Historical background on the diocese of Lipari

The seven Aeolian Islands constituted a diocese with an episcopal see since the origins of Christianity and until 1986. The first bishop of Lipari is said to have been St. Agathon who, in 264, received the body of the apostle Bartholomew, who miraculously arrived on the island across the sea.

Since then the people of Lipari considered St. Bartholomew their patron saint, in addition to the Virgin and St. Agathon himself.

Attesting to the antiquity of the Church of Lipari are some archaeological evidences: funerary epigraphs from the early 5th century and the presence of a bishop from 501 onward.

Between the 6th and 9th centuries monks and hermits found refuge in the archipelago, and one of them apparently witnessed the death of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric (526 AD).

During the 9th century Lipari, like the rest of Sicily, also suffered Muslim conquest, with a first assault in 838 marking the end of Byzantine rule.

With the Muslim occupation, the Aeolian archipelago suffered a gradual depopulation, although it remained a fairly busy trading port that, with the advent of the Normans in the early 11th century, enjoyed a further revival.

The Norman Count Roger founded in Lipari-between 1072 and 1081-a Benedictine monastery, whose splendid cloister survives, and which a few years later Pope Urban II decided to declare subject to the Apostolic See.

Jurisdictions of Angevins, Aragonese, and Neapolitan sovereigns followed until, in 1399, Pope Boniface IX made the Diocese of Lipari autonomous and subject only to Rome.

The episcopate of the Aeolian Islands also suffered in 1544 the Turkish incursion of the pirate Ariadeno Barbarossa, remembered as ‘la ruina,’ with the deportation of about eight thousand Liparians, a colossal fire of the built-up area above and below the Castle, the destruction of the places of worship with the relative loss of all archival documents prior to this date.

Lipari was able to recover in a short time also thanks to Emperor Charles V and Pope Paul III, who attended to the construction of the imposing walls that still exist today and to the reactivation of the places of worship.

In Lipari, the 1600s were marked by a climate of great religious fervor that, fueled by the spirit of the Council of Trent, led to a multiplication in the churches of decorations and images that were the object of veneration. Considerable efforts were made by the bishops in the embellishment of the Cathedral in the mid-1700s.

Great impetus was also received by devotion to the Virgin Mary to whom, in 1681, twenty-three out of thirty-eight churches and chapels were dedicated.

Between the end of the 1500s and the beginning of the 1600s the Friars Minor and the Capuchin Friars had come to Lipari, who took up residence on the Civita and in the lower town, next to the present cemetery.

In 1672, while a terrible famine was raging, a vessel loaded with wheat providentially arrived in Lipari, and the people of Lipari attributed this to the miraculous intercession of St. Bartholomew; thus this event was commemorated in 1930 with the creation of the artistic Vascelluzzo: a boat-shaped reliquary made of gold and silver in which a fragment of the skin of the Holy Apostle is preserved.

Another miraculous intervention attributed to St. Bartholomew occurred on the occasion of the earthquake that devastated part of eastern Sicily in 1693 but which in Lipari had no serious consequences and in gratitude for which an altar dedicated to him was erected in the Cathedral while in 1728, a large silver statue portraying him was made.

The demographic increase following the Turkish sack of 1544 marked a territorial expansion that caused clashes between bishop’s power and the Royal Monarchy of Palermo resulting in 1711 in the famous ‘Liparitan controversy’. Originating from a trivial incident, the dispute involved the entire Kingdom of Sicily and the Papal States, and a long-running clash between supporters of the king and the pope ensued.

For the Church of Lipari, it was a particularly painful period, which, however, was resolved in 1728 without diminishing the Church’s social and educational commitment, nor did it prevent the expansion of the Cathedral to which, at the end of the 1700s, two aisles were added and a bell tower was provided.

In the early 1800s, the disappearance of pirate raids facilitated Lipari’s trade with the Tyrrhenian ports, and the Aeolian Islands came to be at the center of a network of economic relations that gave a progressive impetus to the local economy with renewed industrial activities, such as the collection and processing of sulfur and alum, and especially the extraction of pumice, which took on full industrial physiognomy beginning in 1884.

The Cathedral was equipped in 1913 with a staircase that still opens in front of its main elevation.