by Timothy Egan
“Timo—vieni qui!”
It’s Monica, urging us to come forward. She summons the owner. We are her friends, she explains; it would be an insult for the restaurateur not to find a place for us. Bring chairs. As we walk inside, I hear guffawing from another part of the room, the Laughing Germans. They wave. At Monica’s table of ten people, we also find the Sardinian couple, beaming. Everyone is here. We meet the Englishman Carlo Laurenzi, who—it turns out—has a son now living near Seattle. Of course I recognize the name.
“Carlo from London?”
“Yes.”
“Carlo who was given horse piss to drink in France?”
“You remembered.”
“Carlo who almost didn’t make it?”
“I may not still. I’ve lost almost two stone.”
That’s about twenty-eight pounds. He looks sinewy. His bald head is bronzed. He introduces us to a man he’s been traveling with of late, a stringy-lean Russian with wild, bone-colored hair and a patchy beard, who speaks very little English. The man was a nuclear physicist and knows many secrets from the Soviet era. He’s walking the V.F. to atone for some connection to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, which killed hundreds of people through radiation exposure.
We share many courses, many stories, many discoveries, many explanations, many glasses of wine. The Italians are as appalled by the litter along the trail as we are. It’s because of the Mafia, Sergio, the Sardinian man, explains—they control the trash business. And also, blame it on pride, on trying to maintain a bella figura. How so? Nobody wants to be associated with a urine-stained mattress outside your home awaiting garbage pickup. Better to throw it in a ravine at night.
Carlo says he lost all that weight despite eating more than 3,000 calories a day. It’s because he pushed the pace, trying to do twenty-five kilometers every leg. I ask him if he’s independently wealthy. He laughs.
“I’m independently poor,” he says. He sold his flat in London and cashed out part of his pension to make this pilgrimage. What he will do after seeing the pope, he does not know. He has no plans. But he’s no longer an atheist.
“I gave up on the concept of God at the age of fourteen or fifteen. I brought up two boys as atheists. For most of my life, I’ve worn my atheism like a safety blanket.”
“So now you believe?”
“I’m still skeptical about the gods of the main religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, but I believe.” His two goals of the trek to Rome—to reflect on his late parents, and to consider the nature of God—have been met. But nothing is finished. “My sense today is that something sentient exists, separate from us, but I can’t tell you what.” I wondered if he prayed along the way.
“What is prayer?”
“I’ve asked myself the same question.”
“Maybe it’s just the process of quieting a busy brain. That’s what’s so great about the Via Francigena. I love the opportunity to think.”
He mentions the baffling things that happened to him when he was younger, the accidents that should have killed him, the driving source of his spiritual curiosity.
“It could be a statistical anomaly. I don’t know. Why didn’t I die?”
We linger; nobody wants to leave. More wine is passed. More stories told. After tomorrow, we’ll be part of the masses mobbing St. Peter’s Square, no longer pilgrims. The plotting of a day’s route, the anxious scanning of the sky, the concerns about water and food, shouldering a pack—all will be replaced by the ordinary.
I tell Carlo about Saint Lucia the incorruptible, looking for a second opinion from a seasoned skeptic. He didn’t go to the crypt in Montefiascone. Can’t help me. But his companion, the Russian nuclear scientist, saw something similar to my experience. The eyes, he told Carlo. Great. So my corroborating witness will have to be a man who knows too much and can’t say anything.
* * *
—
IN THE MORNING, my legs refuse to move; they’re unresponsive. I cannot get out of bed. It’s a strange and horrifying paralysis, without cause, with Rome so close. I start to sweat, overcome by a wave of panic. After all these months, I’m not going to make it. But . . . it’s only a dream, a classic anxiety projection. I open my eyes in murky light and pull back the blinds.
