





































Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 6.1 (2019) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.5399/uo/hsda.6.1.5 
 

 

 

 

  
 69 

The Dialogues Bioregional Project: Landscape Ecology in Central 
Italy from the Sixth Century to the Present 

Damiano Benvegnù 

 

Abstract: Pope Gregory I (r. 590-604), commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, 

is celebrated for re-organizing both the institutional and liturgical life of the Roman 

Catholic Church; for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to 

England; and for his writings. Among these, a distinct importance has been attributed 

to his “Dialogues,” a collection of four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings 

carried out by then little-known holy men, which represent a portion of central Italy 

as a sacred space where the Christian God is present in both human and non-human 

form, while also interacting with the environment by performing landscaping 

functions.  

This article outlines the “Dialogues Bioregional Project,” a digital, interdisciplinary 

interface on Italian landscape ecology which would promote dialogues between 

scientists and humanists as well as provide a modeling tool for environmental and 

cultural awareness. Shaped around the “Dialogues” of Pope Gregory I, this digital 

humanities project explores continuities and discontinuities between the socio-political 

and ecological history of a specific section of Italian territory, a set of multidisciplinary 

environmental narratives (from c. 600 AD to the present), and local communities. My 

aim is to introduce readers to the ecological potentials of Gregory’s book and thus 

prompt scholars interested in the environmental humanities and the integration of 

biophysical and analytical approaches with humanistic and holistic perspectives to 

become part of the “Dialogues Bioregional Project” and collaborate in its further 

development. 

In his 2000 paper entitled “The Landscape Narrates” [“Il paesaggio racconta;” now collected in 

Turri 2010], Italian geographer Eugenio Turri argues that a landscape is first and foremost a 

“depository of stories” (161). These stories are told in two ways. On the one hand, there are the 

superficial events that represent the synchronic interactions between a human community and a 

specific environment. On the other hand, there are the ecological sedimentations of a territory, the 

diachronic stratigraphy of those events that, as inevitably as for a chemical process, have precipitated 

below the surface (161). Turri claims that the two sets of stories are strongly intertwined and advocates 

for a practice which allows for a simultaneous dual-reading: only a strong hermeneutical appreciation 

for this double set of narratives would in fact allow us to preserve a landscape’s continuity and future. 

Turri’s reflection is prompted by what he calls “the submersion of the pre-existing landscape,” a 

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process that he claims has been happening in Italy with the increasing modernization of the country. 

Indeed, in the last 50 years, large portions of Italy’s traditionally agro-pastoral landscape have been 

submerged, flooded not with water but with new economic activities and industrial constructions that 

have erased those signs which bear witness to the historical interdependence of human communities 

and specific physical environments (178). Against this tendency – which he labels “riempimento” 

(filling) – Turri suggests paying attention to the original motivations behind the organization of a 

specific landscape, for two main reasons, both connected to what he sees as good eco-cultural 

planning. First, a better archeological knowledge would help us understand, in our current hybrid 

landscapes, what is “functional” and what is instead “memorial,” namely the different kinds of 

relationships local communities have with places, spaces, and monuments that constitute their specific 

territories. Second, this knowledge would increase our awareness of how those landscapes which form 

the foundation of local identities not only can be reconstructed through the surviving evidence, but 

also – to be preserved – they “must be sacralized, in cultural sense” [“vanno sacralizzati (in senso 

culturale);” 184].  

In Italy, few institutions have understood the socio-cultural relevance of such landscape planning 

better than the Roman Catholic Church. Although “the Christian sacralization of space was not as old 

as Christianity itself” (Caseau 1999,40), following its transition from minority cult practiced in private 

homes to imperial religion, the Church increasingly worked to transform the numerous pagan spaces 

scattered throughout the Italian territory into properly Christian spaces, often sacralizing for the first 

time or resacralizing as Christian locations that have been abandoned or forgotten. For instance, in 

recent years, archeology has given us early evidence of a slow “destructuring” of a pagan landscape 

followed by the creation of “a new, Christianized panorama,” often adhering closely to the main routes 

connecting Rome to the adjacent provinces (Spera 2003, 39). These changes to the landscape, and the 

archeological/textual artifacts which document them, offer us an opportunity to follow Turri’s advice 

to protect Italy’s landscape from further eco-cultural catastrophe and submersion: by exploring the 

narratives behind Italy’s landscape organization, we can achieve a better understanding of the alleged 

original interaction between humans and a specific environment. Although contemporary geographers 

such as Yi-Fu Tuan acknowledge that the adjective “sacred” can be applied to modern landscapes 

only by stretching its original meaning, these sacred narratives can nonetheless reactivate those 

polarized tensions as between the numinous and the quotidian, the supernatural and the scientific, 

that bond together human and nonhuman actants in a specific territory (Tuan, 97-99).  

