A feature of life in Europe and North America over the past fifty years or so has been an attempt to blur the lines that separate opposite sides of long-established binaries: man-woman (gender roles and identities), culture-nature (anthropogenic climate change), and right-left (bipartisan populist politics) are just some examples of the binary struggles that currently command public attention.

The line between the sacred and the profane in Italian popular culture is another example, but one with such a longstanding and naturalized status that I think the project would be less about blurring an already established border but about demarcating it more clearly, if anyone would even see a need for such a clarification, which I think would be a mistake.