Matthias Grunewald.
Temptation of St. Anthony.
Isenheim Altarpiece.

Appenine Ghosts

being a few moments on a journey to Venice

Night falls early and heavy as Italy slowly slouches towards winter. We had passed across the Appenines before, a fog-shrouded transit from Urbino to Arezzo, on a cold, white morning. However, this time, the bus was passing the opposite direction from the foothills of Tuscany into the plains of Emilia. It was late afternoon and growing swiftly dark.

Our route from Cortona to Bologna took us over the peaks again, veiled in rainy semidarkness and milky fog. The dark mist shrouded the hill towns with sinister mystery. Civic campaniles became desolate watchtowers, verdant hills seeming more like wilderness. Wide vales vagely sloped beneath us. The trees that crowned the hilltops were chillingly skeletal, and we caught glimpses of dead peeling corn crops in the fields. Houses clung to steep hillsides, whitewashed and half-Slavic, like something out of Jonathan Harker's journals. Even the trees seemed different, real pines of a strange Nordic blue-green, their pointed tops and curving branches seeming like a Transylvanian steeple. Halloween was coming up, and someone had drawn a big happy pumpkin on the fogged-up front window of the upper tier of the bus. It looked a little too much like a death's head.

We smile at Italian superstition, the way it occasionally blurs and seeps into Italian religion, the cross next to the good-luck spike of coral, decadent Renaissance popes having their horoscopes cast by Galileo, and the ever-present fear of la stregheria, witchcraft. But in that gloom, it would not have taken much to imagine the most fearful spirits dwelling here, dark ancestral demons of Etruscan necropoli or Ostrogothic werewolves snarling in the thick, evergreen air. It rains in Italy, it gets dark in Italy, and people are afraid in Italy. Sometimes we have to remember that.

Superstition is futile, but fear has a purpose. Sometimes it is good to be afraid; we expect too much from our ancestors sometimes as they huddled around their primitive campfires. The frightful dark concealed wolves as well as werewolves, grave-robbers as well as graves. Foolhardiness can get a man killed. It's only when we step back and imagine the night without the warm seats of our cars and the light of streetlamps that we understand the adversity those long-ago tribesmen or medieval pilgrims had to face.

Fear keeps things at a distance; sometimes laughter can put evil in its place, but the the way demons and ghouls have become figures of fun in the popular culture of today seems unhealthy. Maybe even more unhealthy and irrational than trusting in lucky charms or misusing the God-given sacramentals of the Church. Laughing at superstition sometimes comes full circle to a rejuvenation of that old perversion. For, as I walked past the well-lit windows of a dozen bookstores from Bologna to Venice, it seemed that the old demons had come out in force for Halloween, and they weren't the charming rubber-mask Count Chocula kind.

You see, witchcraft is fashionable in Italy these days. As in American pop culture, they've gone from fearing la strega to laughing at her and finally, it seems, venerating her as wiccan cultists. The bookstore window displays are only the beginning. Even the newsstands sell toys for the Italian branch of the Mary-Kate and Ashley set with hideous colorful packaging labelled, inexplicably, Witch World. You can laugh and call it a child's game, but as you stand there in bewildered contemplation and recall that the number of church exorcists in Italy has been increased over the last decade from 8 to 800, it gives you a momentary chill. There's a reason for that change, and it's no laughing matter.

We must count our blessings, pray for God's will and do the best to perservere. At least this time, it's just fog and rain, and the bus is cozy and warm. And that preposterous pumpkin, finally, looks like it's smiling.