This article focuses on a digital project shaped around one of the most intriguing documents of 

the early Church, the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great. A collection of four books of miracles, 

signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men in sixth-century Italy, the 

Dialogues represented a portion of central Italy as a sacred space where the Christian God is present in 

both human and nonhuman form, while also interacting materially with the environment by 

performing landscaping functions. The stories collected in Gregory’s work testify to Turri’s concern 

for the importance of the myths connected to the original organization of a landscape as well as to 

what Iovino and Oppermann has called “material narrativity,” namely a shared creativity in which 

“human and non-human players produce narrative emergences that amplify reality, also affecting our 

cognitive response to this reality” (8).  Moreover, they can be read as excellent examples of bioregional 

literature: in narrating the original interaction between human and nonhuman actants within a series 



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of landscapes that are now often neglected, they helped “people reimagine the places where they live 

and their relations with those places, as well as reflect the unique bioregional character of specific 

communities” (Lynch, Glotfelty & Armbruster 2012, 4). The goal of this article is thus twofold: 1) to 

introduce readers to the ecological potentials of Gregory’s book through an analysis of the functions 

performed by nonhuman agents in shaping the sacred landscapes narrated in the miracle stories; and 

2) to present the Dialogues Bioregional Project (hereafter DBP), a digital humanities project that I am 

developing around the Dialogues, meant to create a set of near-continuous ecological narratives of 

central Italy from ca. 600 AD to the present, primarily in the form a deep (or “thick”) map. 

Accordingly, while the first section of this article is meant to display the ecological potential of 

Gregory’s text and its crucial value as a quasi literal pre-text for an exploration of Central Italy’s 

landscape ecology, the second and third sections focus instead on outlining theoretical premises, 

structure, goals, and current state of the DBP. Although a 2017 grant awarded by the Neukom Institute 

for Computational Science at Dartmouth College allowed me to start working on this digital project, the 

DBP is still in its very early stages:  not public yet, it exists as an embryonic frame only within the 

private repository of Dartmouth Digital Commons. The DBP’s aims as described in this article are 

thus subject to change as the project goes public and we begin to gather data and feedback from its 

various users. Deep maps as the DBP aspires to be are in fact voluminous, polyvocal, and open-ended; 

they are enterprises meant “to provide a conceptual base for examining the nuanced and qualitative 

aspects of community knowledge and broadening the participatory mapping process” (Harris, 323). 

Consequently, it is highly likely that even my initial conception of the DBP – as a platform where 

scholars interested in the integration of biophysical and analytical approaches to the environment with 

humanistic and holistic perspectives can collaborate – will be modified by the encounters with both 

the local communities inhabiting the locations mentioned in Gregory’s text and potential non-local 

users interested in the project. Yet, as provisional and aspirational as it might seem, my hope is that 

introducing the Dialogues as a blueprint for the landscape ecology of central Italy will indeed prompt 

interested scholars and communities to join the DBP and collaborate in its further development and 

objectives. Ultimately, I believe that by exploring the diverse ecological narratives that shape our 

understanding of specific physical environments, we might indeed achieve both a richer, more 

democratic, and more responsible sense of the fundamental connectivity of “various knowledge 

orders” and life-forms (Springett, 623). As a deep map, the DBP thus has “the potential to be inclusive 

of ecological as well as social concerns and work toward creating conversations that change the way 

people perceive, think about and ultimately engage with place” without neglecting the socio-economic 

and cultural needs of indigenous communities (633). 

Finally, throughout this article I will be using terms and categories such as “space,” “territory,” 

“environment,” and “landscape:” while in general discourses they might at times indicate similar 

entities, they nonetheless have different meanings and thus deserve a brief explanation. For “space” 

and the often-associated term “place,” I follow Yi-Fu Tuan’s 1977 canonical work, according to which 

while the former is abstract, objective, and geometrical, the latter is instead phenomenological, 

subjective, and experiential (5). In a sense, the whole DBP is an attempt to reframe what is mere 

representational space into a set of polysemic, multi-layered places. “Territory” has more a political 

tone, meaning a geographic area under the jurisdiction of a governmental authority or an 

administrative subdivision of a country. In this article is often used in relations to Pope Gregory’s 



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administration of the Italian land. The term “environment” designates instead the complex of physical, 

chemical, and biotic factors (such as climate, soil, and living things) that act upon an organism or an 

ecological community and ultimately determine its form and survival. The DBP is an environmental 

project in so far as it relates to the natural world, the impact of human activity on its condition, and 

how human cultures describe this impact both synchronically and diachronically. Lastly, as it will be 

better articulated later, the category of “landscape” is used in this article not as a synonym for “natural 

scenery” but to address the complex and performative interactions of human and nonhuman agents 

within a specific portion of the Earth’s surface. From the perspective of landscape ecologies, the DBP 

thus studies and visualize the interplay of socio-cultural and environmental pattern and structure 

capable of affecting ecological communities across dynamic temporal and spatial scales. 

