created via an app, we are able to comfort and support one another in ways that we would not otherwise be able, as there is an ocean between us. Without our screens, our technological icons, we would not have this, and my research and life, online and off, would be much less beautiful and fulfilling. In her 2020 Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell writes of the joyous, challenging, and liberatory opportunities from the white, patriarchal, capitalist hegemony that the online world afforded—and still affords—her and countless others, seeing the glitch, as ‘a refuge from the hegemonic order’ (Hurley 2023: 2). I see the potentials of the glitch, in using technologies for our benefit and beyond the ways they were intended in much the same way that Russell does:  as a space outside of the norm, a space that is co-created by those who are in relationship and entangled with these technologies and each other. The virtual can foster elsewhere spaces; virtually and in real life—because of course isn’t all of this co-created reality, online and off, virtual? Isn’t this distinction, this binary already behind us now? Just as Rosalia is multifaceted, a both-and, aren’t I? Isn’t life?

Rosalia, as we can see in her vita and through her relationships with others (both human and not, as in the case of the city of Palermo), is continually creating and inspiring elsewhere spaces where change is not only able to happen but does happen. These relationships, the networks created through space, saint, and devotees, re-territorialise space, both physical but also emotional, spiritual, and discursive. Today, as I watch the Festino from my couch, I am thankful that I can still, through screens, step into this elsewhere space that I created with Rosalia. What she (and other female saints) suggests to us is that we must engage with our screens with care and consideration. We can create elsewhere spaces through them, but to do this we must participate, actively, in using them and being in relationship with them in healthy ways that side-step the desires of the companies behind them. We cannot slip into binary ways of thinking and perceiving online or off, so that we may embrace nuance, tension, and the highly strange, and—dare I say—magical, aspects that constitute life.

Notes

[1] Sara Cabibbo, in her book Santa Rosalia tra terra e cielo: storia, rituali, linguaggi di un culto barocca, writes of onlookers grasping for bits of Rosalia’s holy remains to keep for themselves, which was common throughout the Early Modern period. For example, when Lucca’s Santa Zita died, mourners attempted to take her fingers and toes as a way to bring Zita home with them. Pilgrims to the Holy Land would bring back dirt and rocks from important sites as well, thus bringing that landscape into their home landscape, mingling the two and dissolving borders between here and there and the sacred and quotidian.

[2] There is so much exciting scholarship on this, and in particular on the ways that female saints can help us to better understand the lives of women in the past. Books by scholars Caroline Walker Bynum, Patricia Skinner, and Christiane Klapish-Zuber are excellent starting points for information about the lives of ordinary women and the devotion to saints in Europe and specifically Italy throughout the pre and early modern periods.

[3] Anyone who is familiar with living in Italy will understand this; it is always fits and starts, glitches and strangeness attempting to navigate the web or connect to Wi-Fi there.

[4] There is interest right now in exploring Italian magical traditions and the Strega, or witch, as well. Recent publications, such as Mary-Grace Fahrun’s Italian Folk Magic: Rue’s Kitchen Witchery, published in 2018, attest to the growing interest by the Italian diaspora to connect to the spiritual parts of their histories that are not necessarily contingent on the Catholic Church. A cross study between this book and the ethnographic research into Lucanian magic of Ernesto de Martino could be an interesting project in the future.

[5] The special relationship between the Romani and Rosalia still needs to be examined from the point of view of inhabiting a marginal, border zone. Rosalia, in inhabiting a cave on Monte Pellegrino, existed outside of the city center and in fact in the city’s border, as the Romani do now. By tying themselves to her, she who is now embedded within the spatial fabric of the city thanks to the movement of her relics and the many images of her throughout the city, the Romani are, it could be argued, also asserting themselves as part of the city fabric too. While they, like Rosalia, are not always seen, they are still there.