Ever since the relic of St. Pantaleon was transferred from Miragaia to the cathedral, in 1499, the Church of the episcopal city of Porto undertook a series of measures which, by structuring social behaviors and forms of religiousness, invested the intramural urban scenery with new meanings. Consequently, property and a ritual whose paradigm was - through its great power of social agglutination and representation of the urban space - the Corpus Christi procession, played an important part in the creation of several levels of sacrality, corresponding to particular morphological and social topographies; in the second half of the century, they were equally decisive for the Christianization the counter-reformation undertook. At that time, the church-state alliance drew - through the hyper-representativeness of the reformed convents, a ritual which had itself become confessional, and a new parochial division - a privileged area of activity in the Vila river valley, which in the Middle Ages had belonged to the merchants and the Mendicants. This valley became the alma urbis of a city in which catholic vigilance -led by the Jesuits and effectively protected by their last bastion, the new cathedral chancel (1606) expelled the heretic New Christians, and with them the Atlantic trade of Modernity, exchanging them for the guarantee of a heaven which the institution of a powerful urban image had brought closer.
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