Italy, the historic home and former bastion of Catholicism, is increasingly becoming the home of West African migrants, primarily from Ghana and Nigeria. Propelled by the push factors of economic woes back home and the alluring pull factors of educational and economic opportunities offered by life in Italy, African immigrants envision a brighter future in this new host country which they hope will be their new residence. With visas, passports, letters of invitations, job offers, and scholarships in hand, these adventurers, among whom are clandestine “missionaries,” stream into an unfamiliar world with great expectancy. After all Italy, with an 80 percent Christian (Catholic) population, is expected to be a welcoming host to strangers, but instead what Africans meet is a deep, dispiriting suspicion of the ‘dark continent’ encroaching on ‘sacred space.’

Africans on their part carry a deep mistrust of their own, namely, that Europe, which was once the axle of global missionary sending, has now sunk into religious apostasy and is in dire need of ‘revival.’ For many Africans, nowhere is this apostasy more telling than in Italy, the home of Catholicism and seat of the papacy. To them, Catholicism's obsession with relics, worship of dead saints, and lifeless rituals, are all signs of post-Christian Europe's renouncement of true religion. The Vatican, once the lighthouse which sent hope across the world, is now draped with the invisible hanging banner signaling Ichabod—the ‘departed presence’ of God.

At the heart of Annalisa Butticci's carefully crafted ethnography of African Pentecostalism in Italy and its denouncement of European Catholicism, lies a telling irony. She contends that African Pentecostalism, emerging from the shadows of African traditional religion, is driven by the same preoccupation as Catholicism, namely the quest for ‘real presence,’ i.e., a longing to experience the tangible presence of God in the here and now.

The author convincingly elucidates how Pentecostalism's impossible commitment to immateriality paradoxically illuminates its gritty materiality and deep and visceral longing for real presence that it shares with Catholicism and also African traditional religions. Put simply, African Pentecostals are denouncing Catholics for their love and veneration of images, rituals, and statues as embodied presence when they do exactly the same thing within African Pentecostal spirituality. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic and empirical field research, which spans Ghana, Nigeria, and Italy, Butticci unearths revealing similarities and continuities in what are ostensibly two polar opposite religious traditions.

In the first chapter of the book, she locates and profiles African Pentecostalism in Italy, explicating how immigrants are scapegoated for the economic crisis in Italy, a social profiling which has led to increasing tension between African immigrants and Italians. Chapter 2 explores what happens when African Pentecostals and Catholics share the same physical place for worship and prayers—what Butticci calls ‘shared contact zones.’ Attention here centers upon a particular mico-contact zone within the macro-contact zone of Italy. Chapter 3 looks at the place of relics within Catholic and Pentecostal aesthetics. Similarities and differences are drawn between Catholics, who view relics as objects of veneration and passion, and Pentecostals, who abhor them because they are perceived as carrying evil forces that blur the barriers between the living and the dead. The final chapter concentrates on a particular object in the contact zone, namely, the famous painting of Raphael's “Transfiguration of Christ,” painted by the New Life Pentecostal Church in Italy. The presence of this picture, she argues, problematizes commonly accepted notions held by Pentecostals, for whom such images represent idolatrous leanings. Yet there it is in all its aesthetic glory with its sacred power embedded in materially actualized presence: a picture of Raphael's “Transfiguration of Christ” on center stage. The book brilliantly unpacks the significance of this apparent irony and how iconography is repurposed within an African Pentecostal context in Italy.

The book concludes by responding to the ultimate question about the aesthetics of presence and its implications and ramifications. It probes the relationship between immanence (tangible, visible, and the ‘real’) and transcendence (supernatural and the divine) and the role tangible presence plays in human spirituality as well as in politics. By taking, or what Butticci calls, “repurposing,” Raphael's “Transfiguration of Christ,” African Pentecostals, who are often disempowered and discriminated against, are doing something inherently political and empowering: “African Pentecostals in Italy are turning this Renaissance image of Jesus into a transcultural, transnational, and transracial image that collides with and dissolves social boundaries, that critiques and suspends nationalities and hierarchies, divisions, and conventions, creating the possibility of imagining a new social and spiritual order” (127).

My main critique of the work would be the lack of critical engagement pertaining to the role that pneumatology plays in African Pentecostalism and the sanctifying role the Spirit performs in the material and embodied world of divine presence. Although materiality of presence finds a place in African Pentecostalism as much as it does in Catholicism, the difference for African Pentecostals is the empowering and sanctifying role that the Spirit plays. The mediating power of the Holy Spirit transforms aesthetic materiality and makes it sacred. Catholics are often harshly criticized not only because of the externality of their spirituality, but because of their lack of spiritual power to invoke the presence of God above and beyond the aesthetic objects of worship.

Overall, the book presents a fascinating and intriguing comparison between African Pentecostals and Catholics in Italy within shared contact zones, and offers penetrating insights into both Pentecostal and Catholic aesthetic and the politics of presence. To that end, it is a worthwhile contribution to the growing body of literature, broadening our understanding of African Pentecostals in Europe and around the world.