The most beautiful church in Italy is nor a duomo nor a cathedral. It’s not an abbey, nor a parsonage nor a rectory. It’s not a parish, nor a chapel, nor a chartreuse nor another monastery. It’s not located in a city, nor a town, nor a village. It doesn’t have a cloister, nor a nave, nor a pronaos, nor aisles, nor a choir. It doesn’t have an organ, or pews, or chairs, or a confessional or a pulpit. It’s not dedicated to saints or martyrs from the calendar. But it does have a name, frescoes, a door, and its own saints.
It can be reached coming out from the woods, one of the woods on the slopes of one of the hills of one of the segments of the pre-Apennines in the Latium region in central Italy. You leave the track that takes from a saddle to a clearing, so vague a path that one wonders if it’s been traced by man or wolf, when still there were some - although they’ve been reintroduced recently, a move hailed by conservationists, less so by shepherds.
You have to wander a bit through the woods, in search of that elusive cep, pretending to know perfectly well how to go back to the track, that now has become elusive too. Better to forget about it, and just go downwards, towards the dirt road with the trough, where the car is faithfully waiting, warming up at the sun of the autumnal afternoon. It’s worth walking carefully when coming out from the woods because, contrary to wolves, vipers are increasingly more frequent.
With no forewarning the woods end, and you are in the middle of a ploughed field. Nothing else in sight, certainly not the road, that must lie between a pair of those hills that extend to the left and to the right, as well as, alas, also behind. The field goes as far as the eye can see, in the air still tepid and exhausted of summer colours. Time is suspended, even the insects are awaiting something.
In the middle of the field there is a construction, a little cube with a tiled roof. Let’s have a look. Getting closer, the door becomes distinguishable, and above the door a triangular shape with a faded fresco. On top of the roof there is a small cross, therefore it’s a church. The door is ajar; perhaps for generations it’s not been in line with its frame, and whoever opens it can’t close it anymore.
Inside it’s strangely clean, a sign of respect from the animals, be they biped or quadruped. The walls are white, of that last nuance before that colour takes a different name, like grey or yellow or brown, or a mixture of the three. If he tried to lie down lengthwise, a tall man would bang his head. Across, he could sit and stretch his legs out.
There’s no altar, but a little shelf made of whitewashed bricks in the centre of the end wall. There’s nothing else in all the church. There’s nothing else to see, and the mildew stains on the walls can attract one’s attention only for a limited time.
Let’s go outside, to look at that incongruous external fresco, in the gable above the door. Two men’s heads, crude and simple, in which brush strokes combine with time strokes. The models for those ancient faces are still around, and you can see them sitting at the tavern every night. Their names have changed. It seems there is a whole section of paradise dedicated to the forgotten martyr saints, often an array of brothers whose names differ but for a single vowel, as if their mother had tired of looking for new ones at any new birth, or if the chronicles of Christian piety, in doubt about the spelling, had recorded all variations as many people, in this way multiplying the progeny of that already exhausted mother.
Nowadays the obsession for originality would make impossible this game of variations. The same happens with names traditionally passed down in alternate generations, from grandparents to grandchildren; only kings still do so, but with less conviction than in the past. Among common people, some old men from some places still carry names derived from a well-wishing Greek origin: Eugenio, Eusebio, Euprepio, Eustorgio, and so forth. The following generation relegates them to middle names, as a registrar’s makeweight for grandparents and great-uncles. The next generation forgets them for good, so that, for want of christenings, prayers or curses, more saints with obliterated names join that Paradise’s side wing, a bit out-of-the-way, where even eternity wears on more slowly. The saints that dwell there rarely leave their quarters, and receive ever rarer visits from angels and other saints, until they will be forgotten by them, and little by little they’ll start forgetting about themselves and doubting of having ever existed.
But on the gable of the small country chapel the two names are perfectly legible: Saints Abbondio and Abbondanzio, Plenty and Plentiful. Are they two variations on the same name, or two distinct people? Let’s try looking at their faces: are they two expressions of the same face, or two distinct faces? Hard to tell.
I remember a bivouac once, on the slopes of Gran Sasso, the highest mountain in central Italy, above the village called Civitella Messer Raimondo, size wise in between a fortified farm and an extended market village. I remember how, passing through it the following morning, I noticed that each and every one of the inhabitants we met, sported the same prominent big nose, a patent sign of the feudal importance of the ancient and prolific Messer Raimondo.
Our two saints have round and hale faces, aligned eyebrows in the Byzantine style. The nose is unclear – perhaps Messer Raimondo didn’t reach thus far – their haloes almost touch. The saints look at the pious visitor, don’t look at each other. And when the pious visitor leaves, and months go by, or years, or even generations, before another visit, what do the two saints do, I wonder: do they look on, as the suns rise and set, without telling each other good morning and good night? Or if they talk to each other they have to do it without ever being able to look at each other, for all the eternity of their colours.
And those names: Abbondio and Abbondanzio, in the middle of a ploughed field, are they the Christian version of a rural cult, as old as the clods in the field are? What was there before? Perhaps a small Roman altar, were a periodic sacrifice of a small animal could be performed, to implore the grant of a good crop. If it is so, even earlier than that must have been the devotional site to an Etruscan god, evicted and then forgotten. And before that? Some local devotion, whose deity perhaps wasn’t even distinguishable from what it was meant to preside on: a harvest-god or an abundance-goddess.
