A postscript love letter to Fidenza

We are now in Orvieto, a glamorously ancient city on top of a hill with a world-famous cathedtral and a zillion shops selling fancy dishes, fancy clothes, and crummy souvenirs. It makes me a bit homesick for Fidenza, the town we came here from.

Fidenza is not much of a tourist destination. It has a medieval Duomo, which is lovely, and a pilgrimage site, but not the sort of thing that appeals to busloads of camera-toting visitors. Its main square, Piazza Garibaldi, is home to Italy's first monument to that national hero and a town hall that dates back centuries, but its charm has more to do with the Italian-ness of the life that goes on there than with its architecture.

Go down one street in Fidenza and you can see charming row houses built into the old city walls; a few blocks in the other direction are some prison-like apartment blocks that were thrown up during the pre-crash boom and remain unfinished and unoccupied. You see more obvious non-Italians walking the streets than you used to—people who look like they probably hail from Asia, Africa, or the Middle East—but they are mostly residents, not tourists. Some of them have opened stores that stand ready to sell you fruit or a haircut or a kebab when many of the more traditionally Italian establishments are closed for siesta or the sabbath.

The whole place smacks of real life, Italian style, while Orvieto, beautiful as it is, feels a little theme-park-ish.

Fidenza's Duomo, which dates from the twelfth century, is a far more modest affair than Orvieto's.  But it recently had its front facade cleaned, so it looks better than ever. It is dedicated to San Donnino, a third-century Christian who, after being beheaded by heathens, picked up his severed head and carried it across a river to the site where the Duomo now stands. Why exactly he did this remains unclear to me. 

Here he is, as he appears in the cathedral crypt.I'm pretty sure the box is where his relics are kept. That seems to be him, standing on top of it, head in hand.

And here's the Duomo itself. It is beautiful, in its own austere way. Pam tells me it used to be covered in colorful frescoes, but during the Great Plague they were covered in whitewash as a (tragically pointless) sanitary precaution.

I already miss the busy life of Fidenza's Piazza Garibaldi, the town's main square, which we went through every day on our way to meet Franca for an Italian lesson, or to go on some errand or other, or to meet Pam and Romano for a drink or some gelato. The photo below was taken at 10:35 p.m., but in fairness it was the Friday of a holiday weekend--little kids aren't always out that late.

I loved all the little streets with their colorful houses squeezed next to each other. They aren't the stuff of calendar shots or travel posters, but they feel cosy and just the right amount of foreign. And I loved the feeling that we were, at least briefly, part of the day-to-day life of this unassuming but very sweet, very Italian place.

Arrivederci, Fidenza!