We’re hoofing it down the traffic-clogged Via Cassia part of the trail, past old suburbs that merge with even older ones, dodging cars, scooters, and the exhaust flatulence of gasping buses. It’s an urban route now, the spill of Rome all around. Blank walls and signs are graffiti-covered, trash cans are stuffed to overflowing. Joni has settled into a good rhythm; she’s found her pace. She’s wearing a dress, very practical, which also means she’ll be making a bella figura upon our entrance into the city. We keep our eyes straight ahead, on the prize, moving with urgency. The forecast is not good: a nasty thunderstorm is supposed to roll through sometime in the afternoon. The route takes us to Monte Mario park, a big rock promontory in the city’s outer limits, remarkably litter-free. We stroll by autumn-painted trees, track upward to a clearing 456 feet above the city, the highest natural perch over Rome. And there it is: the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. Michelangelo’s design, which he conceived in old age and oversaw until his death at eighty-eight, rises from a thicket of apartments and red-roofed buildings, umbrella pines and the hidden bend of the Tiber. To his final day, Michelangelo tried to live up to his life motto: the greatest danger, he said, “is not that we aim too high and miss it, but that we aim too low and reach it.” The sky darkens and broods; birds screech by. The first thunderclap rattles overhead. We’ll need to take cover very soon. But for now, in a Roman moment for today and many tomorrows, we aren’t going anywhere.
“Stop,” I say. “Take it in.” Kairos time.
THIRTY-THREE
PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
Dutifully, I tried to visit the tombs of Peter and Paul; a pair of thorns that crowned the head of Christ; the wood fragments from the cross to which he was hammered. All of them are here, their authenticity backed by varying degrees of certitude, at the final stops in Rome that a pilgrim is supposed to visit. You cross the finish line when you link your tenuous existence to that perpetual past. We started in Saint John Lateran, the first major church of Catholicism, built on the site of a fourth-century foundation from a time when the scattering of Christians worshipped in meeting houses. For more than a thousand years, the Lateran was home to every pope. Inside, it’s all hard edges and glittering surfaces, mosaics, and frescoes, with too much empty space between ceiling and floor. The skulls of Peter and Paul, the two Christian founders, one crucified upside down, the other beheaded, are in a raised reliquary over the main altar. So say the guidebooks, relying on tradition.
The palace that housed the successors to Saint Peter was also where the Lateran Treaty was signed in 1929. It was a shameful pact from a shameful period. The thug, the narcissist, the father of Fascism, Benito Mussolini, traded signatures with Pope Pius XI here, sealing an authoritarian state to the ancient faith of this land. Had not the results of melding crown with cross, of armies marching off to war behind God Is on Our Side banners—all the serviceable lessons from eras gone—meant anything? The twentieth century would usher in the greatest wave of horror ever seen. And the signing of the Lateran Treaty signaled that the leaders of the largest religion in the world, nearly one-in-three people on the planet in 1930, would be largely passive as dictators prepared to slaughter millions.
What Pius XI got in return was sovereignty, a 109-acre compound—his kingdom for a piece of paper. Mussolini reigned by terror and theater of the dark arts. In his formative years, he hated Christianity, asserting that “God does not exist” in one missive. He was known as a mangiaprete—priest-eater—and his gangster followers beat up clerics with a political conscience. But his murderous cult of personality would be fragile without the church. “In youth, give your flesh to the devil,” he said. “In o
ld age give your bones to the Lord.” In return for autonomy, Catholic authority would look the other way while Mussolini built a police state and allied himself with Hitler. Il Duce was hailed by the pope as “a man sent by Providence.” When Mussolini gassed thousands of people in Ethiopia, the church did not protest. He never made it to the stage of holy benevolence. While trying to flee Italy in 1945, he and his mistress were shot by partisans at Lake Como. Their bodies were spat and urinated upon, then strung upside down from a rusty beam next to a petrol station in Milan. Providence didn’t save him.
Out front, facing this colossus of church-state ostentation, just beyond the monstrosities in marbles, the gold-barreled ceilings, the bronze door from the old Roman Senate, the tombs of many popes, is a large statue of Saint Francis of Assisi. He’s holding his arms out, as if in disgust, as if to say, “Basta!”
