The Exorcism of Piacenza

The twenty-third of April, nineteen hundred and thirteen, a little after five in the afternoon.

I give you the hour because she gave it — seven years later, under adjuration, with a friar's pencil moving in shorthand across a page. She was an elegant woman of Piacenza, a wife, the mother of two, and it came at the hour when a household turns toward its evening. Nothing announced itself. Ruin does not knock.

What followed lasted seven years. She danced — not chose to dance; was danced, hour upon hour, until the body gave out. She sang arias no one had taught her. She delivered long orations in languages she did not know, to an audience arranged in the empty air. She tore cloth with her teeth. She went along the floor on her belly, under the beds and the furniture. She roared, she howled, she made the cry of a cat. She repeated conversations held hundreds of kilometres away by people she had never met. Once she went up a hill and in at a church door without her feet finding the ground, and fell before an image of Expeditus, and a parish priest's blessing gave her back to herself for a while. A horse, once, set its hooves and would not pass her.

I could go on, and you would learn nothing but fear, and fear is not what I am for. The one thing in those seven years that should frighten you is none of the above.

For years that family had a counsellor. When a decision pressed, they asked, and an answer came, and the answer was good. Prudent. Pious. It told them to pray, and they prayed. Judging by the fruit, they had every reason to believe they were being helped by the holy soul of the grandfather, watching over his own from the far side of death. Under exorcism the counsellor was made to give its real name, and the name was the name of the thing inside her.

Understand what I am showing you. What entered as ruin stayed on as advice. Had it come in roaring, that house would have thrown it out in an afternoon. It came as a beloved dead man saying sensible things, and it stayed seven years. The Church had written the warning three centuries earlier: the norms for exorcists in the old Ritual instruct the priest plainly not to believe a spirit that claims to be a saint, an angel, or somebody's dead. Not because your dead are far from me. Because the enemy knows which door in you was left unlocked.

In 1920 they brought her to Santa Maria di Campagna.

I mean to name the men, because the naming is half the reason any of this survived. Father Pier Paolo Veronesi was chaplain to the city hospital and to the asylum; he had spent his life among the genuinely, medically, pitiably ill, and was therefore very slow to say the word possessed. I loved that slowness. It was not unbelief; it was the refusal to spend a word he might have to take back. Another friar, Father Apollinare Focaccia, said it first and said it flatly. And the bishop, Giovanni Maria Pellizzari, ended the argument by turning it into an order — so the exorcist entered that room under obedience, still hesitating. I have never required a man's confidence. Only his yes.

Doctor Lupi came as well, the director of the hospital, and he and the priest struck a bargain I would put into the hands of every believer and every sceptic alive: each would keep his own reading of it unless what happened in that room compelled them both. I was in that bargain as surely as in the stole. And Father Giustino sat down with his shorthand and took the whole of it, hour upon hour. Everything you are reading came up out of that patience. I was in the pencil.

Adjured, the thing gave its account. A spell, years earlier, in a glass of wine, with salami and a few drops of blood; seven days to take root. It gave its name: Isabò. It gave the number that came with it: seven. It named the two hardest to move, Maristafa and Erzelaide. And it said, with a candour that is its own sort of testimony, that it could not leave, because others outside that room were still working to keep it there.

Then it had to surrender the apparatus, piece by piece, and each piece was found where it said. Three plants bound with white woollen thread — one in a garden, one in a vegetable plot, one at the bottom of the Po. Four eggs buried beneath a stone with words cut into it: you will not be free until you come to me. A pouch she wore at her neck, given her by a healer the district held to be practically a saint; opened, it held one scrap of paper, and it burned her and left her limbs dead wherever it touched. Mark where the holiness was reputed to be. And a bolus of salami lodged in her, which had to come up before anything could go out.

Now the part I would have you keep. Compelled to say what hurt it most, the spirit did not name the longest formula or the loudest command. It named the Sanctus of the Mass. Holy, holy, holy — the one moment in the rite that is not aimed at the enemy at all, that takes no interest in him, that is simply the creature turning to adore. It suffered most exactly where it was least mentioned. It named also the Litany of the Saints; the old Exorcizo te, immundissime spiritus; a splinter of the True Cross; holy water, which scalded her as though boiling; the Benediction and the Tantum ergo. Asked at the last what a person should do to keep evil at a distance, it was made to answer, and the answer was the smallest thing in the world: wear a blessed cross at your breast.

