"At Oliveto Citra, in the province of Salerno, on May 24, 1985, a group of children said they saw the Madonna. In subsequent weeks, hundreds of persons made similar declarations, beginning an extraordinary phenomenon of collective visions that is not yet over.". "In Cielo in Terra: Costruzioni Simboliche di un' Apparizione Mariana (1993), translated for the first time here by William A. Christian Jr., Paolo Apolito completes the inquiry begun in a previous work about "how" the world of apparitions is constructed and considers the problem of "what" constitutes this world. The author shows how the visionary reality is constructed through the interaction of local symbolic creativity, Catholic tradition, ecclesiastical authority, and the charisma of the seers. Apparitions of the Madonna at Oliveto Citra describes the conditions under which people who claimed to be seers gained access to the public and to the media, what local elites intervened to filter this process, what pilgrims brought to the visions, and how the content of the visions converged on the great themes of Marian apocalyptics."--BOOK JACKET.