St Gregory of Spoleto

(24th December)

St Gregory was a priest who was martyred in the amphitheatre at Spoleto in 303 AD during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian.  His remains were to be fed to the wild animals, but St Abbondanza (the widow) bought them for a considerable sum of money.  She buried them in the Christian cemetery outside the city walls, near a bridge called "Sanguinarius".  This is almost certainly a reference to the Christian cemetery on the site of San Gregorio Maggiore.

Three churches in Spoleto are or were dedicated to St Gregory:

  • San Gregorio della Sinagoga (see Walk I), the site on which he was imprisoned;
  • San Gregorio Minore (see Walk II), built on the site of the amphitheatre in which he was martyred; and
  • San Gregorio Maggiore (see the link above).  St Abbondanza (the virgin) built the first church on this site to house the relics of St Gregory in ca. 840.

Bishop Theoderic (Dietrich) I of Metz took most of the relics to Metz in 970.   Bishop Wuilfridus acquired them from the Emperor Otto I and translated them to the Abbey of Saint Paul de Verdun, which he founded in 970-3.  This abbey was destroyed in 1552:

  • Cardinal Giovanni Evangelista Pallotti acquired the cranium of St Gregory when he was in Verdun in 1617.  He kept a fragment for his new church in his native Caldarola, Marche  and gave another to Decio Gelosi, the Prior of San Gregorio Maggiore in 1619.  Two reliquary busts associated with this relic are preserved in the sacristy of San Gregorio Maggiore:

    • a gilded wooden reliquary bust (17th century), which has an inscription that records the donation of Cardinal Pallotti to Prior Decio Gelosi; and

    • a reliquary bust (ca. 1755), which is attributed to Francesco Giardoni, into which Bishop Paolo Bonavisa transferred the cranium of St Gregory in 1755.

  • The reliquary from Saint Paul de Verdun found its way into the possession of  Bishop Giovanni De Rossi of Ossero in Croatia and he translated it to the Duomo of Lussingrande in 1663.  The Duomo there is now dedicated to St Gregory.

There are at least three other documented cases of the dispersal of relics of St Gregory from Spoleto:

  • Bishop Olderico of Cremona (973-1004) took some of the them to Cremona. 

  • The Emperor Frederick I stole a reliquary containing some of them during the sack of Spoleto in 1155.  These relics are said to remain in the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne Cathedral. (Frederick I stole the relics of the three kings from Milan in 1164).

  • Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany acquired some of them from Bishop Carlo Giacinto Lascaris in 1720.