A better moment, not so clouded with corruption and compromise, would be found at Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. So we hoped. Here are two pieces from the Crown of Thorns, a sliver of the cross from the good thief who died alongside Jesus, a finger from Thomas the doubting apostle. The main attraction is the Titulus Crucis, the sign that hung over the slain Christ’s head. The world-class relics came from Helena, mother of Constantine, as part of the haul she brought back from the Holy Land in 326. Christians were heartened when a panel of experts assembled in 1997 to gauge the authenticity of the board of walnut wood said it was indeed possible that Titulus came from the time of Christ. But later radiocarbon dating, peer-reviewed by experts, placed it sometime between 980 and 1146. Most likely, it’s a medieval forgery.
On another day we went to visit the tomb of Saint Paul. Though his skull is in the Lateran, the rest of his remains are below an altar in the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. It was built over the site where Paul was executed during the reign of Nero, not long after Rome burned. The ruler blamed the great fire on Christians, but he likely started it himself. Emperor at sixteen, Nero murdered his mother and at least one of his many wives, then killed himself as the Empire turned on him. He never played the fiddle, not while Rome burned or at any other time; it didn’t exist until ten centuries after his death. I got very close to what is left of Paul, author of nearly half the books of the New Testament, written on perishable papyrus. This vast basilica, one of the ten largest churches in the world, was oddly empty on a weekday but for a guard manning a metal detector. When Joni stepped outside, I lingered; for a good ten minutes, it was just Paul and myself. I tried to refrain from engaging the crypt in argument over the subjects I’d tossed around on the Via Francigena. As these things go, I found Lucy’s company in Montefiascone more stimulating.
At least no church in Rome claims the Holy Prepuce, the foreskin snipped from the penis of the baby Jesus. It was well traveled, from an old Hebrew woman who put it in an alabaster box after the circumcision, to the treasury chest of Charlemagne, who gifted it to Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800, to sanctuaries all over medieval Europe, to its last known home in the closet of a parish priest in Calcata, thirty miles north of Rome. The priest reported it stolen in 1983. Relic hunters say the trail has gone cold since.
None of it matters, not to me. The sacred scraps prove nothing, for the proof of a faith is not found in bits of bone or chips of wood or flakes of skin. The body parts are evidence of only one thing: the certainty of death. The Catholic Church tries too hard. Christ said many good things. Those many good things have held up far longer than any physical object, and will outlive any treaty with a tyrant made in his name. He was nailed to a cross by Romans—that is not disputed. He rose from the dead—that is. I believe in the Resurrection, and I owe this sentiment to the Via Francigena. I’d been moving in this direction for a month or so, even as I grew more disgusted with the powerful custodian of this life-affirming event. The evidence from the first century, the many people who swore they had seen the risen Christ and chose death rather than recanting, is a compelling argument—for who would die for a fraud? But what cinched it for me was something the young Lutheran minister in Geneva, Andy Willis, said about the message of Easter from Jesus, something that echoes Jewish sentiment on what happens after death: “Nothing can keep my love in a grave.”
It was with this realization—and after that third day in Rome—that I knew I’d had enough. I was done with relics, done with the remnants of the sacred dead, done with calling out to place and time. And though I still would need to get my Testimonium certified at the Vatican, though I awaited final word on an audience with the pope, I was done being a pilgrim. You lose something—a great deal, actually—when you give up your peregrination. For months, every step taken was in the direction of Rome, the complexity of life simplified to a journey, one of the oldest of human callings. Each dawn promised something new or startling in a wondrous part of the Old World. Each day brought some twist from nature, some quizzical artifact from the past, a small personal challenge. Each dusk allowed time for rumination about the verities of a trail compressed by the patter of 150 generations, my footsteps now added to theirs. I wasn’t ready to be just another tourist waiting in line to see a Caravaggio. But I had to bring things to a close. Millions who came before me believed they’d been given absolution for their sins, and went home with a clean soul. They got their passage to eternity. My return ticket is not such an easy one-way. I’ve resolved some things, but other matters will have to remain irresolvable. At the least, I know this: What I discovered was not served in a stiff shot. A stiff shot doesn’t last.