1. Gregory’s Dialogues 

Pope Gregory I, commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, was the first monk to be elected 

pope of the Catholic Church, an office he held from 590 AD to his death fourteen years later. Gregory 

is famous for re-organizing both the institutional and liturgical life of the Church; for instigating the 

first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to convert the Anglo-Saxon people of England to 

Christianity; and for his writings (including sermons, manuals, commentaries, and 850 surviving 

letters), which were more prolific than those of any of his predecessors as pope.  

Among these writings, a distinct importance has been attributed to the Dialogues, a collection of 

four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men, 

primarily monks, of sixth-century Italy. As the title of the work conveys, these miracles are told as a 

series of short narratives framed within a dialogue between Gregory himself and a deacon named 

Peter. While the stories are told by the former, it is the latter who triggers the narration with his 

relentless questioning about those Italian “virtuous men” who, to his knowledge, have nonetheless 

performed “no signs or miracles” (Gregory 2016, 5). Gregory proceeds to correct his deacon’s opinion 

and narrates circa 200 of these signs or miracles, often moving from one holy man to another, but 

sometimes focusing at length on one individual, as in Book 2, completely devoted to the life and 

miracles of St. Benedict of Nursia. Several narratives in the Dialogues come (with only minor changes) 

from a Mediterranean “common fund of stories and teaching, upon which Eastern and Western 

Christian writers alike could draw” (Petersen, xxi). Yet, a significant amount of them have been 

probably collected through epistolary exchanges, with Gregory urging his numerous correspondents 

to send him via letter “the miracles of the Fathers, which we have heard took place in Italy,” as he 

writes to Maximian, bishop of Syracuse, in July 593 (Gregory 2004, 268-269 [3.50]).1 As Carole Straw 

has pointed out, Gregory probably began writing the Dialogues in the summer of 593 and finished by 

594, “but his work is the fruit of decades spent hearing and collecting stories of the holy men” (67). 

The writings thus exhibit a knowledge of the material territory where they take place which, as I will 

explain shortly, is functional to their overall objective. 

Traditionally, the Dialogues have been read either because they contain the first biography of the 

founder of Western monasticism (Benedict, in Book 2) or for the theological explanations on afterlife 

 
1 On the issue of Gregory’s extradiegetic sources and intradiegetic informants, see Petersen 1984 and Laghezza 2009, 
respectively. 



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included in Book 4. Both historians and theologians have in fact usually ignored the rest of the 

Dialogues, some of them even contesting the attribution of the four books to Gregory due to the alleged 

lack of sophistication of the Latin writing and the low social and intellectual status of the main 

characters.2 Yet, textual evidence suggests that the four books were instead very dear to Gregory, 

actually speaking to his concerns on both pastoral and administrative levels as they depict a portion 

of central Italy at a turning point in both Italic and European history. Having been both defensively 

and administratively abandoned by weakened Roman imperial powers based in Ravenna, central Italy 

was increasingly devastated by the frequent incursions of non-Italic invaders, most notably the 

Lombards, resulting in panic, chaos, and despair. Although scholars have disagreed on the reasons 

behind Gregory’s geographical choices and have even accused him of historical inaccuracy,3 we can 

surely say that the circa 200 miracles narrated in the Dialogues represented a portion of central Italy as 

a sacred space populated by holy men—and not one abandoned by God as distraught contemporaries 

were inclined to believe. As Laghezza has pointed out, the Dialogues can instead be considered the 

expression of a political and pastoral project meant to create a “privileged space – Rome and Central 

Italy – in which the presence of the divine was persisted and perceived, a shield against the dangers of 

history” (Laghezza 2012, 259).  

