Inking Italy

The Feast of Corpus Christi, Sardinian-style

On our last night in Iglesias, Sardinia, Glenton and I walked out of our B&B toward the town church.... and saw a huge crowd.

Maybe slightly to his chagrin (it was 9pm, dinner time, and we'd only eaten some half-melted pastries all day), we stopped to see what was going on. Thirty seconds later, priests, nuns and altarboys started emerging from the church, solemnly carrying candles. A priest swung burning incense; the smell, sweet and smoky, drifted through the piazza. An ivory- and gold-embroidered canopy followed, providing the whole focus of the procession: an elderly priest, walking carefully so as not to trip on his elaborate mantle, his forehead pressed against the gold monstrance holding the Catholic host.

Once the procession had passed, the crowd fell in behind it. And if you'd looked down at us from one of the balconies above, there, shuffling alongside the modestly-dressed, small Italian women and the elderly, Italian men, you would have seen an odd sight: a 6'2" black man in a purple polo shirt, and a girl short and dark enough to be an Italian, but in a sundress and flipflops that said "I didn't get the memo."

Awkwardness aside, it was great. The procession reminded me (a lot) of the procession of St. Theodore's relics that my friends and I happened upon when we were on the island of Korcula, Croatia, two years ago.

 

   

Festival of St. Theodore, Korcula                    Festival of Corpus Christi, Iglesias

For the next 45 minutes, we walked beneath balconies draped with lace tablecloths and full of watching townspeople, trying to mouth along with the (Italian) "call and response" part of the prayer. Sometimes we'd stop, and a band at the head of the procession would play; sometimes, the people would sing hymns. As we walked, we crushed flower petals, mint and rosemary underfoot. Parts of the walk were decked out with silk canopies and bouquets of flowers. Between the fragrance of the air, and the chants, and the at-peace feeling that always (frighteningly) comes from following a crowd, I felt almost trancelike.

We later learned that the procession was for the Feast of Corpus Christi, a holiday dating back to the 13th century. Traditionally, a procession would pass through each town, and the people would come out to venerate the host as it passed. "In recent years, this practice has almost disappeared, though some parishes still hold a brief procession around the outside of the parish church," says the ever-trusty (erm) About.com website.

But while the rest of the world rockets toward secularism, Iglesias is still Corpus Christi-ing like it's 1250. Except, that is, for the addition of an African-American man and a scandalously-dressed woman. But hey. We were just keeping it modern.

Festa della Reppublica

Too bad the red, white and green fade so fast. Festa della Reppublica, Rome.

I spent most of June 2 -- Italy's "Festival of the Republic," celebrated each year for the 1946 referendum in which Italians voted out the Fascists -- chasing a piece of luggage around Termini train station.

This was partly the fault of my dear friend Glenton, who had, in a jetlag-induced stupor, left his bag on the good old Leonardo da Vinci Express. He called me frantically. "I'm having kind of an emergency," he said. "I can't find my bag."

After going through the usual suspects -- was it lost by the flight carrier? snatched by a Gypsy? -- I found out that, no. He'd just left it on the train, and the train had left. Oops.

Over the next three hours, we proceeded to turn Termini upside down. We checked every new train that came in from Fiumicino. Asked every ticket-seller and train conductor we could. Went to the customer service office, where we were told to go to the police station, and to the police station, where we were told to go to the customer service office. The saga ended, somewhat anticlimactically, by filling out a "police report" and trying to ignore the large American man who was, for some reason, insisting on giving us the 30-minute epic of how he lost his cell phone. (Hint: It started with his divorce.)

By the time we emerged back out of Termini's hellish halls and into the daylight, Festa della Reppublica was over. The crowds outside the Colosseum were gone. The last traces of tricolored smoke had disappeared from the air. The enormous Italian flag, while still hanging, looked lonesome. And given the state of, well, the state these days, the atmosphere seemed more than a little bit fitting.

Even so, I remembered how, just that morning, the people had packed the streets with such patriotism -- and how the sight of planes shooting overhead, trailing ribbons of red, white and green, had induced a little spark of pride, inexplicably, even in American me.