Memoria di papa Damaso Patrono dell'Archeologia Cristiana

The Lectiones damasianae offer each year, on the occasion of the liturgical memory of Pope Damasus, patron of Christian Archaeology, a space for reflection and in-depth study on the pontiff's life and works.
On Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024, Andrea Antonio Verardi, professor of History of the Church Antiquity at the Faculty of History and Cultural Heritage of the Church, will deliver the public lecture entitled: Hic multa corpora sanctorum requisivit et invenit, quorum etiam versibus declaravit.
Pope Damasus in early medieval Roman sources. The memory of Pope Damasus underwent significant elaboration during the 6th century. It is mainly related to the writing, in different editions, of the Roman Liber Pontificalis between 514 and 535. In this source, the pontiff is not only the subject of specific news, but also the protagonist of the apocryphal epistolary exchange that opens and motivates the work itself. The lecture will focus mainly on the ways in which Damasian memory is defined and redefined in sixth-century Rome, with particular reference to the news devoted to the pontiff in the three editions of the Roman Liber Pontificalis. The image of the pontiff that emerges from these texts will then be compared with the coeval, but less positive, image that can be reconstructed through some documents in a collection of canon law, the Collectio avellana, produced at the same chronological height and perhaps in the Roman.