Varieties of religious experience

Friends from California, Mark and Barbara, recently visited us in Fidenza for a few days, bearing a ridiculous amount of gifts, most of them edible or drinkable, and providing a pretext for quite a few excellent meals. Their visit also spurred us to stop by a few notable sights in the area, 

The first was the weekly Saturday street market, where I mostly managed to restrain them from buying still more things to feed us. However, Mark did discover a vendor who makes delicious bread, a commodity in short supply around here, as well as some very nice goat cheese. He has the hunting instincts of a bloodhound when it comes to good things to eat. 

On our way home from the market we encountered a large crowd in front of Fidenza's historic theater in Piazza Giuseppe Verdi, cheering and sending geysers of rice and confetti into the air. There'd been a wedding in the theater, and the bride and groom had just emerged into the piazza. 

Barbara claims the rice was carnaroli.

I tried to unobtrusively get some pictures of the men in the party, many of whom were extremely elegant in the Italian style, but I have neither the eye nor the courage to be a good street photographer. 

I thought these guys were interesting, though I imagine that the little pink handbag is not a man-purse (an item that many, many Italian men carry) but an accessory belonging to the little girl on the left. Apologies to my reader who is hankering for pix of Italian manhood; this seems to be the best I can do.

The theater is usually locked up when there isn't a performance, but it was still open so Mark, Barbara, and I were able to go in and have a look. Built in the mid-19th century, it's a 425-seat jewel box whose interior decor was the handiwork of a contemporary of Verdi's who designed sets for many of the maestro's operas. 

They were already taking down the Italian and EU flags that shared the stage with the happy couple. I wonder if those are standard fixtures at every wedding here, or if it was a political statement.

The theater ceiling is particularly spectacular. 

We were less fortunate later that day when we tried to take our friends to the Fidenza Duomo, to see the bones of the town's patron saint, San Donnino. (You can read more about him here.) Some kind of religious event was going on inside and the place was jammed. We never found out what drew such a big crowd.

So no visit to San Donnino's relics that day.

Subsequent adventures included a visit to one of our favorite sites of devotion, the Parma branch of Ikea, where we were able to pick up a new living-room chair and bring it home in our friends' rental car. Mark even put the chair together, a truly amazing act of friendship. 

We also toured the historic Jewish synagogue in the nearby town of Soragna. The Jewish community of Parma, the nearest big city, maintains the pretty little Soragna synagogue as a museum, a reminder of the relatively large Jewish community that once lived in this area in the 18th and 19th centuries, unburdened by many of the restrictions that kept Jews out of other parts of Europe. But Soragna's last Jewish resident died in 1971, and today the synagogue rarely can get enough people together to form a minyan. 

In order to enter, the men in our party had to put on yarmulkes. Despite how aggressively secular both these fellows are, they were good sports about it.

As was standard practice, women and children had to sit in the upstairs balcony, behind a screen. In the women's section was a display of Jewish marriage contracts, including one dating from the time of Italy's unification. 

Whoever commissioned the contract was apparently very excited about the new Italian state, because it's decorated with portraits of the leaders of the movement for Italian unification: at the top, Victor Emmanuel, named king of the new country; at right the revolutionary leader Garibaldi, whose military prowess and wide popularity made unification possible; and, at left, Count Cavour, the statesmen whose wheeling-and-dealing diplomacy also played a crucial role. (Our guide speculated that another revolutionary leader, Mazzini, was depicted on the bottom part of the contract that's now missing.)

In just about every Italian town the Risorgimento, as it's known, is memorialized with piazzas, streets, and parks named after these four worthies. In our own Fidenza, the main piazza is named after Garibaldi (the first Piazza Garibaldi in Italy, I've heard) and the main street cutting through the downtown, the one we live on, is named in honor of Count Cavour. Here's a close-up of him:

From what I've read, he was clever but not particularly admirable--and not as nice-looking as he's depicted here, either.

When we emerged from the synagogue, we saw a group of nuns in full habit who had been selling jam and liqueurs in front of a church a few doors down and were starting to close up shop. Unlike most habit-wearing nuns I've seen in Italy, these were young and Western. Mark broke the ice by buying some of their jam and soon we were all chatting away--in English, which most of them spoke. They were a jolly lot.

The order they belong to, the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, was founded just a few years ago, in Spain, and these sisters hailed variously from the U.S., France, and Austria. (The name sounds better in Italian--Sorelle di Maria Stella di Mattina--as well as less reminiscent of the Herman Wouk novel.) 

Once it became clear that a couple jars of jam was all we were willing to purchase, the nuns bid us adieu and climbed into a little white van. The order has 250 members in small communities around the world, including a convent in another nearby town, Fontanellato, that these nuns call home and where I presume they were headed.

I am such a social being that I feel a momentary urge to join virtually any group I encounter, even when they don't wear the kind of outfit that struck me as the height of glamour when I was a prepubescent fan of The Nun's Story. (Audrey Hepburn can make anything look glamorous.) Doesn't the nun-mobile look like fun?

I was curious enough to look them up online later. They are a contemplative but not cloistered order that believes in manual labor and physical fitness, which latter strikes me as very 21st-century spiritual aspiration. They live on charity and what they earn by making jam, sandals, and the like, so perhaps their lunch depended on Mark's jam purchase.

They maintain silence except during one meal a week, but evidently that rule isn't in force when they're selling their wares to the public. Indeed, their eager friendliness--Barbara dubbed one who was particularly insistent "the marketing sister"-- took me back to the days when the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas were glad-handing every young person they met on the street.

That is unfair to these nuns, I'm sure. And becoming a Morning Star sister undoubtedly entails a lot more than spending a weekend being love-bombed and handing over your trust fund. Which is perhaps lucky for me.

Later I reflected that there was really nothing all that exotic or even interesting about this series of little incidents--the wedding, the crowd in the cathedral, the nuns and their jam. The same encounters in California probably wouldn't have me reaching for my camera and thinking about writing it all down. I am reading Michael Pollan's book about psychedelics and he talks about how these drugs make even mundane things--a flower, a rain shower, ambient New Age music--seem brand-new, awe-inspiring, magical. Being in Italy makes me feel a bit that way quite a bit of the time. I hope I can hold onto that for a while longer.