Different categorizations of the miracle stories are possible. In her comprehensive volume on 

Gregory, Boesch Gajano provides a classification of the miracles but also acknowledges the difficulty 

implicit in any categorizations (236). Yet, even when the landscape is not the direct focus of the 

hagiographic narrative, each story includes elements that offer an ecological map of human and 

nonhuman dwelling interactions in the sixth century, and binds the landscape—in all its familiarity, 

generosity, and treachery—with human action and salvation. Although the book clearly belongs to a 

hagiographical genre quite typical in late antiquity, all the stories in the Dialogues reveal the Christian 

God’s presence in those human-nonhuman interactions capable of performing landscaping functions.4 

The Dialogues thereby establish a “sacred geography” (Boesch Gajano 2012) in which both human 

communities and the whole biosphere surrounding them are mutually transformed. 

As Laghezza has indicated, rural and urban realities are almost equally present in the Dialogues, but 

Gregory does not always offer precise geographical information about the place in which a miracle or 

a wonder has occurred (Laghezza 2012, 251). Despite this “terminological imprecision, variety and 

ostensible disorganization of territorial references” (Boesch Gajano 2004, 292), circa thirty different 

towns are mentioned, mostly located in the regions surrounding Rome, unsurprisingly the city that is 

cited the most in the four books. The Dialogues also mention urban centers that are both in northern 

and southern Italy, as well as a few places outside the Italic peninsula, but it is the territory that goes 

roughly from Ravenna to Nola that provides the location for the vast majority of the narratives. 

Moreover, the Dialogues show a peculiar ability to observe and narrate environmental realities that, 

 
2 On this topic, see Clark 1986; Clark 2003; and, for an opposite perspective, Boesch Gajano 2004. Accepting Gregory’s 
authorship, did not necessarily mean sympathy toward the Dialogues either: see for example the harsh hostility toward this 
book expressed by Edward Gibbon in his notorious The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (103). 
3 For two opposite perspectives on Gregory’s geography in the Dialogues, see respectively Boesch Gajano 2004, 164-168; 
and Cremascoli 2001, 259. 
4 This is not, of course, a theological argument meant to explain the connection between the divine and the natural either 
in general or in Gregory’s theology; for such a debate with specific reference to the Dialogues, see McCready 1989, 206-
240. 



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although forming only part of a larger eschatological plan, nonetheless reveal the writer’s interest in 

the material and historical interactions between human communities and the physical world. For 

instance, Grégoire has noted how the sea and the land are the objects of both Gregory’s essential 

curiosity and analytic interpretation: his ability to describe in detail distinct weather conditions speaks 

to a population engaged in activities that are very much influenced by and connected to what we may 

now perceive as minimal changes in their environment (75).  The Dialogues’ miraculous narratives are 

meant to create a peculiar space, capable of transforming, sacralizing it, a whole territory: an activity 

that scholars compare to the material transformation of the rural landscape produced by contemporary 

monks around their monastery (Boesch Gajano 2004, 295). Consequently, the landscape in Gregory’s 

book is often characterized by a movement toward precision and particularity (for example, from the 

general province to a specific cave or boulder), and, even though it is always functional to a specific 

holy man’s story, it is never mere background but a constitutive element of the miracle. Boesch Gajano 

claims that in the Dialogues “space shapes sanctity and it is reshaped by sanctity” (297), thus 

emphasizing the dynamic, almost circular and performative, nature of the landscape instead of its 

traditional, static and passive, visuality.  In this sense, Gregory’s book offers a unique opportunity to 

consider in a pre-modern context a notion of the landscape as a performative space which emphasizes 

simultaneous human intervention in and witness to landscape as the basis for ecological sustainability 

and cultural growth. 

Yet, although all the miracles belong to such sacred geography, nonhuman elements are not 

explicit features of every story, and in fact, nonhuman elements perform a crucial role in less than half 

of stories. As we will see better shortly, only in circa seventy of the more or less 200 miracles collected 

in the Dialogues there is either a zoological, botanical, hydrological, or geological feature clearly 

implicated in the landscape building process. Nonetheless, when inserted in the right digital frame, 

these seventy stories equip us with a foundation for the study of the landscape ecology of central Italy, 

that is to say they bring forth, through their narratives, a set of patterns and structures across dynamic 

temporal and spatial scales in which not only biotic and abiotic processes and disturbances occur 

within the environment, but also testify to landscape changes capable of affecting the overall structure 

of ecological communities.5 

2. The Dialogues Bioregional Project 

The DBP is a digital, cross-disciplinary, and multimedia interface on Italian landscape ecology 

shaped around the Dialogues of Pope Gregory I. It explores continuities and discontinuities between 

the socio-political and ecological features of a specific portion of Italian territory, a set of 

multidisciplinary environmental narratives (from c. 600 AD to the present), and local communities. 

