The vocation to secrecy is without doubt the most tenacious and enduring constant in the history of the city of Perugia. Today, as in the past, separating and dividing, framing discourses that are apparently public but in truth addressed only to a few connoisseurs or initiates, seem to be rooted in the history of the city’s culture. Today, as in the past, the distinctiveness of conduct and the withdrawal from view, the concealing of one’s presence from the many in order to reveal oneself only to a chosen few, seem to constitute the most deeply rooted aspect of the city’s life. Here, however, we do not wish to refer to the present or to the more recent past, to that proverbial Perugian vis bound up with Freemasonry and its history. We wish instead to go back to the beginning of the modern age, to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which the modern state was founded through the theories and political practices of absolute monarchy. We refer, that is, to the age in which the disenchantment of the world was spreading through society, and modern science and the territorial nation were being born; but also to the age in which “secrecy” became an art of government, a form of cultural resistance in the interplay between simulation and dissimulation, the hallmark of an art in the course of emancipating itself from the divine.

The Arrival of the Jesuits in Perugia

In the history of the city, the sixteenth century was marked by the traumatic annexation to the Papal States, while the seventeenth saw the consolidation of the state apparatus, which tended to shape the manners and forms of social life.
Immediately after the annexation of 1540, Cardinal Fulvio della Corgna, who had become bishop of the city following the papal election of his maternal uncle Julius III, asked the founder and first general of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola, to open a college for the education of the young in Perugia as well. The Roman College, the principal Jesuit college, had only recently opened (1551) when Ignatius decided to accept the bishop’s proposal and to send ten Jesuits to Umbria.
In April 1552 a small group of Jesuits, led by the Belgian Everard Mercurian, future general of the Society of Jesus (1573-1580), left the professed house of Santa Maria della Strada and the Roman College. Before their departure, Ignatius himself had prepared for them a brief set of instructions in which he reminded the future masters of the first college in Umbria of the renowned history of the Studium of Perugia (the university) and of its refined literary tradition. For the opening of the school, the founder of the Society of Jesus advised proceeding with prudence in settling into the city: he proposed opening only two classes and beginning the course of studies from the first rudiments of Latin up to the epistles of Cicero, and from Greek grammar and, if possible, Hebrew grammar as well. He further cautioned that no public proclamation or inauguration should be made, asking instead that they begin “with few [pupils], and those who come one after another.”
On 9 May 1552 the ten Jesuits arrived in Perugia, received with great honours by a small and influential committee made up of Bishop Fulvio della Corgna, the Legate of the city of Urbino Giulio della Rovere, and the venerable inquisitor Fra Matteo Lacchi, together with the doctors of the Studium Perusinus Guglielmo Pontano and Marcantonio Orandini. The first schools were opened in the premises of the Vicariate in October 1552, and only the first three grammar classes were established; the humanities class would be opened later, once there were pupils well trained in Latin morphology and syntax. Despite their immediate success, or perhaps precisely because of it (given that in the first year more than a hundred pupils were already enrolled in the new college), protests arose in the city against the Jesuits, stirred up by the masters of the Comune, who considered the methods adopted by these foreigners unsuited to the education of Perugian youth. Opposition to the division into classes by age and level of learning that the Jesuits adopted in schooling (the method in the manner of Paris, the modus parisiensis) was not, moreover, peculiar to the Perugians. At the opening of the colleges of Rome, Naples, and Bologna as well, the Jesuits had had to face the dissent and protests of those responsible for local instruction, who mobilized against the intrusion of these foreigners from northern Europe and against the adoption of a method so different from Italian customs.
In Perugia, in order to demonstrate the soundness of the method and the elegant command of Latin of these foreign masters, as much disparaged as they were feared, a master of French origin, Father Edmond Auger, composed and delivered in the Cathedral, during the Christmas holidays, a Latin oration in the presence of numerous doctors and students of the Studium of Perugia. A few days later, some select pupils of the college also publicly recited a dialogue in praise of studies, arousing admiration and unanimous approval among their listeners. During the Easter festivities, Master Auger delivered yet another oration, and the pupils in turn performed a long dialogue in the premises of the old Confraternita del Salvatore, premises that the bishop had just assigned to the new college. This episcopal decision was, moreover, itself a cause of the local conflict against the Jesuits, since the old Confraternita had until then been entrusted with the education of the young by the Magistrates governing the city. The bishop’s choice to hand over to the Jesuits the very premises of the Confraternita, thereby suppressing the old civic institutions and customs, was inevitably perceived as a tangible sign of the inauguration in the city of the new course of the centralizing policy of the papal state.
