Italy is a sensual place, a corporeal place. It is a land that assaults one’s senses with sights and smells and tastes and sounds. In a sense, it is a sacramental place, that is, all of this deep sensory connection points to the presence of the Creator. That Italy is a place for the sacred is nothing new. For millennia people have felt here a deep connection with that which is divine. From the Etruscans through the Romans into Christianity, Italy has always been marked by an acute awareness of the sacred. Perhaps this is no better expressed than at Sant’ Antimo, where Gregorian chant wafts out of the abbey church, which is nestled among the breathtaking Tuscan landscape. It is this kind of intimate connection between the natural environment and the divine that led St. Francis to praise God through Brother Sun, Sister Water, Mother Earth, and Brother Wind. Indeed, many a writer has found Italy, with all of its sensual sacredness, to be the proper inspiration and context for his pieces. Tomasi’s The Leopard, Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, and Ondaatje’s The English Patient are among the many works of literature that effectively use Italy as a context for exploring the sacred.
From the first lines, the reader is already quite aware that The Leopard will deal with matters of the sacred. From these same lines the reader is also made aware of the novel’s intent to explore the relation of death and the sacred. With the Rosary barely finished, another aspect of the sacred is introduced: pagan gods and goddesses. These divinities, painted on the ceiling, “awake” at the conclusion of the Rosary, to reign until the next day’s recitation of that same Marian devotion. Tomasi’s discussion of these pagan divinities in the midst of Christian piety sets the scene for the reader, underscoring that, while Italy is a Christian land, the legacy of Rome lives on. This points to a deeper reality existing in Sicily: there are certain kinds of ‘gods’ who reign on the island, living a shared life with the religious orthodoxy of Christianity. That is to say, the Sicilian mindset or character and even the Sicilian nobility, are kinds of sacred, almost divine, institutions that have the permanency of gods. Thus, it is made clear that, while political things have changed, no revolution, no army is able to alter that which makes Sicily, Sicily.
The progress promised by the Risorgimento stands in opposition to the sacred, in some sense. This is the reason for Fr. Pirrone’s opposition to the new order, as he understands that what happened in England and France will be repeated in Italy. The Risorgimento promises a kind of secularism, yet it is made clear that, Sicily, at least, will always have her gods, hence Tancredi’s comment: “If things are to stay as they are, things will have to change.” This is a kind of indictment on modernity that promises such change and progress, but ultimately cannot unseat the gods of the old way of doing things in Sicily. Thus, the elections are rigged and while the house of Salina does decline, no one is made to feel any terrible discomfort, and the nobility’s legacy is, in a sense, carried on by the likes of Caligero, the new aristocrats who will continue to operate according to the old ways. These gods, then, that rule Sicily may be more likened to ghosts that haunt the island.
The novel’s treatment of death is perhaps the most poignant example of how Italy serves well as a context for the sacred. The motif of death permeates the work, even from the first line “Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.” This interplay of death and the sacred is expressed in a number of ways. The most obvious use of death as a motif is to examine the supposed death of the old order when Italy becomes a modern, unified republican state. The irony, perhaps, is that much of the old way of doing things will live on, just as the legacy of Rome’s pagan deities lives on in the midst of Christianity. Fabrizio, then becomes a symbol of this. He, as a Jove-like figure, is seen to be dying in the final pages of the novel. Italy once again serves well as the scene for this drama, as Fabrizio witnessing a priest bringing Viaticum through the streets foreshadows the prince’s own death. Then, on his own deathbed, Fabrizio himself hears the bells indicating the bringing of the last Sacrament. Yet, in his death, Fabrizio, in seeing a kind of Venus-Maria Stella conflation, is almost assured a certain immortality that is not unlike the ‘gods’ of the stars he had so carefully studied.
The same omnipresent sense of the sacred that is found in The Leopard is also used by Forster in his Where Angels Fear to Tread. Herein, one sees the importance of choosing Italy as the setting and context for a novel. However brilliantly woven, one cannot help but set a story of the Risorgimento in Italy. Yet, a critique of British social order at the turn of the century need not be set in a place so removed from Sawston. The choice of Italy, and in particular rural Italy, as the location for the unfolding drama is important in several respects. Firstly, Italy as a sacred place allows Forster’s characters to become enchanted, converted, and transformed, something very necessary for these British gentry who cannot escape the disillusionment of life in Sawston. In Italy, Phillip, Caroline, and for a time even Lilia can find transcendence through that which is ordinarily beautiful, in a very physical sense: a medieval piazza, a Tuscan vista. Mrs. Herriton can never experience such transcendence because she remains in domestic Sawston. Harriet remains there in spirit and thus cannot transcend the place even though she visits Italy.
