On the Eve of St. Clement's Day in Rome

After two days of searching and a week of anticipation, I never did find Cardinal Medina or his mass at Santa Cecilia. When I dropped by this morning to pay my respects in the humming, crowded church, nobody was quite sure when the Tridentine rite was to be celebrated. When I went down to the crypt, I found it full of weird nuns in those odd white pseudo-cassocks strumming guitars and singing in English, which didn't strike me as terribly encouraging.

When I finally tracked him down with the assistance of a diminutive, fully-wimpled sister, the pastor ended up giving me the time for the main mass. Which was to be presided over by another prince of the Church entirely. Anyway, I soon discovered that the principal mass and procession was on for the same time as the festivities at San Clemente for the vigil of their feast, and they were going to have firecrackers. Tough choice, but the firecrackers won out.

The St. Clement's day festival in Rome is so Italian it could happen in New York. It has that concentrated, wonderfully cinematic Italianness one simply can't find beyond the watery bounds of Manhattan. After a long and harrowing detour around the Palatine and back towards the Campidoglio to avoid another tiresome pacifist demonstration that was cluttering up central Rome from Il Gesu to the Vittoriano, I arrived to find the procession had already begun. So I followed the lights and the music.

A scraggly-looking brass band played vigorously at the head of the cortege, followed up a banner-bearer, torchers in the black and scarlet habit of the clerks of the Propaganda Fide, as well as assisting Dominican clergy in surplice and tunic. Then came the great gilded head-reliquary of the saint on a litter borne on the shoulders of four men in identical martyr-maroon sweatshirts with the Latin inscription Nihil dificile volenti, the meaning of which is entirely lost on me. After them followed Dominicans in cappa and tunic and surpliced acolytes. And then us, the laity, some bearing burned-down wax tapers.

A truly Italian touch came in the fact that at each corner of the sedia were plastic flame-shaped red lights that blinked on and off the whole time. Only in Italy.

On either side, people ran ahead and lit spark fountains affixed to the walls or taped to stop signs, blazing away with magnesium whiteness until the flammules died in a halo of gold on the sidewalk. Overhead were strung extravagant exotic displays of lights that had a faint hint of some small-town orientalist movie palace. It was great. It was tacky. It was pious. It was holy. It was Italy.

We processed into the church through the side door, the banner dipping as we entered. Incense, and the first notes of the organ prelude. Six candles shone on the altar, and four more burned before the grating of St. Clement's tomb, decorated with the palm branches of martyrdom. The prayers alternated between the American-accented Italian of Cardinal Stafford's prayers and the Irish-accented Latin of the Dominican schola. Everywhere was the scarlet of blood and the white of papal purity, in the vestments of the clerics, in the festoons of flowers bedecking the choir enclosure, in the banner on the high marble ambo.

As the mass concluded, the brass band started up again outside. I strolled through the booths that had been set up, a wonderful and just plain weird melange of local products. The earthy smell of dozens of cheeses and great hocks of ham filled the air, while others steamed and sizzled away at their cooking chestnuts. Middle-aged marathon runners in spandex pranced around in expectation of some race later on in the evening's festivities. There were people with big bowls full of names for raffles, half-a-dozen antique dealers with the same identical porcelain dressed dolls and ormolou tchotkches, a table selling something resembling oversized tarot cards, two or three American Indian memorabilia peddlars, some horrible velvet paintings of wolves and a truly penitential Ecce Homo, not to mention the contingent from the pet adoption agency. And the Mussolini booth.

Yes, the Mussolini booth. You heard right. He's here, too. Some dealer had set up his wares, and almost all of the antiques he'd set out seemed to be Fascist in inspiration: newspaper clippings, calendars, replica flags, and three or four busts of Il Duce, either chrome-domed or wearing an even more unfortunate hat. He had posted some earnest notice pointing out the only ideology he was supporting was collectionismo, thank you so very much. I started laughing and moved away.

And so, with the night chill starting to fall, I left the fair behind as the band struck up another jaunty number. The Colosseum stood before me, framed nicely in a sliver of street and lit with the extravagance of a Las Vegas ruin. It was amazing, an evening straight out of a Hollywood Rome. And I had a saint to thank for it, chestnuts, procession, blinky lights, Mussolini and all.