According to the intentions of the founder, Saint Ignatius, the Society of Jesus was to devote itself solely to higher education, and it required that pupils, in order to enrol in its schools, already possess a basic education, that is, be able to read and write in Latin. The complete and regular course of studies thus comprised three grammar classes, one humanities class, and two rhetoric classes. In Perugia, at the request of the representatives of the Comune, the Jesuits were also asked to take on primary instruction. Accordingly, in 1557 and only for three years, the class of the “abbecedari” was established, in which elementary instruction was given. That they agreed to set up this class, even against the decisions of their Roman superiors, shows how cautious the Jesuits were and how unwilling to come into conflict with local demands. A prudent attitude that is also evident from the late introduction of the Greek class in the Perugian college, which was added only some years later, when the young men trained by the Jesuits were able to follow its courses profitably. The mistrust, or rather the hostility, towards the teaching activity of the Jesuit fathers on the part of the Perugian teachers thus dissipated fairly quickly, while, as Father Polanco informs us, the pupils enrolled were, by 1556, already 180, and in the course of that year would rise to more than 200.

Alongside the ordinary teaching activity in the college, the Jesuits took on other commitments in the intellectual life of the city. In 1555 the proposal of the jurist of the Studium, Marcantonio Orandini, to appoint the Messinese Father Giovanni Antonio Viperano as extraordinary lecturer in humane letters at the Perugian university was accepted. Viperano had, moreover, already won a certain fame in the city as a fine humanist, for having delivered an oration in the Cathedral and for having composed a dialogue in verse recited by the pupils of the college. His humanities lessons in the college were, moreover, attended not only by his own students but by numerous outside listeners, “among whom were noted not only the nobles of Perugia but also outsiders, such as the nephew of Cardinal Farnese, the nephews of Pope Marcellus […].” Besides the prestigious university appointment of the humanist Father, the Jesuits also made themselves available for other private teaching activities: proof of this are the lessons given at home (for example, that of the young Jesuit scholastic Marco Valdés for the children of Laura Della Corgna), as well as certain lessons in canon law, theology, or philosophy, given at the request of Cardinal Della Corgna.
Within a few years, the Jesuits’ commitment to higher education in the city of Perugia no longer met with a hostile attitude from the Perugians but, on the contrary, aroused esteem and general appreciation for their work, especially in “literary matters.” The college of Perugia was assiduously attended, at least until the mid-seventeenth century, always by more than a hundred students. Having thus overcome the initial disputes, the Society of Jesus took on, to general satisfaction, the task of forming the city’s elites, remaining there until its suppression in 1773.

The Church-House-College Architectural Complex
The Jesuits were not only the great reformers of the early modern school system; they also modified the age-old conception of the convent and the church of the old Mendicant Orders. The seats of the Society of Jesus were not, in fact, called convents, but Houses. The House is the place where the Jesuits live in community, being first of all companions and not friars or priests: made up of Fathers and Brothers, novices and lay companions, the Jesuit community has always devoted itself, in its professed houses, to the formation of young novices. The latter and the young lay companions are indeed brought together by an education imparted in common by teachers called Fathers, assisted by the Brothers who, even without having taken holy orders, constitute the true operative arm of the Society. The Jesuits, according to the intention of the founder Saint Ignatius, were not to live in the silence of the cloister but to immerse themselves in the noise of the world.
To fulfil this fundamental choice, the Society of Jesus established itself in the cities by constructing an architectural whole made up of the interpenetration of three building complexes: the Church, the professed House, and the College.
The interpenetration of these three buildings, where religious commitment, education, and community life were joined, was profoundly bound up with the needs and conceptions of the Jesuit apostolate in the world. Adopting the principles of the Council of Trent, according to which new impetus was to be given to religious practices, the Jesuits created new spaces and different forms of participation for devotional practices. This also meant the introduction of a different architectural conception of the church.
