A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

  At dusk we’re out in the swift current of young Pavians taking their early passeggiata. I crave a smooth surface and can’t venture too far. You never think twice about walking on rounded stones until your feet are hamburger.

  Because we’re in Arborio rice country, Sophie insists that we dine on risotto tonight. Across the square of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, we sit outside at a family-run osteria featuring risotto ai funghi—the rice from the Po Valley, the mushrooms from a forest up north. The last light is lovely, slowly crawling up the Gothic brick façade of the church, brushing over the big rose window.

  We are just blocks from Augustine’s final resting place. How would the best mind of Christianity have viewed this evening? He said everything made by God is beautiful and good because God is beautiful and good. But then he drew up a long list of prohibitions regarding these beautiful and good things. He went into a fit of self-flagellation over being “much attracted to theatre,” his fondness for “food and drink” and “beauty of a lower order.” He loathed his restless early inquisitiveness—“this futile curiosity masquerading under the name science and learning.” He never reconciled pleasure with piety. And in seeing love of good things of this earth as bad, he retreated to a sanctimonious form of his old dualism.

  As the night comes on, the small square fills with people. They arrive on bikes, in wheelchairs, the youngest on the shoulders of parents, the oldest helped along by their grandchildren. It’s a buzzing crowd of all ages. We assume it must be a holiday event, reenactment of a miracle or rare military victory in a city battered by Charlemagne and Napoleon, the onetime capital of the Kingdom of the Lombards. But no—the church of Santa Maria del Carmine is celebrating something else, something simple. As we linger over dessert of poached pears, a spotlight is cast upon the flanks of the church. The gathering hushes to low murmurs, then silence. A woman walks up the steps of the church, takes a microphone.

  “Buona sera, Pavia!”

  The crowd roars. The woman soars. She is Antonella Ruggiero, as I discover from a poster, a star of some renown in Italy. She has the voice of an angel—neither fallen nor beatified, just a sweet, perfect tone. For the next hour, she sings, and people in the square are lost in the power of a human instrument put to its highest use.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I LEFT CANTERBURY in the spring, I wasn’t sure what I would find on the Via Francigena. No pilgrim ever is. There are moments and days that you can’t anticipate, and moments and days when there is clarity on some things. I know this now, as I did in Aosta—some bit of clarity. It follows me into the morning, when I wake with whatever is the opposite of a hangover. I hobble my way to the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, named for the interior ceiling of gold. After Augustine’s death in 430, his North African home of Hippo was besieged by Germanic Vandals. His remains were spirited off to Sardinia for safekeeping. When Muslim Saracens raided the island in the early eighth century, the bones were moved again, to Pavia.

  And so here they are, inside a golden urn encased in glass, in a marble ark of ninety-five statues and fifty bas-reliefs depicting highlights of his long life. It’s on a raised crypt, the dominant feature of a heavily frescoed and ornamented basilica. For almost thirteen hundred years, what was left of Augustine’s mortal life has been a holy destination for popes, kings, and sojourners of the spirit. It’s a good thing that this stack of brittle bones, little more than ossobuco without the marrow, is not what we remember of the great Doctor of the Faith. He asked the right questions. But some of his answers do not fit in a world that is so much more than sorrow and penance, more than denial, more than predestined awfulness or salvation, a world capable of producing joy and wonder in its everyday details. And those joys and wonders are not forbidden fruits—otherwise why would they be so abundant? To reject the “pleasure, beauty, and truth” that can be found in creation, as Augustine said he had to do in order to understand the divine, is not an argument for God. It’s an argument against God.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS IN A SMALL CAR

  We walk the few blocks from the old power corridor of Pavia, where the Holy Roman Emperor was crowned by the pope a thousand years ago, past storefronts selling cheap cigarettes and three-packs of underpants. The distance from the city’s high mark, when all of Western Christianity looked to its cathedral, to the grittiness of workaday modern life is short. For me, hope crashes in just a few steps. I will not be moving on my own this morning and perhaps for many days to come. I apologize to Sophie and curse my fate and right foot. We have another mountain range still to cross, castle grounds to explore, saints to meet. Reluctantly, I decide to rent a car. After nearly a half day of hassles with an Avis outlet determined not to do any business, I get a Cinquecento—the classic, boxy, durable Fiat. Mule of cars.