The DBP is meant to be collaborative and provide a digital platform for dialogues between scientists 

and humanists, a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness, and an opportunity for 

experiential learning and sustainable economic development. 

When fully functional, the DBP would supply for both each and all locations mentioned in the 

Dialogues in which a nonhuman actant plays an important role what geographers call a “deep map” (or 

“thick map”). A deep map is an attempt to try to comprehend space, place, and time in concert and 

 
5 A quite exhaustive introduction to landscape ecology is Gardner, O’Neill, and Turner, 2001. 



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has been recently defined as “a finely detailed, multimedia depiction of a place and the people, animals, 

and objects that exist within it” (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, & Harris, 3; 135). A deep map ties together 

the tangible and the material with the discursive and ideological dimension of a place – matters with 

meanings – but, unlike conventional maps, it does it privileging “experiential navigation, time-based 

approaches, participatory mapping, and alternative rhetorics of visualization” (Presner & Shepard, 

207). As Todd Presner writes about the HyperCities project, deep mapping (or, as he calls it, “thick 

mapping”) thus emphasizes “context and meaning-making through a combination of micro and macro 

analyses that foster a multiplicity of interpretations rather than simply reporting facts or considering 

maps as somehow given, objective, or complete” (Presner; Shepard; & Kawano, 19). Consequently, a 

deep map acknowledges how engaged human agents “build spatially framed identities and aspirations 

out of imagination and memory” (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, & Harris, 3) that often require equally 

engaged nonhuman involvement and participation, as is the case in the Dialogues. The DBP would be 

a deep map of both the larger portion of central Italy mentioned in Gregory’s book and each location, 

revealing the ties that places have with each other as well as outlining the specific more-than-human 

temporal and spatial network that has characterized and may still characterize each place. In this sense, 

as with a deep map, the DBP would be simultaneously a platform, a process, and a product, provoking 

negotiation between insiders and outsiders, experts and contributors, over what is represented and 

how (21; 227).  

 A project such as the DBP only now becomes possible thanks to advanced spatial technologies 

and functions that work through a series of layers corresponding to how traditional GIS operates. As 

Bodenhamer has pointed out, deep maps and GIS maps ultimately offer a visual interactive space in 

which the relative transparency of layers allows users to contribute to “a virtual world in which 

uncertainty, ambiguity, and contingency are ever present but all are capable of being braided into a 

narrative that reveals the ways in which space and time influences and is influenced by social 

interaction” (22). They thus both permit us to see a community in which “what is known is not only 

a function of objects but also of subjects and observers, of what is desired and needs to be known,” 

as well as define place “as sedimented layers of meaning” (22).  Having as a point of departure one 

specific miracle story of the Dialogues and its correspondent location, the DBP proceeds by adding 

layers of narrative (historical, literary, spatial, etc.) and scientific data with the aim of creating a near-

continuous ecological stratigraphy from ca. 600 AD to the present. In so doing, it would generate, for 

each story and location, a collaborative community in which scholars, researchers, and local 

populations would interact to both reconstruct and negotiate knowledge. My goal is for the DBP to 

operate as an ecological narrative generation platform, that is to say, a platform that would provide 

new ecological insights into the correlation, interaction, and structure of ecological events and 

narratives in space and time. As Delozier, McIntosh, & Yuan write about their own American Civil 

War GIS platform, narrative generation is performed by connecting events in space and time based 

on actors (both biotic and abiotic), action or both “to decipher the spatiotemporal relationships among 

actors and action in making histories” (181). 

For an example of how the DBP is built to perform, I want to take one of my favorite miracle 

stories of the Dialogues. As Gregory narrates in book 3, chapter 11, Cerbonius was “a man of holy life” 

and the Bishop of Populonium, modern Populonia, a tiny frazione (hamlet) of the larger town of 

Piombino in Tuscany today, but in the sixth century AD still an important Roman city, albeit 



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increasingly devastated by foreign invasions. As the story goes, once Cerbonius gave shelter to some 

Christian soldiers and so saved their lives from the Goths. Totila, the Goths’ “impious king,” learned 

of the bishop’s action and “in great rage and cruelty commanded him to be brought unto a place called 

Merulis (eight miles from Populonium), where he remained with his whole army, and in the sight of 

the people to be cast unto wild bears to be devoured.” In front of a large crowd (perhaps in a natural 

amphitheater? In the woods?), Cerbonius was brought forth, where a ferocious bear was waiting: “Out 

of his den was the beast let loose, who in great fury and haste set upon the Bishop: but suddenly, 

forgetting all cruelty, with bowed neck and humbled head, he began to lick [Cerbonius’] feet: to give 

them all to understand that men carried towards the man of God the hearts of beasts, and the beasts 

as it were the heart of a man.” As Ziolkowski has pointed out, this story can be read as just one 

example of the several biographical saints’ narratives in which wild bears play a positive ex machina 

role, somehow rescuing, submitting to, or entering the service of holy personages (Ziolkowski 2017, 

