Naples

Januarius was a bishop of Benevento killed in the persecutions of the early fourth century, and his relics were brought to Naples, where he became patron of the city. Two sealed glass ampoules held in a silver reliquary contain a dark solid substance identified by tradition as his blood, collected at his death. Three times a year, on the Saturday before the first Sunday of May, on his feast day in September and in December, the reliquary is brought out and held up before the congregation, and the contents usually become liquid within minutes or hours.

The ceremony is not a quiet one. A group of women known as the relatives of San Gennaro pray loudly and sometimes scold the saint until it happens, and the announcement is made from the altar and greeted with applause and a wave of handkerchiefs. Failures are recorded and read as warnings, and Neapolitan memory attaches them to particular disasters, which is exactly the kind of retrospective fit that makes the pattern hard to test.

The Catholic Church permits the devotion and has never issued a ruling on its cause, a position it maintains carefully. Chemists have shown that a thixotropic gel, one that liquefies when shaken and sets again when left alone, can be made from materials available in the fourteenth century and behaves the same way, published in Nature in 1991. The custodians have not permitted the ampoules to be opened or sampled, so the contents have never been analysed directly, and the question stands where it has always stood.

Naples keeps its dead close. The catacombs of San Gennaro, cut into the tufa on the north side of the city, contain frescoes and mosaics from the second century onward and were a burial place of bishops before they were a pilgrimage site. Far larger is the Fontanelle, a quarry cavern filled over centuries with the bones of the anonymous poor, plague dead and cholera dead, tidied into ranks in the nineteenth century.

Around those bones grew a devotion with no exact parallel. A person would adopt a skull, clean it, give it a box and a candle, pray for the soul in purgatory it belonged to, and expect help in return, often after the soul appeared in a dream and gave its name. The practice was overwhelmingly the work of women, and it operated as a system of exchange with the unremembered dead. The archbishop condemned it in 1969 as superstitious and closed the site; the ossuary later reopened as a monument, and the devotion has continued quietly, which is the ordinary fate of popular practice under official disapproval.

Above ground the same instinct is visible on nearly every street corner in the old city, in small glazed shrines holding a Madonna, a saint or a photograph of a local dead, kept lit and dressed with flowers by whoever lives nearest. At Easter the Madonna dell'Arco sanctuary outside the city receives the fujenti, associations who process barefoot in white and blue, an expression of vow keeping that the church has regulated more than once without ever suppressing.