  We make it to Piacenza, less than forty miles away, in a blur. My, my, my, the Via Francigena passes by so quickly in a compact macchina. There is not enough time for anything to make an impression, to be startled by what comes around the bend, to experience the deep relief of finding another red-and-white V.F. road post or an informative fellow traveler, to feel the weather on your face. It’s all turn here, stop there, and don’t slow down in the roundabout, you effing idiot. And getting into a garage parking space the size of a birdcage is no small challenge. Nothing very pilgrim about any of it. You’re not on a journey. You’re not special. Nobody is going to wave to you, unless it’s with a middle finger, or offer you a cold drink, or invite you in for focaccia, or tell you about their own experience with God, or call out Bravo, pellegrino! If you get lost, good luck. That’s what Siri is for. If your car breaks down, hah! It’s a Cinquecento, what did you expect. I don’t mind the insane drivers. The rule is to get within six inches of the car ahead of you—that’s six inches, even if you’re moving at eighty miles an hour. I exaggerate. Ten inches. You menace that car until it gives up and lets you pass, even on a blind curve. There’s a speed limit, sure, a posted one. The real limit is infinity.

  I like one thing: the Autogrills along the highway. These may seem like interchangeable big-brand pit stops within the closed universe of Italian toll roads. In truth, each one is an oasis of steaming cappuccini and fresh-baked cornetti. You can get a big chunk of perfectly aged Parmigiano Reggiano from one bin, a wine sold nowhere else in the world from another. You line up at the bar, inhale your caffeine, and newly fortified, get back on the autostrada. The only disconcerting thing is the sight of bleary-eyed truck drivers downing their caffè corretto—the espresso corrected with a liberal shot of high-alcohol grappa.

  We have a couple of errands in Piacenza, a city of 100,000 along the plain of the heaving Po. The ground is flat and the air is heavy. We’re in Emilia-Romagna now, in a community that was once among the richest in the world. The great families built palaces and villas under the mostly tolerant thumb of a half-dozen conquerors, the same armies that marched through Pavia. To live under so many rulers from so many different sovereigns breeds a person who shrugs at nationalism, a person for whom the changing of one flag for another is little different from the change of seasons. The consistency, the thread that ties these northern Italian towns together, is the Via Francigena. It brought a lifeline of pilgrims, beginning not long after Sigeric wrote up his journey. At one point, Piacenza had more than thirty hostels for leg-sore seekers of the spirit.

  Before we can sample Piacenza’s centro storico, we need something from the industrial outer ring. I will not walk without a change in shoes. I’m looking for footwear that is open-air and nonrestrictive, allowing my blisters to heal. Good sandals would do. We find nothing at the supermercato, nothing at the normally reliable Coop. But a low-slung gathering of sad-looking stores is promising. At a chain outlet, I ask for “sandali, per favore,” like Jesus wore, preferably cheap. I’m out of luck. It’s September, and the shoe selection has changed for the upcoming colder months.
There is not a single pair of sandals in this entire mall, maybe in all of Piacenza. In another part of the store, Sophie finds a contender among the pajamas and bathrobes. A clerk eyes me trying on a pair of something with leather crossing over the top, open-toed. She rushes over to scold me, frowning, wagging her finger as if I’m a shoplifter caught in the act. In rapid-fire Italian, too fast for me to get most of it, the saleswoman tells me I do not want to make that purchase. Sophie translates.

  “Those shoes are for old men.”

  “Old men . . .”

  “You should not buy them.”

  “My toes are butchered. I need something like this. I don’t care about fashion.”

  “You should care. What kind of man are you?”

  “Well—”

  “Don’t you have any pride in yourself?”

  “I’m in a triage situation.”

  “You are—let me guess, American?”

  “Yes. You could tell?”

  “No Italian man would ever be seen in . . . those.”