The old three-nave plan with lateral transepts for the chapels of the church, which had been adopted by the Mendicant Orders, was thus replaced by a single nave, with the transept restricted to the same width as the nave. In the Jesuit scheme of the church, the chapels are therefore already arranged along the single nave, thereby making it possible not to establish any difference in height between the nave and the presbytery. In this way the dictate of the Council of Trent was respected, which focused the attention of the faithful on the high altar and regulated the hierarchy of cults: at the centre, only the worship due to God; at the sides, the veneration of angels and saints; in the first chapel of the transept, the veneration of the Virgin. In the churches of the Jesuits the choir too had been abolished, and the great religious functions took place in the large nave for the public, while an area reserved for the Fathers was added by means of the small galleries and tribunes that formed an interface between the house and the church, thus eliminating the old separation between church and convent desired by the Mendicant Orders. The function of these small galleries was to allow immediate, though reserved, access to the church from the residence and the classrooms of the college, on a level that was not that of the ordinary faithful but higher. Within the church there was thus created a plane of election, set above the faithful and the officiant himself, in which the privileged and elevated space of the Fathers and their pupils came to be located.
The house and the college thus extended into the church through the openings of the small galleries, which wrapped around most of the perimeter by means of various connecting corridors. The building was therefore conceived as a double box: the inner one for the use of the faithful and the officiants, and the outer one for the use of the Fathers and of the new ruling class being formed in the colleges.
In Perugia, the assignment of the site for the construction of the Jesuits’ House-Church-College architectural complex was not an easy choice. At first the Magistrates and Priors of the city had identified an area in Porta Eburnea, which the Jesuits, however, rejected as unsuitable for the young, that quarter being “a disreputable place, for many years given over to the ugly trade of women of ill repute.” Bishop Della Corgna then decided to assign them a site in the Piazza del Sopramuro, next to the palace of the Podestà and adjoining the old granaries, in the very premises of the old Confraternita del Salvatore, which was likewise devoted to schooling. Cardinal Della Corgna persuaded the magistrates “that by giving such a place to the fathers they would gain, in place of one master, three masters who would instruct their sons not only in good Greek and Latin letters, but also by the example of a Christian life and holy conduct.”
To promote the new construction, the bishop bought three shops from Messer Andrea and assigned to the Jesuits the city’s old slaughterhouse, known as the Campione. The new teaching order thus established itself in the important Piazza del Sopramuro, the appointed place of civic power and culture, where the prestigious palaces of the Podestà and of the Perugian Studium also stood.
Once the shops had been demolished and the site levelled, work began on 4 May 1562 with the laying of the first stone. The work was entrusted to the architect Brother Giovanni Tristano, who arrived in Perugia in July 1561, accompanied by Fathers Laínez and Polanco. Already contacted earlier by Bishop Della Corgna for the restoration of the bishop’s palace, Tristano proposed to the Perugian prelate a complete project, comprising the church, the college, and the professed house. Once the project had been accepted and the financing arranged, work began, meeting great difficulties in excavating the façade and with the roughness of the terrain. It was for these reasons that the church was finally inaugurated only on 7 October 1571, the same day as the great victory of the papal fleet over the Turks at Lepanto.

The church of Perugia was one of the first Jesuit churches to be built in Italy, constituting a singular example of transition between the old conception and the new Tridentine one. Here, in fact, a three-nave building scheme was proposed, a model uncommon in Jesuit architecture. Its specific interest lies in the fact that this scheme gave rise to small galleries as deep as the side naves above which they were set, thus forming an ample space for the Fathers and pupils.
As happened on other occasions in the early Jesuit settlements, the capacity of the church proved insufficient for the great influx of the devout, owing to the growing success the Society enjoyed in the city. From 1586, therefore, the church was enlarged and completed with an imposing square apse, conceived by De Rosis and executed by Valentino Martelli. Created with a bold structure overhanging the cliff below, the apsidal enlargement also made it possible to build superimposed rooms, facilitated by the great difference in level between the floor of the church and that of the foundations of the enlargement. In the period when the Society’s action in Perugian society had consolidated, also through the educational programme addressed mainly to pupils from noble families, it was decided to use the space beneath the apsidal enlargement to house the three rooms of the different Marian Congregations. Called Oratori, the construction of these rooms was completed in 1613, and they were entrusted to three different congregations: the Congregazione dei nobili, the Congregazione dei mercanti, and the Congregazione dei coloni.
