It was Wednesday, and the day we would say goodbye to the great long hallway of Domus Sessoriana and Rome. After breakfast, Mom and Bronwyn headed upstairs to our room, while I checked out of the room and headed to Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.
I walked through the great foyer and opened the door to the church. The church was empty, and it was still early enough in the morning where the light of day had not filled the great space. I walked to the left of the sanctuary to the chapel where the Holy Relics and the tomb of Antonietta Meo were. In front of the entrance stood a man in jeans and a blue plaid shirt. He looked to be in his 30s, and he was standing as if at attention.
Maybe the chapel is closed, and he is making sure no one enters?
I walked up to him, smiled, and said hello.
He kept staring forward. I thought I saw his hands tense. He didn’t look at me, which I found unsettling. My running coach told me in the past, if I was ever out for a run and ran by someone who would not make eye contact with me to be very wary of that person. A self-defense instructor once told her that a person who intends to attack someone will not make eye contact with that person because it will make it more difficult to identify him in a line-up.
That is what was going through my mind as I walked past him to the small room, which held Antonietta’s tomb. I really thought there would be someone else in that section of the church, but there was no one.
I took a deep breath.
I was trying to come up with a miracle to help Antonietta attain sainthood. She only needed one more. Yes, it was self-serving of me. At that moment, the logical thing to pray for would have been, please God don’t let that man come in here and kill me. I didn’t want to throw my miracle request away, though, so I asked her to heal my younger daughter’s airway. My younger daughter, Arden, was born with one lung and birth anomalies that left part of her bronchi limp. Arden suffered a great deal the first year of her life, and although now she is nearly 13 and excelling, she still wheezes often, coughs a lot, and gets winded faster than others her age. Although she has physical limitations, her mind doesn’t allow her body’s limitations to slow her down.
I prayed at Antonietta’s tomb, and then I left her room and walked down to the Holy Relics. I thought there would at least be someone in that room, but no. There was absolutely no one around. It was just me and the angst-ridden man standing at the entrance of the wing.
This time, I got down on my knees and paid respect to the Holy Relics as I had seen others do. Since it was only me, there was no worry of looking foolish. I took some deep breaths and reflected on how amazing the experience was to be alone with the relics.
I walked out of the chapel and wondered if the odd man would still be there. I wondered, if he’s not there, will that make me calmer or more nervous because he might be right behind me?
He was still standing in the same place.
Muscles clenched in his face.
Eyes forward.
I walked past him to the other side of the church.
Maybe he had a pressing miracle request for Antonietta and was working up his courage to ask her?
I walked into Helena’s Chapel. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
I wanted to stay there for hours, but suddenly two Russian-speaking women came in, and they started taking pictures. The flash from their cameras nearly blinded me. Their loud talk bounced through the room.
I left, and as I was leaving, I noticed the tense man was gone. Maybe he asked for his miracle from Antonietta. He should have it really. I paused before I left the church and prayed at Antonietta shrine asking that my prayer go to the tense man I had seen earlier.
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Bronwyn, Mom, and I got on the train without incident. I would miss Domus Sessoriana, but I wouldn’t miss Rome. The train ride was less than two hours and brought us to a very small and quaint train station in a very small town at the foot of a giant mound of extremely old volcanic rock on top of which Orvieto sat. We left the train station in search of the funicular.
I didn’t even truly know what a funicular was, but I knew it was going to take us up the side of the cliff.
We bought tickets and entered the funicular.
In my mind, I kept hearing the song from The Muppet Show, “Mahna Mahna,” but in my head I replaced the Mahna Mahna to funicular.
While we waited for the funicular (doo, doo, da, do, do), a man and his wife and grown daughter got on, and after seeing Bronwyn’s UNC Chapel Hill T-shirt, he started talking to us. He had a Duke University shirt on. He was a religion professor from Duke on vacation. He challenged Bronwyn to read Look Homeward Angel while his daughter rolled her eyes at his suggestion. He felt that everyone who goes to Chapel Hill should read Look Homeward Angel.
The funicular (doo, doo, da, do do) was a short ride, and when we got off we seemed to have been transported into a calm and less densely populated world.
We rolled our luggage up a steep hill to our hotel, Hotel Corso, and checked in at the front desk.
The hotel was small and clean, with pretty marble flooring in the hallway. The room was light and airy, complete with a window opening to the street with window sheers blowing in the breeze. On our beds were candies, robes, and slippers were on the floor.
Outside the room was a deck with several tables and chairs and lovely plants.
I looked down the street and felt like I had fallen into a Shakespearean play backdrop.
We headed up the hill from our hotel in search of lunch, found a café a few blocks away, and sat outside admiring the tranquility of Orvieto.
The pace was much slower than Rome, the air was much cleaner, and there was no graffiti. The streets were cobblestone, yet my mother seemed to walk effortlessly relying less and less on her cane.