There it is, the small church, with its door just ajar, its mysterious story and its certain purpose, in the middle of the ploughed field, whose deep brown assumes a golden hue at the sunset’s slanted rays. We set off along the woods’ edge, carrying in our hearts the secret memory of the most beautiful Italian church.
Extract from Wilma Laryn's autobiography, Tales From the Wood's Edge.
It can be reached coming out from the woods, one of the woods on the slopes of one of the hills of one of the segments of the pre-Apennines in the Latium region in central Italy. You leave the track that takes from a saddle to a clearing, so vague a path that one wonders if it’s been traced by man or wolf, when still there were some - although they’ve been reintroduced recently, a move hailed by conservationists, less so by shepherds.
You have to wander a bit through the woods, in search of that elusive cep, pretending to know perfectly well how to go back to the track, that now has become elusive too. Better to forget about it, and just go downwards, towards the dirt road with the trough, where the car is faithfully waiting, warming up at the sun of the autumnal afternoon. It’s worth walking carefully when coming out from the woods because, contrary to wolves, vipers are increasingly more frequent.
With no forewarning the woods end, and you are in the middle of a ploughed field. Nothing else in sight, certainly not the road, that must lie between a pair of those hills that extend to the left and to the right, as well as, alas, also behind. The field goes as far as the eye can see, in the air still tepid and exhausted of summer colours. Time is suspended, even the insects are awaiting something.
In the middle of the field there is a construction, a little cube with a tiled roof. Let’s have a look. Getting closer, the door becomes distinguishable, and above the door a triangular shape with a faded fresco. On top of the roof there is a small cross, therefore it’s a church. The door is ajar; perhaps for generations it’s not been in line with its frame, and whoever opens it can’t close it anymore.
Inside it’s strangely clean, a sign of respect from the animals, be they biped or quadruped. The walls are white, of that last nuance before that colour takes a different name, like grey or yellow or brown, or a mixture of the three. If he tried to lie down lengthwise, a tall man would bang his head. Across, he could sit and stretch his legs out.
There’s no altar, but a little shelf made of whitewashed bricks in the centre of the end wall. There’s nothing else in all the church. There’s nothing else to see, and the mildew stains on the walls can attract one’s attention only for a limited time.
Let’s go outside, to look at that incongruous external fresco, in the gable above the door. Two men’s heads, crude and simple, in which brush strokes combine with time strokes. The models for those ancient faces are still around, and you can see them sitting at the tavern every night. Their names have changed. It seems there is a whole section of paradise dedicated to the forgotten martyr saints, often an array of brothers whose names differ but for a single vowel, as if their mother had tired of looking for new ones at any new birth, or if the chronicles of Christian piety, in doubt about the spelling, had recorded all variations as many people, in this way multiplying the progeny of that already exhausted mother.
Nowadays the obsession for originality would make impossible this game of variations. The same happens with names traditionally passed down in alternate generations, from grandparents to grandchildren; only kings still do so, but with less conviction than in the past. Among common people, some old men from some places still carry names derived from a well-wishing Greek origin: Eugenio, Eusebio, Euprepio, Eustorgio, and so forth. The following generation relegates them to middle names, as a registrar’s makeweight for grandparents and great-uncles. The next generation forgets them for good, so that, for want of christenings, prayers or curses, more saints with obliterated names join that Paradise’s side wing, a bit out-of-the-way, where even eternity wears on more slowly. The saints that dwell there rarely leave their quarters, and receive ever rarer visits from angels and other saints, until they will be forgotten by them, and little by little they’ll start forgetting about themselves and doubting of having ever existed.
But on the gable of the small country chapel the two names are perfectly legible: Saints Abbondio and Abbondanzio, Plenty and Plentiful. Are they two variations on the same name, or two distinct people? Let’s try looking at their faces: are they two expressions of the same face, or two distinct faces? Hard to tell.
I remember a bivouac once, on the slopes of Gran Sasso, the highest mountain in central Italy, above the village called Civitella Messer Raimondo, size wise in between a fortified farm and an extended market village. I remember how, passing through it the following morning, I noticed that each and every one of the inhabitants we met, sported the same prominent big nose, a patent sign of the feudal importance of the ancient and prolific Messer Raimondo.
Our two saints have round and hale faces, aligned eyebrows in the Byzantine style. The nose is unclear – perhaps Messer Raimondo didn’t reach thus far – their haloes almost touch. The saints look at the pious visitor, don’t look at each other. And when the pious visitor leaves, and months go by, or years, or even generations, before another visit, what do the two saints do, I wonder: do they look on, as the suns rise and set, without telling each other good morning and good night? Or if they talk to each other they have to do it without ever being able to look at each other, for all the eternity of their colours.
And those names: Abbondio and Abbondanzio, in the middle of a ploughed field, are they the Christian version of a rural cult, as old as the clods in the field are? What was there before? Perhaps a small Roman altar, were a periodic sacrifice of a small animal could be performed, to implore the grant of a good crop. If it is so, even earlier than that must have been the devotional site to an Etruscan god, evicted and then forgotten. And before that? Some local devotion, whose deity perhaps wasn’t even distinguishable from what it was meant to preside on: a harvest-god or an abundance-goddess.
There it is, the small church, with its door just ajar, its mysterious story and its certain purpose, in the middle of the ploughed field, whose deep brown assumes a golden hue at the sunset’s slanted rays. We set off along the woods’ edge, carrying in our hearts the secret memory of the most beautiful Italian church.
Extract from Wilma Laryn's autobiography, Tales From the Wood's Edge.