The generalate of Father Claudio Acquaviva (1581-1615) meant, as is well known, the spread of the Jesuits’ apostolic commitment beyond the education of the young in the colleges, directing it towards the formation of the various social components present in the cities. In the course of the seventeenth century, with the promotion of particular forms of religious instruction pertaining to the different classes of society (ad status), the Marian Congregations were founded. According to tradition, it was Father Jean Leunis who, in 1563, began gathering the best pupils of the Roman College at the end of lessons for devotional exercises, thus creating the first Marian Congregation. The general Acquaviva encouraged this institution and in 1587 established that the Congregation of the Roman College should become the Prima Primaria, to which all the other Congregations, whether already founded or in the process of being founded, were obliged to be affiliated.
In Perugia too, therefore, the influence of the Society of Jesus was not limited to the sphere of education, but various Congregations were organized according to the social class of their members. As meeting places for the different sodales these Oratori were built, traditional places of prayer that ended up becoming true places of cultural formation and collective identity. In the Oratori one received a religious instruction suited to one’s own social class, referring not only to individual perfection but also to the rules of life appropriate to one’s position in society: besides an intense religious activity for the Christian perfection of each member, collectively and in perfect union among the sodales, proselytism was practised and works of charity were organized.
As we have said, in Perugia three distinct Oratori were built, superimposed vertically one above the other. Beneath the presbytery and of the same dimensions, a room was made for the Oratorio dei nobili, which could be reached by a reserved staircase descending directly into the right side of the church. It was a large room frescoed with a few friezes and with a small portrait of Saint Ignatius in the central arch of the vault. Beneath it two more rooms of equal proportions were built: the first, reached by a staircase situated on the left of the presbytery and separate from the previous one, used as the Oratorio dei mercanti; and finally, on the ground floor, with an external entrance and direct access from the college’s garden, the room of the Congregazione dei coloni. In short, a singular four-storey building was created in which the social strata of the time found an ordered arrangement: a complex structure that constituted itself, quite literally, as a rationalized mirror of the pyramidal distribution of worldly functions, directly beneath the space of the sacred functions.
In its singularity, the church of Perugia takes on a value and a meaning of great interest, because the hierarchy of the social classes remains incorporated within the very body of the church. The three great rooms end up constituting three great additional chapels, richly endowed by their assignees according to their own resources, with frescoed cross vaults and altars of great value, such as that of the merchants, of ebony and ivory. It should be noted that in the two rooms of the nobles and the merchants as well, the theme of the small galleries was applied, since at the centre of the room, communicating with the first steps of the staircase leading up to the presbytery, there is a stage facing the altar set against the opposite wall: evidently for figures of particular importance, lay or ecclesiastical, who took part in the meetings of the sodales without being seen.
These three superimposed Oratori were built at the beginning of the modern age, in that Baroque period when, throughout Italy, the new urban oligarchies were elaborating complex ceremonials based on appearance and on the display of their own rank, while the cities were being adorned with ingenious monuments and the squares redesigned with curious architecture. In Perugia, by contrast, secluded places were built, hidden from the gaze of passers-by. Without any façade or sign that might reveal their existence to the outside, these Oratori were built beside the Chiesa del Gesù, a rare and singular testimony of how Baroque architecture could range from display to its very concealment.
Perhaps here lies the origin, or the alibi, of the total oblivion that has struck these places, perpetuated even in the most recent learned architectural reconstructions of the prestigious Piazza del Sopramuro: the Oratori bear witness, in their concealed placement and form, to how far the modernity of the city community’s life is founded on distinction and on the principle of belonging to a group, a family, or a restricted circle of people. And, as is well known, the spirit of belonging and identity mean first of all separation, reserve, and the setting at a distance of those who bear any kind of otherness, as the very etymology of the word secret indicates: a separating that creates exclusive relations.
The Jesuits, as a religious order defending and promoting post-Tridentine culture, certainly facilitated and promoted this culture of distinction. Yet, ever since the Jesuits left Perugia, the black legend of anti-Jesuitism has triumphed to such an extent that even the architectural traces, the places of their presence and of their work, have become a collective repression, as indeed happened with the whole period of Perugia’s early modernity, seen mainly from the perspective of the papal occupation.
The Oratori thus became closed places, not open to visitors, forgotten and destined to oblivion for all the citizens. They too became a secret, accessible only to those few who appreciate and love Perugia and its history.

Bruna Filippi, a historian of the early modern period, her research focuses on the history of the rhetoric and theatre of the Society of Jesus in the seventeenth century, and on the history of emblematics (16th-17th c.). She has published Il teatro degli argomenti (Institutum Historicum S.I., Roma 2001).