On hearing Mass at the Siena Duomo

Fiesole, Italia

It would be a feat on the order of Hercules to find the man who is not rendered mute at sight of the Duomo in Siena. It goes without saying that the imposing Tuscan gothic façade, Pisano’s pulpit, the intricate inlaid floor, the soaring, dizzying striped columns are all magnificent. Indeed, it is impossible to sum up in words the entirety of the thing. Put simply, everything about the duomo suggests something of celestial, supernatural importance…everything, that is, save the music.

Upon entering such a seraphic sanctuary, one might expect to hear seraphic sounds and indeed he does during those hours when the duomo functions more as a museum than a house of prayer. Throngs of tourists, tickets in hand, are quite enchanted by the experience of the duomo, set appropriately to the music of monks wafting up as if from some secret, holy place. Only a few notice the PA system, and fewer still identify the masterful 1959 recording of the Benedictines at Clervaux.

If only the experience at Holy Mass were so sublime! Far from enraptured in heavenly tones, one is left bewildered as his ears are acoustically accosted by the sound of guitars and folk hymns. To hear Mass in the duomo is a study in incongruity. The duomo, in all of its monumental and lofty intricacy, begs to be filled with the solemn sounds of Gregorian chant or soaring polyphony, music for which this temple was built. Yet, the visitor and devotee alike are perplexed, dare I say incensed, to hear vapid modernist hymns that rise not to the occasion but rather turn it into an exercise in the virtue of patience.

Looking about for something to distract (an act of desperation to be sure!), one immediately becomes aware of 172 pontiffs staring down at the whole scene, some dumbfounded, others ready to excommunicate the choirmaster. One sees Leo VI roll his eyes as Boniface III struggles to contain his laughter. If one is to retain his sanity, he is all but forced to find the humor in the glaring inconsistency that is before him. It is said that he who sings prays twice, though Augustine might recant were he to make it through the first verse of the opening hymn!

Is not the duomo more dignified than all of this? In the land of Palestrina is it too much to ask for even a selection from the Missa Papae Marcelli? It is not unreasonable to think that more seats at Mass would be occupied if the program of music were revised, if not for the sake of harmony with the architecture then for the sake of that divine action for which the grand edifice was built.

On tripe

Fiesole, Italia

Hot, dripping strips of slime. Ah! And the smell! Without a second thought you’d snarf down a link of processed meat product in Midtown, yet, somehow, this elicits hesitation.

This is the Florentine lampredotto sandwich, served from a cart on Via Dei Macci in a neighborhood devoid of tourists on the east end of town. On a beautifully ordinary Thursday morning, Florentines leisurely go about the day’s business on the street where Sergio Pollini has set up shop. As you learn that lampredotto is made with the fourth stomach of the cow, your own becomes a bit unsettled. What’s more, much to your alarm, it is revealed that some of that same bovine’s reproductive organs have curiously made their way into today’s batch.

Sergio is eager to offer you his succulent selection. There is a large pot a-boilin’ from which he extracts the finest innards. These he proceeds to chop mercilessly, a most merciful act as far as your queasy stomach is concerned. Onto a crusty roll goes the minced mess, bestrewn with salt, salsa verde, and hot chili oil. The top of the roll takes a quick bagno in the brodo and suddenly in your hand you’ve got Florence between two pieces of bread.

It wants you to eat it. Uno, due, tre…and…down she goes! Salty, spicy, slippery, the strips of stomach slink their way down your esophagus. Swallow. Perhaps a brief wave of nausea…but the flavor! It beckons another bite. (Admittedly, a swig of some libation, cold and strong, would have been ideal to wash it all down. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere, no?) The entirety of the stomach now in your own, you glance up to see a sly look of satisfaction and pride sneak up Sergio’s face.

Herein is your first taste, your first glimpse of the City of Lilies, a city that’s practical, rough around the edges, an acquired taste that you’ve acquired with a few bites. Will every experience in and of this new place be so terrible and so splendid? Perhaps, but you can’t say with certainty. What you do know is that you have found place: real people, real tradition, real food, real life on a real street corner. It is oddity. It is a thing divine. Perhaps a Deo gratias! wells up inside. This is the common man’s Florence, in a sense, the only real Florence.

We could all use a little bit more

http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/intelligence.html

from jvssj...

From the Front Porch

Jason Peters on pro basketball and pork tenderloin. Enjoy.


http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/06/indirect-heat-1-miami-heat-0/

On "How I got here"

Fiesole, Italia

“A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority.”
–Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”

I suppose that my stomach is to blame for my being here. Several brief, prior adventures within the borders of the boot did whet the appetite, as it were, but one needs more time to really sink one’s teeth into a civilization.

I arrived here, in some sense, tired of the pervasive modern tendency towards uniformity, a kind of democratic soft tyranny that is coming to characterize the dominant American life and culture. I come to Italy seeking a respect for limits and place, seeking a people who understand their relation to land, history, tradition, and dare I say, the divine. Wendell Berry asserted that “eating is an agricultural act” and so I arrive eager to test the idea that one can discern much about a civilization by how and what it eats: if food is in direct relation to agriculture then it must in one way or another reflect history, economics, politics, and maybe even theology. I arrive with the curious hypothesis that the same slice of Prosciutto di Toscano or glass of Chianti Classico, which one might find in some overpriced SoHo purveyor of supposedly gourmet gastronomies, might in fact taste better in an enoteca on an idle Florentine street. There is something that seems right about enjoying these eminently enjoyable things in the very place wherein they originated and were meant to be enjoyed.

To eat, then, may well be the metaphorical aim of my stay, that is to say, to take in all that one can, and then be transformed by it all in some sense. I got here by a kind of hunger that would seem at least to be spiritual in part, a hunger that may only be satiated by as much immersion into everything as four weeks would allow. The only risk would be leaving in such a condition wherein, on struggling to exit a taxi and the driver asking why I don’t try getting out sideways, answering, as G.K. Chesterton did at the same question, “I have no sideways.” It is a risk worth taking.

PJD: The Future of Democracy in America

Fiesole, Italia

Here's a noteworthy piece

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/05/the-future-of-democracy-in-america/

What would Wendell say: Fiesole

Fiesole, Italia

There's an interesting juxtaposition at work in Fiesole. For one, I'm in the midst of a bucolic Mediterranean hillside, complete with a working olive grove. The view is stunning. At dusk, one no doubt knows that "the world is charged with the grandeur of God"...at least I hope that one knows that. And Yet that view is invariably experienced in the presence of the skyline of Firenze, complete with its Duomo. Does this medieval/Renaissance masterpiece of man detract from it all? Or perhaps we have two manifestations of the grandeur of God: 1. nature 2. that which man has created with his God-given reason.

Thoughts?