30). Although this religious and theological aspect is certainly crucial for a correct interpretation of the 

story and its historical repercussions, for the DBP it would be only a point of departure. From the 

perspective of the environmental humanities, what is interesting is that bears are no longer part of the 

Tuscan landscape, their presence in central Italy being almost completely limited to the Abruzzo 

National Park, where they are severely endangered. The story of Cerbonius as narrated in the Dialogues 

instead implicitly assumes these nonhuman animals still lived in that territory and thus offers us an 

opportunity to explore the symbolic and material interactions that the local human community and 

the bears have had throughout the centuries. What in fact happened to the bears? When did they 

disappear? Why? And how has the story of Cerbonius influenced the local community? Do we still 

have visible signs of this story in the landscape? And what other further narratives might these possible 

signs have created and still create? Can we use this story as the base for a new understanding of the 

Tuscan landscape that would potentially enhance both ecological care and cultural prosperity?  

To answer these questions (and others that might arise from further in loco investigations), an 

interdisciplinary team of scholars, students, and local experts must be assembled, a team capable of 

tackling the multifaceted complexity implicit in the miracle story. For example, in the case of 

Cerbonius, a student majoring in Classics (Latin literature), a zoologist, and a historian of Europe 

might collectively analyze the presence and significance of bears as narrated in the Dialogues. In this 

hypothetical scenario, their interaction provides each of them with specific advantages: the student’s 

research on bears in Latin literature can be enriched by the ethological and historical expertise of the 

two senior scholars; the zoologist’s research on bears in Italy profits from the linguistic and historical 

depth presented by the student and the historian, respectively; the historian’s work benefits from both 

the etymological and literary perspective provided by the student and the zoological precision offered 

by his colleague in Zoology. Lastly, the interdisciplinary research output generated by the academic 

cooperation interacts with popular and often orally-transmitted knowledge possessed by local 

communities about human-bear relationships in their own territory. This interaction would provide 

data otherwise unavailable to the scholars as well as scientific, historical, and environmental awareness 

to local communities interested also in investing responsibly in that specific landscape. 



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3. Current State of the Project 

Thanks to a CompX Faculty Grant awarded by the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at 

Dartmouth College, I have been able to work with a few colleagues of the Dartmouth Research 

Computing team and a student of mine to develop the digital frame that will eventually host the DBP.6   

We first selected the stories in the Dialogues in which nonhuman, environmental features played a 

crucial landscape function: as I mentioned in the previous section, circa seventy of them were selected 

and the locations in which the miracle or wonder occurred were annotated. Some of the locations 

were not mentioned by Gregory with geographical precision, but we still managed to pinpoint with 

reasonable certainty the majority of them thanks to external sources, like local history or religious 

scholarship. Interestingly, not all of them are still active centers of social and/or spiritual life. Instead, 

several of the locations mentioned in the Dialogues have been abandoned and have therefore lost the 

once-established connection between the local environment and the human community. However, 

even when this connection is still present – namely, a human community dwells upon the same 

territory mentioned by Gregory – the original link as narrated in the book is often overlooked, if even 

acknowledged at all: a few ruins are usually the only signs to remind us of the original organization of 

that specific landscape.  

Once all the locations were identified, we then marked the stories according to the main 

characteristic of their nonhuman actants: if in the story there was a nonhuman animal, it would be 

marked as “zoological”; a plant of any kind would mean “botanical” feature; a body of water, 

“hydrological;” a stone, boulder, or any type of rock, “geological.” We assigned different icons to 

these features: a bear, a Mediterranean stone pine, a waterfall, and a mountain, respectively. Those 

icons were selected for practical reasons, but they might be changed in the future, if necessary. 

Sometimes the same story may have different markers, such as in the case of the only story in which 

the four of them appear. It is the story of Marcius, a reverent man “who lived a solitary life in the 

mountain of Marsico” (book 3, chapter 16), the modern Monte Massico, a mountain situated in the 

Italian Province of Caserta. As Gregory narrates, Marcius lived a solitary life in “a narrow and straight 

cave” (geological marker) where one day he managed to cause water to be “sprung (…) out of the 

hollow rock” (hydrological). However, the very same day a “serpent alone would come into the cave 

where he lived also alone, and when he was at his prayers, it would cast itself before him, and when 

he took his rest, it would lie down by his side” (zoological). The holy man was not at all dismayed at 

this and often talked to the snake, until, after three years of this cohabitation, the serpent “made a 

great hissing, and tumbling himself down by the side of the mountain, he consumed all the bushes 

and shrubs with fire” (botanical).  

