Every Day in Tuscany (6 page)

Ed holds out a bite of his sausage with melted
caciotta
, local sheep’s and cow’s milk cheese. He likes my baked rabbit just as well, so we swap. At the end, we try a local
di fossa
cheese.
Fossa
means “pit,” where the cheese has aged, but unfortunately, I always associate the word with my first horrid knowledge of it—when I confronted the open
fosse biologica
, the septic tank. The cheese is good anyway—tangy, complex, lingering. Ed asks for a local
digestivo
, after-dinner digestive drink, and the owner brings over Liquor d’Ulivi. “The very essence of the olive,” he tells us. Pit, leaf, bark, fruit? The old, old flavors taste like history, and is there a hint of spring sunlight through the branches?

It’s easy to project a life teaching in Urbino, having a stimulating career within the confines of the fairy-tale architecture. As in other great hill towns, you can wander through Urbino in an hour and see the place or settle in for a decade and not reach the end.

T
HOUGH THE WIND
still has a honed edge, pears, mimosa, forsythia, and redbud have been fooled into blooming and the hills are scrimmed with vivid green. We’re driving to Loreto, home of the house of the Virgin Mary, borne aloft by angels in 1294, and blown in a storm from Croatia, where it had paused en route from Nazareth. Believe that and you can make any leap of faith. I’m dazzled by the idea of a house flying across the sea. Researchers into this phenomenon found that a shipping family named Angelli brought the masonry back to Loreto from Palestine when it was in danger of destruction. Another line, less appealing because there’s no house careening through the air: Crusaders were sometimes called “angels” and they always returned with holy souvenirs. These were also days when holy relics were endlessly traded and stolen. Every church wanted its bony memento or bit of cloth or hank of saint’s hair. The raids and skirmishes and dealings around these sacred objects make fascinating reading
¹
and surely comprise one of the kinkiest chapters in church history. Loreto, with the touchdown of the holy dwelling place, hit the jackpot. Carbon dating proves that the limestone and cedar remnants, not of this locality, are of the period of Mary’s life.

Loreto often must be thronged with pilgrims, but today we find the town eerily empty. Along a huddle of open stalls very old women wait for the absent
pellegrini
who may buy their religious souvenirs. The unusual round
campanile
and the proud basilica anchor a broad piazza flanked by arcades on one side and handsome religious buildings along the other. I read that the
campanile
’s bell weighs eleven tons. I’d love to hear its long bongs resounding across the stones; if it began to ring surely the faithful would suddenly materialize and miracles would again occur at the Virgin’s house.

“Quiet as the day after judgment day.” Ed takes a few pictures. “Where is everybody?”

“All gone to heaven. How did we never know this place was so … full of force? And the impression is so
light
. That stone—ivory, but warm.”

“Do you think anyone’s ever made a study of
campanile
s? Isn’t the one in Città di Castello round, too?”

“Ah, that’s right! Don’t you think that someone has studied every stone in Italy? This one is lovely, like a tall altar candle.”

M
ANY ARTISTS HAVE
put their veneration at Loreto: Sansovino, Reni, Borromeo, Lotto, Pomarancio, my guy Signorelli, Sangallo, and others. Inside the church, Mary’s Santa Casa, Holy House, may be the magnet, but Bramante’s staggering marble surround of the dwelling makes this place worth a detour. The Virgin’s house is encased in elaborately carved marble depicting scenes from her life. The best section shows Gabriel, the Annunciation angel, before a Virgin half-turned away and wary. Sansovino, who carved this section, managed the illusion of the angel defying the weight of stone; he appears to have landed with an airy step. A marble bench surrounding the house has twin grooves worn into the stone by the knees of pilgrims who circumnavigate as a penance.

Even a big doubter of the story like me has to feel that the inside of this tiny sacred house transcends legend. Maybe it’s the somber black Virgin statue looking down from above the altar. She replaces one supposedly carved by the apostle Thomas, later destroyed in a fire. Maybe it’s the humble stacked brick walls, or just that I feel heavily claustrophobic, but the inscription
Hic Verbum Caro Factum Est
gives me a shiver.
Here the Word was made flesh
. Maybe some of the bricks and boards
were
brought back by a monk.
If, if, if
Mary were born here, received the angel, raised the Baby, then this comes as close as one can get to the very taproot of Christianity. A true believer in this site would have to faint or get the gift of tongues from the power of the place. A believer might echo William Sloane Coffin’s soaring belief. “I love the recklessness of faith,” he said. “First you jump, then you grow wings.”