  “Are they infectious? Faulty?”

  “You put them on when you step outside the shower. They are bathroom slippers. Never wear them anywhere but your bathroom. God would strike me dead if I let a man do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it would make you look like a homeless man wandering around in his bathrobe, a crazy person talking to himself. Un uomo pazzo! The Carabinieri would be suspicious.”

  Maybe this attitude is a holdover from Mussolini’s Fascists, who urged Italian men not to wear slippers because it would “feminize” them. I tell the clerk to wrap the shower shoes in a paper bag, and then I’ll meet her at the counter after they’re hidden, so no one can associate my purchase with her. Italians take great pride in making a bella figura; even being an accomplice to a violation of pride of appearance is a misdemeanor. In the car, I slide into new footwear. My toes can breathe.

  We have to see Eataly in Italy, the market that sells the idealized projection of their cuisine and culture in the place from which it came. Nearby, we stop at the Italian idea of our food, something called the Old Wild West Steak House. It has chuck wagons out front, and life-shortening pallets of beef, fries, and big-gulp sodas inside. It’s not a fair representation, of course. Even small American towns have Thai, Mexican, Chinese, or Indian food, and a decent diner with someone who will call you honey while pouring a bottomless coffee. You can walk a block in a big city and pass two dozen savory enticements from our immigrant citizenry, the food that makes America great. But what gets exported is cowboy swill from a dead era.

  Piacenza’s Eataly is two levels of homage to fruit, cheese, wine, bread, and pasta so beautifully presented you would think they are World Cup trophies. It’s a big change from all the skeletal relics we’ve been looking at in church crypts. Eataly was started in 2007 by Oscar Farinetti, who opened the first of thirty-five stores in an old vermouth factory in Turin. He came out of northern Italy’s Slow Food movement—dedicated to food that is “good, clean and fair,” served in a way that it was meant to be eaten. His idea combined a school, a store, a gathering place, and a brand, all in one place. It would be the village on market day, capsulized and remade. The latest extension is a theme park in Bologna—a fortress of food, more than twenty acres, with stalls that stretch for half a mile, calling itself the world’s largest “agri-food park.”

  I know this because my daughter is on somewhat of a food pilgrimage, in contrast to my search for the eternal verities of the Via Francigena. For every church I drag her into, she forces me to sample an unusual pasta from Parma or a fresh pesto from Portofino. She works at the Culinary Institute of America, trying to get companies and institutions to change the way they offer food, for the better. We have our concerns about Eataly. Sophie hates to see what is a typical market street in a typical town—a block with a macelleria, an enoteca, a frutta e verdure, and a pasticceria—commodified for mass duplication. But as we debate the merits of Eataly in Italy, I notice people are staring at me. Two little kids point and snicker. It’s the shower shoes!

  * * *

  —

  TIME TO CHECK IN with the pope. It’s been a month of Sundays since I heard anything from the Vatican. The pontiff’s handlers haven’t closed out the chance of my asking the Holy Father a couple of questions, not just yet. He continues to embrace random pilgrims, taking the scarf of a walker to wear as his own, welcoming others in for a chat. “Pilgrimage is a symbol of life,” he said early on in his papacy. “It makes us think of life as walking, as a path. If a person does not walk, but instead stays still, this is not useful.” Francis has been making headlines. He pleaded with leaders of Europe not to turn away the migrants washing up on the Continent’s shores, a message that is unpopular at this moment. He brought children from those desperation journeys into the gold-accented center of global Catholic power, had them face the cameras, and dared us to look into the eyes of the innocents, to consider what Christ would do. Our hearts are not hard, he insists.

  The number of sex crimes by the clergy seems epidemic. The pope says all the right things; he’s learned to speak the language of this trauma. “It is a sin that shames us,” he wrote in a letter to bishops. “The sin of what happened, the sin of failing to help, the sin of covering up and denial, the sin of abuse of power.” Clerical abuse, the pope said in a preface to a new book, is “an absolute monstrosity,” leaving behind many victims. Some of those victims, he notes, took their own lives.