* * *
—
NO LONGER OBLIGATED to follow someone else’s path, we have a few days to let the Eternal City reveal itself. We stand now before the hooded figure of Giordano Bruno in the Campo de’ Fiori. The statue of Bruno dominates this piazza, his face barely visible behind a cowl. He’s manacled and holding a book—about to go to his death. A former Dominican priest, this philosopher, writer, teacher, poet, and polymath was burned naked on this spot in 1600, a papal jubilee year, executed under orders of Pope Clement VIII and the Inquisition. Like Servetus, he was killed for thinking on his own, his arguments backed by new theories that would become old science known by every third-grader in the years to come. Specifically, his capital crime was espousing a belief that the earth was not the center of the universe. Bruno was no cosmologist, and certainly no atheist. He picked up his planetary notions from Copernicus, the Polish astronomer. Bruno believed that life was made up of an infinitesimal number of tiny particles, and God was present in all of them. The statue was unveiled in 1889 by some of the leading thinkers of Europe. At the base are these words: To Bruno, from the generation that he foresaw.
We find a seat in the late-lingering sunlight. At this hour, the square belongs to the languorous. Bruno is staring at the Vatican, barely a mile away. This may sound like a heretical thought while in the aura of this convicted heretic, but today “the generation that he foresaw” would have to include the pope just across the river, the man who tells Christians that they must “never fear the truth.” My literary trail-mate Christopher Hitchens said faith cannot stand up to reason. “We no longer have any need of a god to explain what is no longer mysterious,” he wrote. Yet each mystery explained, Pope Francis would say, builds the case for God, which is a reason he welcomed Stephen Hawking into the Vatican. He encourages us to consider what it means that our galaxy is but a speck, one of more than 200 billion in the universe, and that we are part of a whole made up of particles. Francis celebrates what Bruno was killed for.
But Francis will soon be gone, and the church that he tried to make more humane and reasonable and just in the name of a Nazarene pauper is sure to be dragged down, yet again, by the weight of its history. The durability of those dark centuries past is not reassuring—not to me—even if the durability of the pauper’s words is.
Nine years after Bruno’s execution, Galileo invented the telescope, a portal to scientific truths that reduced the biblical interpretation of
creation to a fable. For these discoveries, he was condemned, forced to recant, and spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest. He barely escaped being tied to a pyre. And 350 years after Galileo’s persecution, following thirteen years of study by Vatican theologians, Pope John Paul II in 1992 issued a formal acknowledgment of the church’s error. Galileo was right, he said. The church was wrong. Science is not the enemy. Today, astronomy students train at the Vatican Observatory—two words that could not be joined without threat of undermining what prior popes preached for eighteen centuries. Bruno still awaits his vindication. The closest he got was in 2000, again from John Paul II, who made a general apology and begged for a pardon for “the sins of yesterday’s Christians” and “for the violence that some have used in the service of the truth.” Does that settle it?
For seven years, Bruno was a prisoner in Castel Sant’Angelo, in the dungeon of that cylindrical fortress on the banks of the Tiber. Prompted by the life and death of the heretic, we cross the pedestrian bridge to the place of his incarceration. It’s the most indestructible rock pile in Rome and once its tallest structure, built as a mausoleum for Emperor Hadrian, who died in AD 138. Deep inside, we walk up the spiral ramp. The lower level of the castle, where Bruno was held, is dark and dank; you can almost feel the mildew creeping in from the malarial, garbage-choked Tiber of four hundred years ago. On another floor is the Passetto di Borgo, the half-mile-long fortified escape route between the Vatican and this fort. At one terrace is a catapult that looks to be in working order, and cannons next to iron balls stacked in pyramids. Up higher are light-filled and well-tended papal apartments—used as a refuge when the Vatican was under siege—with portraits on the wall. Through the window are some of the best views of St. Peter’s Basilica. It’s so close, but I’m not ready for the pope, not just yet. I study the painting of a man with a labyrinth sewn into his vest—a final maze at Via Francigena’s end. The subject looks becalmed, fingering the puzzle on his chest. On his hat is a motto inspired by Petrarch: “Hope guides me.”