Old Viterbo: Part of the Former Papal Residence, now the Bishop's Palace

St. Rose of the Machines

I told you already that the second stop after our strange sojourn in Bagnaregio's miniscule old quarter was the bustling city of Viterbo, an industrial center wrapped around a remarkable medieval town crowded with twisty passages overhung with quaint casapontes, houses that literally bridge the street. It is a grey town, built from a uniform pepperino that makes the entire place seem carved into the rocky sides of cliffs, but it is the warmest and most sun-soaked grey town that man has ever conceived.

It's also the only place where I've seen an antique car rally roar down streets that look narrower than some people's driveways back in the States, the thundering old machines directed around a dozen hairpin turns by the city's miniscule traffic police force, all of whom seemed to be uniformed, uniformly young blonde girls in uncomfortable shoes wearing silly WAVE-style hats. It might have been in honor of the Festa di Santissimo Salvatore, posters of which were everywhere. The other part of the festival involves a parade of noblemen dressed in mediaeval garb. Cars and knights. Strange.

Something's subtly off about Viterbo, whether it's the nonchalant mixture of modern and ancient, of straight streets and crooked Gothic alleys, of history and creepy kitsch. A few doors down from the chaste pink stucco facade of a church, on a main street, is, of all things, a garishly-liy window display given over to incomprehensible leather clothing doubtlessly used by consenting spouses, a cross between Torquemada's couturier and one of Vaucanson's eighteenth-century clockwork women. I quickly moved on and tried not to think about it.

Viterbo seems to make a cult out of weird holidays that revolve around machines and the Middle Ages. There's that auto rally, but I can top that easily. The biggest date in the secular and civil calendars is September 3, the feast of Santa Rosa, the town's teenaged patroness, which is comemorated by the festive and incomprehensible custom of building enormous portable tower-shrines called macchine, a cognate of machine which is closer in meaning to a parade float or a ceremonial cart. The pictures make them look weirdly half-Hindu, enormous spindly pagodas rising fifty feet into the air and encrusted with praying angels, supported by hundreds of back-bent semi-Spanish confraternity men. I even wandered through a half-open door into an old church given over to the pageant's props, strange, dark and gloomy, while enormous prop lions loomed over me in the baroque murk. I never did find that church again. Viterbo, like I said, refuses to make sense.

Even something so weirdly straightforward as an incorrupt body isn't quite right in Viterbo. Let me explain. That magnificent young nun St. Rose has long been a favorite saint of mine, and being among her machines made me wanted to see some flesh-and-blood reminder of her memory. I was in luck as I finished sketching about half-an-hour for the bus was ready to leave and dashed across the old town to the looming neoclassical shrine dedicated to her incorrupt body.

Like I said, nothing is what it seems in Viterbo. The term incorrupt is a flexible one, something we often forget as we are conditioned by the beautiful memories of the Little Flower's recumbent form in her glass altar, half sweet milk-skinned Snow White, half swooning Bernini ecstatic. In many instances, it seems to relate to a slowing of bodily corruption, for even saints must suffer the corruption of original sin, no matter how slowly. Many incorruptibles look like St. Teresa of Lisieux and the popes entombed at St. Mary Major, but others have faired worse over the centuries. Whether by Divine design or by the result of a fire that struck the old church, disappointingly, one of them is St. Rose.

It was with an odd mixture of awe and disappointment that I beheld her wizened, brown corpse in the glass urn, draped in Franciscan grey. It was miraculous that so much of her had survived after eight hundred years, but miracles aren't always pretty. She looked more like Mother Teresa than an eighteen-year-old firebrand, and the tip of her nose had gone missing.

But, standing there, I still remembered that this was the face of a saint, for all the hardship visited on her, and tried to reconstruct it in my mind. She was small and slight and lean, with what might have been a beautiful face once. As I stood there, looking through the grillwork, I thought of her, imagining a slightly shallow, high-cheekboned face; perhaps with small, thin lips; a pert, snub nose. She seemed to be inevitably blonde and pig-tailed in the pictures. Like her corpse, in so many images she was slight and pale, and soon between the body and the image, I could imagine her as she was.

Then I realized that was wrong, too.

This imaginary reconstruction, this little pale saint, didn't look like the holy nun or precocious preacher I knew from my books. She seemed more like the quiet, quietly pretty little high-school girl who sat in the back, got good grades, and stayed behind to clap erasers after class. I could have passed her in the Notre Dame dining hall back home without a second thought. And yet, this little creature had challenged a blasphemous emperor at age 11, gotten herself and her whole family exiled for her trouble, and died in the odor of sanctity before turning twenty. It boggled the mind.

And yet I remembered Mary's cry of exaltavit humiles, of the God Who raises the humble, and I thought in this bizarre town of archaic automobiles, scary leather-clad mannequins and streets at once sunny and mysterious, that this little saint was the only thing that made an ounce of sense.