  Francis praised a Swiss man, Daniel Pittet, who endured four years of rape and torment when he was a boy. “Forgiveness does not heal the wounds or wipe away the misery” of the monster who hurt him, Pittet wrote, but has “allowed me to burst the chains that bound me to him and prevented me from living.” Francis is begging for forgiveness, a way to unbind many others of their chains. He will host a global summit on clergy abuse. Those who lost their childhoods, who fell into depression, rage, suicidal thoughts—the living victims—are invited. But beyond an airing of pain and a promise of new vigilance, something as shattering as the Reformation may be required for real change to happen. Francis himself may not survive as pope. Just how deep is the well of mercy for a church that keeps finding criminals among its men of God?

  I also catch up with Carlo, through his blog. He’s far into the Italian leg of a journey that began when he left his home in London about a week ahead of me. But he’s starting to falter. He fell and hurt his hip in the Val d’Aosta. He’s lost twenty-five pounds. He feels sick, weakened by the long walk. His feet are killing him. He’s been vomiting. “I’m not well,” he writes one day. “I hope to finish and not be hospitalized,” he notes on another. And yet, though his body is complaining, though he has his doubts about finishing—as do I—the pilgrimage is bringing him closer to accomplishing some of the things he set out to do. He’s been thinking about his late parents, what they meant to him, his place in the world they brought him into. And the other goal, to try to comprehend “the nature of God, or gods.” He hasn’t resolved this, but he has a better understanding than he did when he set out from England.

  * * *

  —

  I’M READY TO LEAVE the haze and humidity of the Po Valley. Ahead, almost sixty miles out, is a different climate and a different world—the long backbone of the Apennines. Sophie doesn’t drive a stick shift. I’m the solo pilot. But I want to look around, taking slower roads up to the mountain pass. The solution is the robo-voice on our phone GPS. She’s someone who never took a single lesson in Italian. Her pronunciation is criminal. Cinque—properly pronounced cheen-kway—comes out of her auto-voice as “sin-cue.” Via Benedetto Antelami is rendered as a street named for Ant-hill-of-my. It takes barely half an hour to get to Fidenza, but once we pass through the Roman portals of this lost-in-time town, we are lost on roads barely wider than a pushcart.

  Sophie tells me to calm down, take a breath, a
nd we’ll try to translate the robot’s atrocious accent. Our goal is the duomo of San Donnino, a prime pilgrim stop for centuries. I catch glimpses of its Romanesque towers, but that’s followed by more inadvertent turns down wrong roads, and we lose sight of it. San Donnino was another headless martyr. A convert to Christianity in the late third century, he was decapitated by the Romans along the right bank of the river near this town. The saint picked up his head and crossed over the water to the other bank. Charlemagne, while passing through, found the remains when his horse died on the spot, miracle on miracle. Now it’s the site of the cathedral that Google Maps is incapable of leading us to.

  At one point, following the bot’s directions, we end up in a medieval dead end—the thick, blank side of an ancient and unmovable edifice in front of us, towering stone walls on either side. We’re stuck. All I can do is slowly back up, and hope I don’t run over somebody’s cat. I have only a few inches or so on either side of the car, even after pulling in the mirrors. Approaching the turnout, I’m sweating the slow retreat over the cobblestones. Then—arrgghhhh, the wail of metal on stone, the side of my Cinquecento scraping against a much more durable object. I lean out to check. Shit! The crunch has left an ugly scar on the car from the front fender to the rear.

  Fidenza is almost worth the anguish. After we find the church and park the battered Fiat, I go inside to talk with a parish volunteer, who stamps my credenziali. He explains the art on the façade. The life story of the martyred saint is told in carved detail, ending with a pair of angels carrying Donnino’s severed head off to heaven. On another wall is a crowd of characters in bas-relief. They’re Via Francigena pilgrims, walking single file, circa eleventh century. The medieval travelers are dressed in tunics, their feet in simple sandals, hauling their loads on their backs—a bindle on a stick. A dog is atop a horse, and at the head of the procession is a man with a sword, the protector.