I’m drawn. Powerfully. Even in college, I was fascinated by relics. While walking in a cemetery in New Orleans, I found a vertebra near a collapsed grave. I kept it in a small glass box and carefully labeled it in calligraphic hand,
vertebra of the Virgin
. Soon I had a shelf in my bookcase devoted to my relics. Tooth of St. Mark, shell from the bottom of the Red Sea, splinter of the cross, vial of Mary’s tears, a stone from the road to Damascus, small quartz shafts that I called Jesus Wept tears. Faux they were, but I thought that probably ninety-nine percent of those hoisted above altars in gold reliquaries were gathered in the same way. My shelf was a place of devotion, strange as it was, along with books of poetry and Greek plays.

Later, I began to collect
ex votos
, the itinerant paintings on tin or scrap wood to record thanks. I became attracted to them after seeing the Immaculate Conception, a church in Real de Catorce, a mining ghost town in Mexico. I found, and still do, the impulse of thanks tied to the gesture of making art one of the profound human expressions. Usually an
ex voto
shows an accident, such as a cart turned over, the driver almost crushed but saved by holy intervention from a saint or Mary, shown hovering above in the sky. One of my prizes from 1929 shows a man falling off a rickety chair while screwing in a lightbulb. Fortunately a saint intervened in his fate. Many are scenes of sick children with the parents praying near the bed. Almost always the initials
P.G.R
. and the date appear in the sky.
Per Grazia Ricevuta
, for grace received. As a humanist and a pantheist, I can’t not believe in grace received, though the what, where, when, and how of grace remains mysterious to me, and hopelessly entangled with grace
not
received: suffering. But venerating some tiny fragment from the past, yes, I’m stirred by that efficacy. Touch the object and feel time spiral back: That scratchy brown bit of St. Francis’s robe in San Francesco in Cortona, the amber necklace of my mother’s, that first-cut lock of my grandson’s soft blond hair, the crown of thorns I made from brambles, the nineteenth-century wedding dress hanging in my study, the worn handle of the rotary beater that whipped many whites to a froth so many years ago.

I
FIND LUCA’S
unusually restrained hand in a small octagonal sacristy. The cabinets’ fine intarsia represent the robes, censors, and prayer books stored within. Signorelli worked on the Sacrestia di San Giovanni in 1479, covering the ceiling with panels of the apostles, each one of whom is busy writing his gospel; I relish thinking of the apostles not as veteran missionaries but as
writers
. From the dome, luminous musical angels—their muses?—accompany the process. This is a sweet room where nothing dramatic happens except when the incredulous St. Thomas pokes Jesus in his wound. Literalists like him are always crass.

I wonder what Luca thought of the “translation” of the Virgin’s house into the Loreto shrine and if he ever considered painting the famous flight. The subject later caught the imagination of Saturnino Gatti, who painted a decorous version in 1510, and later, Tiepolo, who covered the ceiling of a church in Venice (bombed in World War I) with a big passel of angels swimming through the sky holding the house aloft.
²
A house flying through the sky. Outrageous and magnificent! If I leap, will I grow wings? I once tried to fly off a barn with wings made of an old sheet and balsa wood. Lucky, lucky, I only had the wind knocked clean out of me.

I love the idea of a house transported. I buy a metal medallion of the house from one of the souvenir stands. After all, the Apollo astronauts, in their own unlikely flying house, took one of these to the moon.

I
AM ALWAYS
energized by the synergy of a writing project. Mysteriously, what you need seems to come to you like a hummingbird to a red hibiscus. As I browsed in the bookstore at the Palazzo Ducale, I picked up a card announcing a Signorelli exhibit opening
today
in the village of Arcevia, not far out of our way home. To reach Arcevia, you wind up and up, arriving at a long narrow street lined with low row houses and widening to a piazza. It seems like a town in Spain: closed and secret. Closed to neighbors, closed to its stupendous view, except for one opening at the back of the piazza.

Three major Signorellis hang in the church of San Medardo, and who is he? The interior, so unlike most Italian churches, has walls, pale as lemon juice, which cast a glaze of transparent light on the paintings. Here’s my proof that Cortona’s finest, my
amico
Signorelli, is scandalously underestimated. These three paintings command the whole church, rendering my initial disappointment—only three works on exhibit?—absurd. Two paintings remained here forever, where they were meant to be. The regal and munificent
Madonna in Trono col Bambino, Madonna Enthroned with Child
, from 1508, has been brought home to Arcevia from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. The grand Madonna, with saints, has long since lost her panels, predella, and side columns to Germany, England, and,
mamma mia
, San Diego, so far from home. Nevertheless, the remaining painting stops even the severely mentally handicapped boy, whose parents lunge around the church, guiding him, and attempting to enjoy the exhibit though he shouts and farts, creating echoes. He has trouble holding up his head but gazes in wonder at the sublime face of the young Virgin. A veil of peace seems to fall over him from the young Virgin’s downcast gaze.