We slowly found our way to the town’s Duomo, which dwarfed the square it sat in. Basically, the giant Duomo was built in the 13th century to house a piece of cloth. After reading information on the Duomo, I learned that a doubting priest took communion in nearby Bolsena. His faith in transubstantiation became solidified when blood appeared on the cloth used in the communion service. That was in 1263, and at that time, Pope Urban IV was living in Orvieto. He asked to see the miracle cloth, and when the cloth was brought to him, it was decided that the cloth would live in Orvieto. Well, such an important cloth couldn’t live in the church that was there at the time. No, a grande Duomo needed to be built to house the cloth, which had become known as The Miracle of Bolsena.
I also learned a good “rule of thumb.” If I had anything “special” or “significant” that I thought I might want to keep, I was not going to show it to the pope.
Work began on the Duomo in 1290 and continued until 1970 when the bronzed doors were placed on the building. We walked through the sanctuary and headed to the right side of the church to the Chapel of San Brizio.
While Mom sat on a pew, Bronwyn and I entered the chapel and ran into the man and his family from the funicular (doo, doo, da, do, do). He was spellbound by the art in the chapel. He told us about the Last Judgment painted on the walls of the chapel by Luca Signorelli, a great Renaissance painter. There were only about eight people including us in the room, and I agreed with the Duke professor, it was an intimate experience. It was an intense work of art, filled with agony and redemption.
After spending a good twenty minutes with agony and redemption at the center of our emotional and visual attention, we walked out of the chapel. I told my mom she should walk up the few steps to see the work, but I lost her at agony and redemption.
We walked to the other side of the Duomo to the Chapel of the Corporal to see the bloody cloth. The cloth, or The Miracle of Bolsena, was encased in glass in a beautiful shrine. For a picture of it, click here.
The cloth looked like a very old cloth with stains on it. That was it, really. I wanted to be moved by it, but for some reason, I wasn’t. It was tremendous to think that cloth built the entire Duomo.
Bronwyn and my mom had similar reactions to The Miracle of Bolsena.
We left the Duomo, walked across the street to the visitors’ office, and bought tickets for a tour of the Etruscan caves. Orvieto was once an Etruscan town. The Etruscans built a vast system of caves under the town, which have been used over the last two thousand years for everything from escape tunnels, to pigeon houses.
The tour of the tunnels was a little too watered down for my taste. I wanted to wander around the tunnels until I felt the town heavy on my shoulders. We ended up walking through two short tunnels. Mom went with us on one of the tunnels, and we saw where the town used to press olives for oil utilizing the constant cool temperature of the caves.
The second cave required a little more climbing and tight spaces. Yes! So, Mom sat on a bench overlooking the valley while Bronwyn and I went on with the group. In that cave, we saw many small rectangular boxes carved into the rock for pigeons. We also saw one of the sections of the cave was blocked with rocks. Our guide told us that during World War II, German soldiers occupied Orvieto. The German soldiers used the tunnels, and after the war, the citizens of Orvieto blocked off that section of the cave to prevent anyone else from entering the hospital from the cave.
I did not want to know the atrocities that happened in that section of the cave because of the German soldiers. I knew it had to be awful by the look on the guide’s face.
We climbed out of the cave, and we were greeted by the afternoon sun and the beautiful Umbrian valley. Of course, Mom was not where we left her. We found her closer to the visitor’s office. It always amazed me how much ground she could cover in a short time when we were not walking with her.
Mom and Bronwyn wanted gelato, and I wanted a glass of wine, so we split the difference finding a café for wine next to a gelato shop. We sat at a table, on the wine side, at Enoteca al Duomo, overlooking the Duomo. It was the perfect spot to have a perfect glass of wine.
The wine was excellent as too was the cheese platter. The wine, Urbs Vetus Rosso Umbrian, a Merlot, had a fabulously smooth and mellow quality. I found myself breathing in the scent of the Urbs Vetus while watching the sun play against the side of Orvieto’s Duomo, and I felt the inspiration I didn’t find inside the Chapel of the Corporal.
While staring at the Duomo with my great glass of wine, life became less complex.
We walked back to the hotel breathing in the town’s charm and changed clothes for dinner. A few blocks up the street, we had dinner al fresco in a restaurant’s courtyard. We slept with the windows open to the Umbrian night.
We walked back to the hotel breathing in the town’s charm and changed clothes for dinner. A few blocks up the street, we had dinner al fresco in a restaurant’s courtyard. We slept with the windows open to the Umbrian night.
The next day we would spend the morning exploring Orvieto before we caught the funicular (doo, doo, da, do, do) to the train station. I was not looking forward to heading back to Milan, but I was curious to see what the 5-star hotel I had booked us in would be like.
Ciao
