Genoa, the Sacro Catino and the treasures of the cathedral of San Lorenzo

Genoa is a city of the sea and of trade, and its sacred heritage too bears the mark of voyages and crusades. In the cathedral of San Lorenzo, with its façade of white and black bands, and in the Treasury museum that opens beneath it, objects are kept that for centuries have fed devotions, legends and research. The most famous is the Sacro Catino, a dish that many Genoese believed to be the Holy Grail.

The spoils of Caesarea

According to tradition, the Sacro Catino reached Genoa in 1101, after the conquest of Caesarea in Palestine during the First Crusade, in which the Genoese took part with a fleet. Guglielmo Embriaco, one of the commanders, is said to have chosen as his share of the booty that very green hexagonal dish, believed to have been carved from a single emerald of extraordinary size. The object was given to the cathedral and became the symbol of the city's prestige.

At the end of the thirteenth century the Dominican Jacopo da Varazze, archbishop of Genoa and author of the famous Golden Legend, wrote in his chronicle of the city that the dish was the vessel used by Christ at the Last Supper. From then on the identification with the Grail grew firm, and the dish was surrounded by strict rules of custody: it was displayed only on rare occasions and no one was allowed to touch it.

The discovery of glass

In 1806, during the Napoleonic period, the Sacro Catino was taken to Paris together with many other Italian works of art. There scholars were able to examine it and established that it was not an emerald, but green glass. When it was returned to Genoa in 1816, the dish was found to be broken, and it still shows the marks of that breakage today.

Its true origin is still debated: scholars consider it a glass artefact of Middle Eastern manufacture, probably of the Islamic period, of great technical quality. The discovery has not robbed the object of its fascination, and it remains a unique witness to the relations between Genoa and the Levant and to the medieval fortune of the Grail myth.

The Baptist's ashes and the shell

The cathedral also holds the relics attributed to Saint John the Baptist, patron of the city, which according to tradition arrived in 1098 on the return from the First Crusade. They are kept in a richly decorated chapel in Renaissance style. For a long time women were forbidden to enter the chapel, a ban that tradition linked to Salome's role in the saint's death.

A more recent object recalls a dramatic page of the city's history. During the British naval bombardment of 9 February 1941, a large shell pierced the cathedral roof but did not explode. The device, defused, is now displayed in the right aisle, and many Genoese saw in its failure to explode a sign of heavenly protection.

The cathedral of San Lorenzo thus tells the sacred face of a maritime republic. The Sacro Catino, the Baptist's reliquary and the unexploded shell belong to different ages, but they speak the same language: that of a city that has always read its own history in the light of the marvellous, without giving up questioning it with the tools of reason.