In Italy, Forster is able to recast traditional Italian religiosity in a new way so as to communicate something sacred. A visit to the Collegiate church in San Gimignano reveals Forster’s inspiration for the Collegiate church of Santa Deodata in Monteriano. One sees how the church becomes a place of refuge from the hot Tuscan sun, a place where cooler heads can prevail to decide how to deal with the situation left by Lilia’s begetting a child and subsequent death. In this, Forster is making use of the church as an Italian church had been used centuries before: as a place for meetings, discussions, deals, transactions, planning, and the like. Yet, in the midst of this, there is the sense that Phillip and Caroline are seeking a kind of divine intervention or assistance to remedy the situation. Such assistance comes in the Christ-like death of the baby. It is as if the baby, who is at the center of the entire situation, is sacrificed, so that by his death some resolution may be brought about. Such final resolution and closure is only realized in the scene where Caroline offers to Phillip and Gino what would have been the baby’s milk. In this symbolic act, Forster re-envisions the sacred, so that the milk becomes ‘Eucharistic,’ bringing about a healing and reconciliation between Phillip and Gino. Such a thing, it seems, would only be possible in the context of the spirituality of Italy.
To recast the sacred in the context of Italy is further undertaken by Ondaatje in his The English Patient. That the drama is set in a war torn Italian villa and its gardens evokes the imagery of Eden and suggests a kind of fallen paradise. This imagery is most poignant in the patient’s room, decorated as it is in a kind of garden-motif wallpaper. Thus, from the beginning, the patient is seen as a kind of saint, at least as far as Hana is concerned. The sacred transposed is further evidenced in Hana’s use of the chapel’s crucifix as a scarecrow. The cross is thus deconsecrated in the sense that it no longer promises eternal life, but rather ensures the continuance of earthly life through the food grown in the garden. It is within this context of the sacred transposed, within the context of this fallen Eden, that Ondaatje places his characters who are all in need of redemption.
The symbol, then, of this redemption may be seen as water. This of course is an echo of Baptism. It is a symbol that is very effective. For Hana, scarred as she is by her abortion, the death of her father, and the scourge of war, redemption is realized by her caring for the English Patient. This is most clearly seen in her washing of him, a scene evocative of Mary Magdalene’s washing the feet of Christ. The reader also sees Hana wanting to be washed of her pain as she sits in the fountain, awaiting the rush of water, in a larger sense, awaiting her final redemption that will come in the water escape in Clara’s canoe.
Kip’s presence in Italy and at the villa is curious in several respects. It is stated that, as a Sihk, he comes to Italy already in possession of his own spirituality. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he finds himself at home, in a sense, with the company of religious statues and paintings in churches. It is in a church in Naples that he lays down to perhaps die if the city is indeed rigged to explode. Here, under the protection of angels, he finds comfort. Kip is also described as a saintly figure, yet he too is in need of redemption following the war and the death of Hardy and Lord Suffolk. This he also finds by water, in an echo of Hana’s watery redemption, by his escape by motorcycle through the rain and eventual crash into a river.
The symbol of water, as a kind of transposition of the sacred and a promise of redemption, is very effective, especially when considered in the context of where the novel is set. The desert is traditionally seen as a place of purification or preparation. It is a place to which the first monks retreated in order to be closer to God. In the Almasy’s time in the desert, the one thing needed for survival is water. This fact is underscored in his fiery crash and his burns. It is as if the desert prepares Almasy for his redemption at the hand of Hana who washes him. In the isolation of the villa, in a land that is now barren because of war, Almasy and the rest find a new kind of desert, wherein they can draw close to the sacred in search of redemption and healing.
The experience of Italy as a place, a nation, and a history forces one into a kind of contemplation of higher, spiritual things. If nothing else, the beauty of the landscape presents the problem of gratitude, and giving thanks must logically involve an indirect object. With a patrimony that exudes the sacred, Italy presents itself as the perfect context for exploring questions of profound implication, questions which are essential to one’s being human. Modern authors, in using Italy as such a context, follow in the great literary tradition of the likes of Dante and Boccaccio. In doing so, Italy is not just a setting for the exploration of the sacred. Rather Italy comes to symbolize and make present that very sacredness.
