The Miracle of Bolsena and the introduction of the feast of Corpus
Domini throughout the Catholic world go back to the years 1263 and 1264. These were times
of doubt and of the outbreak of the first heresies. Peter of Prague, a Bohemian priest on
his way to Rome on a pilgrimage, bearing within him the burden of his doubts as to the
actual presence of Christ in the consecrated Host, had asked permission to celebrate mass
in the crypt of the church of St. Christine at Bolsena. While breaking the consecrated
Host, however, this revealed its nature as the true body of Christ by dripping blood,
which stained the corporal, the purificators and the altar. Urban IV, informed of this
prodigy, entrusted the bishop of the town James to bring the Host and the Sacred Linen to
Orvieto, and he himself, together with the papal court and the people of the town, went
out to meet the relics on the bridge over the Rio Chiaro, nowadays called Rio Del Sole.
Also at Orvieto, in 1264, the pope inaugurated the series of eucharistic celebrations and
with the Bull “Transiturus” extended the feast of Corpus Domini to all the
catholic world. 
The painstaking work of Lea Pacini has produced, day after day, with
extreme precision and thanks also to the skill of the seamstresses, embroideresses and
artisans of Orvieto, the four hundred splendid costumes and the procession, as we see it
today, is a reconstruction of the atmosphere of the town of Orvieto as it was in its
period of greatest splendour when, in about 1250, after a long period of
“darkness”, it acquired the status of a powerful and respected Commune. At that
time the county of Orvieto was quite large and its influence extended from the Tiber river
to the Tyrrhenian sea, over areas which had already been dominated by the Etruscans,
Tuscans, Umbrians and Latins, subjecting illustrious families, whose members were to take
an active part in the civil, political and military life of the town, confronting each
other in the opposite factions of the “guelph” Monaldeschi and the
“ghibelline” Filippeschi, with many bloody struggles for the conquest of the
supremacy over the town.
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