The next step was the creation of a digital map of Central Italy. We opted for a multilayered outline 

in which users could select four different maps by clicking the layer control icon. The first map is the 

Open Street Map (OSM) as part of the collaborative project that goes under the same name: it contains 

 
6 I want to thank specifically the Director of the Neukom Institute, Dan Rockmore; the colleagues in Research 
Computing with whom I collaborated, especially Steven Gaughan, Douglas Hill, and John Wallace; and the Dartmouth 
student who worked on the initial database with me, Wes Kendrick. I avail myself of this opportunity to thank also 
Hailey LaVoy and Martin Bloomer who generously brought Gregory’s Dialogues to my attention and with whom I had 
several conversations about this work and its importance. Finally, my gratitude goes to the anonymous reviewers of this 
article. 



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fine detail on roads and footpaths and it would be helpful if users contemplate visiting a site mentioned 

in the Dialogues (fig.1). 

 

Figure 1. Open Street Map. 

 

There are then a “Satellite map” and a “Street/Terrain map” which may both help visualize the 

landscape (fig. 2 & 3). 

Figure 2. Satellite map. 



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6.1 (2019)  79 

Figure 3. Street/terrain map. 

 

Finally, we decided to have a “Roman map” that shows features from the time of Imperial Rome, 

somewhat before Gregory's day (fig. 4). 

Figure 4. Roman map. 

 

It is less detailed than present day maps, so one may not be able to select Roman if they zoom in 

too far, but it offers the toponymy of the time, the same used by Gregory in the original Latin. Given 

the importance of people’s movement and travel in the Dialogues, the Roman map also contains the 

major Roman roads radiating from the Capital of the empire to the various provinces. We are also 



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contemplating introducing further maps featuring, for example, the different ecosystems or land uses, 

but they are not currently part of the platform.  

We then inserted the markers for each category into the multilayered map. Users can view markers 

from more than one category at once, but markers from identical locations may obscure each other, 

so we decided to allow users to switch off one or more category if they are unable to click on the 

marker they want. To facilitate the navigation of the platform we also added clusters. So, if two or 

more markers from the same category are close enough to overlap, they are replaced by a colored 

circle, with a number showing how many markers it represents. When a user clicks on the circle, the 

map zooms enough to separate at least one of the markers. If all the markers in the circle are all in the 

same location, they are redrawn on rays around the central locations, so that they are far apart enough 

to be clicked separately (fig. 5).  

Figure 5. Rays around a central location. 

 

Lastly, when users click on a map marker, the Text Information Panel appears, containing the relevant 

Dialogues text (fig. 6). 



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Figure 6. Text Information Panel. 

 

Currently, only the English translation is available, but we created in advance space for the original 

Latin as well as for the Italian translation. A user can drag and resize this panel if it is inconveniently 

placed. In the top of this panel is a View today link. Clicking this will bring up a Google Maps Street 

view for the location. Of course, the actual location for an event related in a miracle story written 1500 

years ago must be quite approximate, so users can enjoy the view if they would like to see the 

contemporary landscape, but they should not expect to see most of the environmental features 

described in the Dialogues. For this feature, we are currently using Google Maps, which unfortunately 

has no imagery for some of the most remote locations. 

The next step for the DBP would be to provide all these marked locations and their respective 

miracle stories with team of scholars capable of producing both inter- and extra-textual hyper-linked 

narratives. For example, to return to the story mentioned earlier, a team might focus on Cerbonius 

and the bear and produce: an interpretation of the meaning of bears in Gregory’s work and in this 

story in particular; a zoological account of possible bear species present in the Italian peninsula; a 

historical (diachronic) reconstruction of the presence of bears in that specific territory; a list of other 

literary or visual accounts in which bears appear and their significance; a set of zoo-anthropological 

explorations about the relationship between bears and human beings in general and in that territory 

more specifically; a set of recorded contributions by local communities about the presence (or absence) 

of bears in their environment; a study on the importance of bears for the general ecology of that 

specific territory, etc. Needless to say, these are only some of the directions each team can take, and 

the outcome will be determined by the specific interests of each team and open to further 

development. At the same, it will be crucial to engage not only with local communities and their 

specific knowledge of the territory, but also with the Italian government (and potentially the EU). As 

I mentioned above, one of the aspirational goals of the DBP is to develop forms of environmentally 

and culturally responsible tourism in relation to the multi-faceted and interdisciplinary narratives 

created by the project, and therefore institutional support becomes paramount. A further development 



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of the project, at this point even too ambitious, is to create an application through which users can 

read the Dialogues on their favorite electronic devices, follow the text to explore simultaneously the 

narratives created by the project and the locations, and eventually have direct access to those locals 

who would be willing to engage with this kind of environmentally- and culturally-conscious tourism. 

