The city has always been, and remains, the ideal place of collective
rituality. It is the city that has hosted, since Antiquity, collective
celebrations of victory, important religious ceremonies, but also ritual
consecrations of the elite. Based on these essential notions, the aim of
this book is to reflect on a specific issue: the interaction between
ritual and city space. Our wish is to understand, in a multidisciplinary
and cross-epochal approach, how a collective liturgy, civic or
religious, can unfold within the public space and transform it. In
addition to sacred buildings and seizures of power, the square and the
streets become in this sense important identity-shaping loci. Bringing
places of power to the street or the square - which are by definition
liminal spaces - means entering into a dialogue constructed between
those who organise the ritual, those who perform it and those who
witness it. It seems that it is in compromise between the different
components of society that collective rituals can happen within the
public space. Therefore, it is no surprise that the crucial question for
this book is the way in which this same space is adapted to the
requirements of the ritual, or, on the contrary, how the ritual adapts
to the space.