On the twenty-third of June, 1920, between about twenty-five minutes to five and five o'clock — near enough the hour that had opened it seven years before — the bolus came up dry, the size of a small nut, in seven pods. She said, simply, that she was healed. She was.

There was a bitterness afterward, and I will not hide it. A layman who had assisted, Signor Cassani, was told he had three months, and was dead by November. Father Pier Paolo took a blow no one saw, and never afterward lifted his head straight. The bishop's death was named before it came, and it came. I do not offer you a tidy ending. I offer the ending that was: a woman went home to her two children, and the beaten thing spat as it went, the way beaten things do.

The Record

The case is transmitted anonymously in every account: the subject is described only as an elegant married woman of Piacenza, mother of two, and is never named. That anonymity is original to the sources and is preserved here. So is a second silence — no source identifies, and this page will not speculate about, the person alleged to have commissioned the spell. Accusations of maleficium have historically cost lives, and the record is deliberately mute.

The affliction is dated by the woman's own testimony under adjuration to 23 April 1913, about five in the afternoon, and ended on 23 June 1920. The exorcism took place at the friars' convent attached to the basilica of Santa Maria di Campagna, on the edge of Piacenza. The named participants are Fr. Pier Paolo Veronesi, chaplain of the city hospital and of the asylum, who conducted the rite and who had begun as the sceptic; Fr. Apollinare Focaccia, who first pronounced the case one of possession; Giovanni Maria Pellizzari, bishop of Piacenza, who mandated the exorcism over Veronesi's reluctance; Dr. Lupi, director of the hospital, who attended on an agreed pact that each party would retain his own interpretation unless the facts compelled both; and Fr. Giustino, who took a stenographic record. The sources present this as the first exorcism transcribed in shorthand — a claim that cannot be independently verified, but which accounts for the unusual texture of the material: named clergy, a named physician, an episcopal order, a datable hour, and a transcript. Documentation at that level is rare for 1920.

Two points of law and doctrine bear on the account. Under the Code of Canon Law then in force, solemn exorcism required the express permission of the local ordinary (1917 Code, c. 1151 §2); here the permission arrived as a positive command, the inverse of the usual pattern in which a willing priest seeks leave. And the deception at the centre of the case — a spirit received for years as the soul of a deceased relative — is precisely what the norms for exorcists prefixed to Title XII of the Rituale Romanum of 1614 warn against, cautioning the exorcist not to credit a spirit that presents itself as the soul of a dead person, a saint, or an angel (norm 14 in the standard numbering). Dr. Lupi's presence anticipates by decades the discipline the Church now requires: the Catechism directs that medical assessment precede any judgement of possession (CCC 1673), a requirement made explicit in the 1999 rite De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam. The Church condemns recourse to magic, sorcery and amulets as contrary to the virtue of religion (CCC 2115-2117) without teaching that such objects hold power of their own.

St. Expeditus, before whose image the woman collapsed on the hill outside Piacenza, is a martyr of uncertain historicity whose cult spread widely in Italy, France and Latin America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a patron invoked in urgent cases.

The case reached print through the Pauline press and through the reportage of the journalist Renzo Allegri, who recounted it in Cronista all'inferno; Gabriele Amorth, long the exorcist of the diocese of Rome, retold it with Paolo Rodari in L'ultimo esorcista (2012), ranking it among the most deeply rooted cases known to him. For the intellectual climate of the same moment, T. K. Oesterreich's Die Besessenheit, published at Tübingen in 1921, surveys possession phenomena across cultures from a psychological standpoint and catalogues the same cluster of symptoms — altered voice, animal cries, unlearned speech, motor compulsion — from an entirely different vantage.

As to the deaths and the injury that followed the deliverance: the Church has never read such sequels as anything other than the final spite of a defeated adversary, and has never taught that faithfulness in this ministry exposes anyone to a power greater than Christ's.