4. Conclusion 

In his Vita Gregorii Magni, Paul the Deacon (c. 720-790) describes a moment in Gregory’s life when 

Gregory was dictating his homilies on Ezechiel to his secretary through a veil drawn between the two 

of them. According to the legend, as the pope remained silent for long periods at a time, the servant 

made a hole in the curtain and, looking through, “beheld a dove seated upon Gregory's head with its 

beak between his lips. When the dove withdrew its beak, the holy pontiff spoke and the secretary took 

down his words; but when he became silent the servant again applied his eye to the hole and saw the 

dove had replaced its beak between his lips” (xxviii). Although the dove was meant to symbolize the 

Holy Spirit and therefore the divine inspiration moving Gregory, when it comes to the Dialogues the 

story also suggests a fascinating circularity: the source for Gregory’s inspired stories about the 

nonhuman world and its crucial interaction with the human one comes from a nonhuman creature 

whispering (singing?) words into his mouth, which Gregory then delivered to his human listener. 

In this article, I outlined how this potential circularity and reciprocity between the nonhuman 

environment and the human culture and society as described in some of Gregory’s miracle stories in 

the Dialogues can promote new ecological narratives, knowledge, and awareness. I have also briefly 

sketched out premises, major features, and potentials of my digital project based on Gregory’s work, 

summarizing what has been done so far and what ought to be realized in the future. As I stated in the 

introduction, my hope is to create a community of scholars, students, and locals interested in 

participating in the project and advance its environmental agenda. In fact, I truly believe that deep 

mapping the sacred human-nonhuman interactions depicted in the Dialogues would eventually create 

a new (culturally) sacred landscape and help protect these often overlooked and abandoned 

environments from that “filling” or riempimento that Turri saw as an increasing dangerous possibly for 

Italy. 

As Frascaroli has pointed out in his preliminary study of the potential of sacred natural sites for 

biodiversity management in central Italy, the link between sacredness and natural areas has rightly 

been deemed to offer crucial opportunities (587). The aim of the DBP is to leverage computer 

technology to provide a digital platform through which scholarly collaboration would help the sacred 

territories described in Gregory’s Dialogues re-acquire their eco-historical significance and therefore 

reconstruct a symbolic and material link between spiritual beliefs, human communities, and the 

environment. In a country like Italy, whose patron saint is Frances of Assisi – who is also patron saint 

of animals and the natural environment – this should be considered a priority. 

However, different from what Frascaroli aim, the DBP is not mainly meant to shed light on the 

sacred as “the possible ultimate source of a conservationist ethos” (588) and therefore to separate 

these spaces from the environmental and socio-economic struggles of local populations. Instead, the 

radical ambition of the project is to provide those local communities with a tool meant to reestablish 

a meaningful and productive connection with their own environment and thus draw ecological as well 



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as economic progress. As Cesaretti, Iovino, and Past write, “the lack of a bond between cultural 

identity, social awareness, and environmental protection is indeed at the core of the ecological crisis” 

(8). I agree with the editors of Italy and the Environmental Humanities that Italy needs now more than 

ever to concoct (environmental) progress with (economic and cultural) development, thus reinforcing 

“the mutual formative bond of humans and place, something which could constitute the premise for 

a healthy life, both in physical and political term” (8). The DBP is thus meant to be a tool for 

socioenvironmental justice and development rather than an element of conservationist ideology. 

Ultimately, I hope this project will encourage communities to re-approach their natural settings in 

ecological terms, by engaging in dialogue with other experiences through history and literature. 

Perhaps then we can slow the increasing abandonment of these landscapes to either real estate 

speculation or our (privileged) fantasies of pure, untouched wilderness. 

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	The Dialogues Bioregional Project: Landscape Ecology in Central Italy from the Sixth Century to the Present
	Damiano Benvegnù
	1. Gregory’s Dialogues
	2. The Dialogues Bioregional Project
	3. Current State of the Project
	4. Conclusion
	Works Cited


