Le Glorie di Maria (The Glories of Mary)
Le glorie di Maria
A voi mi rivolgo, o mia dolcissima Signora e Madre mia Maria; voi sapete che io, dopo Gesù, in voi ho posto tutta la speranza della mia salute.
Our renderingTo you I turn, my sweetest Lady and Mother Mary; you know that I, after Jesus, have placed in you all the hope of my salvation.
What it is
Written in Naples in 1750 by Alfonso Maria de' Liguori, founder of the Redemptorists and Doctor of the Church, Le Glorie di Maria is a doctrinal and devotional exposition of the Salve Regina combined with reflections on Marian feasts, the Seven Sorrows, and ten virtues of the Virgin. It was composed in direct reaction against Jansenist attacks on Marian piety, and its 736 editions between 1750 and 1932 — 109 in the original Italian — made it the dominant Marian devotional text throughout the Catholic Italian courts and princely households of the later 18th and 19th centuries. Liguori himself was of Neapolitan noble birth (his father served as Captain of the Royal Galleys under the Bourbon kingdom) and his congregation's missions throughout the Kingdom of Naples embedded his devotional texts deeply in local court and chapel culture. Though no single surviving manuscript ties the book to a named Bourbon palace inventory, its extraordinary diffusion and the Redemptorists' active court-adjacent mission work in Naples make its use in Bourbon-Naples and Italian princely circles highly probable.
Why it still matters
A Christian today can pray the embedded meditations on the Salve Regina as a structured evening prayer cycle, using Liguori's brief reflections on each phrase of the antiphon as a daily Marian examination of conscience.
Kept alongside
Esercizio della Via Crucis (The Way of the Cross)
Esercizio della Via Crucis
First published in Italian in 1761, Liguori's Via Crucis became the single most widely used format for the Stations of the Cross in the Catholic world, surpassing all competitors and remaining standard in Roman Rite parishes from his lifetime through the present. Written during his active Redemptorist mission period, the text was designed for communal parish use — precisely the setting that brought Liguori's Congregation into regular contact with noble chapels, court oratories, and the Bourbon kingdom's parish network. Each of the fourteen stations combines a brief act of contrition, a meditation on Christ's passion, and an invocation, keeping the whole devotion compact enough for domestic as well as public use. The Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land had formally fixed the stations at fourteen in 1731 (confirmed by Clement XII), and Liguori's prayers supplied the textual form that parishes throughout the Kingdom of Naples and the Italian states immediately adopted; the spread through Redemptorist missions ensured its presence in Bourbon court chapels, making its use in that setting highly probable though no named palace inventory has yet been cited in published scholarship.
Visite al Santissimo Sacramento (Visits to the Blessed Sacrament)
Visite al Santissimo Sacramento e a Maria Santissima
The Visite al Santissimo Sacramento, composed in 1745 for the novices of the Redemptorist house at Ciorani near Naples, was Liguori's first published devotional work and immediately his most successful, running to forty editions within his own lifetime and over two thousand total editions through the present day. Arranged around 31 brief visits — one for each day of the month — each pairing a meditation on Christ in the Eucharist with a prayer to Mary, the book gave Catholic devotional practice a compact daily form that passed readily into noble and court chapels. Liguori himself was born into Naples' naval nobility and the Redemptorists conducted sustained missions throughout the Kingdom, ensuring the book's circulation in both rural parishes and aristocratic oratories. Its prayer of Spiritual Communion, included after each visit, became one of the most widely memorized Catholic prayers of the 18th and 19th centuries, and Benedict XVI singled out this work in his 2011 general audience on Liguori as foundational to modern eucharistic devotion.
Apparecchio alla Morte (Preparation for Death)
Apparecchio alla morte, cioè considerazioni sulle massime eterne
Published in Naples in 1758 when Liguori was sixty-two, the Apparecchio alla morte consists of 36 meditations on the 'eternal maxims' — death, judgment, hell, and heaven — structured for both private lay use and clerical preaching. The text opens each meditation with unflinching corporeal imagery (a putrefying corpse) before pivoting to hope in divine mercy, a stylistic pattern characteristic of 18th-century Italian missionary preaching. The Redemptorists carried the book throughout the Kingdom of Naples on their parish missions, making it standard reading in noble households as well as among the rural poor. Its documented influence extended even to Blessed John Paul I, who discussed it with his secretaries hours before his death in 1978, testifying to its enduring presence in Catholic formation. The strong likelihood of its use among Bourbon-Naples elite rests on the Redemptorists' documented missions in and around Naples and the universal reach of this genre in Italian Catholic devotional culture of the period.