The Shrine of the Holy Whapping Holiday Special:
Rain, Sophia House, Drunk Frescoes, and an Italian Thanksgiving with the Arkies

It's raining in Rome now, has been all afternoon. I came out of the hotel and crossed Piazza Sant' Andrea, looking up to calmly study some stony counterreformation priests and an ecstatic pincushion St. Sebastian on the church facade. Then I saw a wonderfully hopeful slice of blue sky. But then it hit. Like God turning on the cosmic shower. The hard-falling drops actually hurt by the time I jogged to the big studio door on Via Monterone and jammed my key into the lock.

S. was sitting in the kitchen. She was calmly eating a slice of Spanish omlette, left over from Thanksgiving dinner, and informed me I had hail in my hair. Sure enough, as I toweled myself off I found a whole colony of buck-shot-sized bits of melting ice like salt off a Michigan road. Explains that unpleasant pain bit.

So, stranded without my umbrella, I postponed my afternoon museum-going and got to work on drafting a perspective of my latest project. Besides work and food and yesterday's Gaudi entertainment, it's shaping up to be a quiet weekend in studio. About half the class is out traipsing around Europe and the rest of us are dutifully working on our assignments, or wasting time on Instant Messenger. I'll probably have a crack at door number two later in the day and see who I can find digesting their turkey online.

I have to admit, for six or seven college girls, a gifted Italian janitor and one professor working in a kitchen smaller than some people's closets, the ladies (and two gentlemen) of the Notre Dame Rome Studies Architecture Program put out quite a spread. By the time night had fallen and the table had been set, there was a little bit of everything out there to eat and be thankful for. A better holiday couldn't be asked for, away from home at least.

A word on the setting. We dined, quite literally, under frescoes. A fresco, anyway. A few years ago, some of the undergrads drank too much and decided to decorate the whitewashed vault with their watercolor paints one weekend. Somehow the then-program director didn't find out until the following Monday, and then he couldn't do anything since the dedicatory inscription included his name, in bad Latin, and the pontifical-sounding meme PONT. MAX. Pontifex Maximus, the high priest.

I mean, how can you turn down that sort of memorial?

Plus, the illusionistic cherubs with their dangling feet and little flying wings aren't half bad considering the sozzled genesis of the whole extravaganza. This is another of the many reasons I don't drink.

Anyway, this frescoed storage room is always handy for when we feel like a bit of domesticity. We pull up three or four (or twelve or thirteen) drafting tables, grab as many stools as possible and put out our best disposable plastic silverwear.

It's a delight, a real slice of home in a strange sort of way. There weren't the lingering kitchen discussions over newly-cooked gibblets or surreptitious toast-snatching, but we had other traditions like opening up our online e-cards, full of MIDI hymns, dancing variety-show turkeys, cornstalks and, most surprisingly, Strong Bad's imaginary metal band Limozeen.

All this simulated domesticity reminded me of my first year of school when I looked forward to visiting some older female theo student friends off campus. They called their rented bungalo "Sophia House," after wisdom, and flew the Papal flag from their porch. We, lonely little freshmen, always enjoyed their surrogate maternal presence, and just as importantly, that cozy fireplace.

I still remember going out back with Meghan to gather firewood, one of those little memories that I will cherish forever for reasons I perhaps don't fully understand yet. It's vivid. I can still feel the too-hot heat on my back, a wonderful memory, and one of the girls with her guitar, and my newfound college friends sitting back and enjoying the moment before we would trundle off into the unseasonable and cool November night and return to the hectic world of last-minute deadlines and narrow lofted beds. Now they're gone, graduated, and nobody lives there anymore.

So many connected memories, firelight and collegiate friendship inextricably tied to cold North Florida Christmases as a child. And that heartbreakingly sweet moment when you have to finally say goodbye to your mother on the weekend of freshman orientation. And she looks up at the big golden dome with the statue of the Virgin and tells you our mother will be watching us.

In some curious way it's like John and Christ and Mary at Calvary. It's a moment of transition and separation which makes you feel, paradoxically, closer to her than you'd ever felt before.

Someone's playing a recording of Schubert's Ave Maria in the depths of the studio here. All I need, theme music. But thank God, it is so sweet to remember these things, and be thankful for them.

It all leads back to the same search for home. As urbanists, we architects are used to having it drummed into our heads that you can and must live in the city, in an apartment. The very town becomes your real home, the civic hearth your fireplace, the piazza your solarium and your parlor. It's a lovely ideal, but--but--

Humanity wants something slightly different, I think. I'm not sure how to reconcile it with the civic hive. We want to be inhabitants of a city, but also free citizens with free families. A city of men can't all marry the same impassive metropolitan goddess with her turreted mural crown and Juno profile. You want your own fireplace, your own civic hearth, just as you want your own sweet Vestal to tend it, and you to tend to her. The same goes for women, but I'm stumped on nifty analogies there.

It seems the attempt to recall the domestic tranquility of childhood, however imperfectly reconstructed, has almost the sweet poignancy of the real thing.

And, comparisons with home or no, it was quite an impressive turnout in terms of both guests and food. There was a whole turkey, sliced Italian turkey in lemon sauce, potatoes, a vast omlette, improvised pseudo-cranberry sauce, sausage stuffing, carrots, apple and pumpkin pies, peach cobbler and plenty of ice-cream.

I sat near the director, the ever-genial Professor Y. (the successor to the Pont. Max.), with my seminarian pal John on one side. He'd come in full rig, cassock and fascia, and almost a cappello romano, but he had decided not to overdo it. He wasn't sure how formal it was to be, and when he saw everyone else in shirtsleeves and jeans, he undid a few top-buttons and removed the sash, and then set to work on what to do with all that falling cloth while balanced on a rather high stool.

They don't wear the red and blue piping like they did pre-Vatican II, except for MCs during services sometimes, and Gamarelli doesn't stock his size anyway. Sad, but on the other hand, given the inconvenient costumes some of the other seminaries had as their dress (e.g., the Germans, who seemed to have dressed like an unholy three-way cross between Dagwood, Darth Vader and Cardinal Mazarin) perhaps it's easier on their dry-cleaning budgets. Still, where else would you get to wear a frickin' red cape to class? But I digress.

John said grace, and we all gratefully tucked in. Conversation ping-ponged around the table. One of the professors' wives explaining to Pino, our delightful though monoglot porter-cum-special occasion chef, that the seminarian's Boston accent was like JFK's.

I can't remember what I said to everyone else, but the seminarian and I chatted up a storm. John and I covered everything from Latin to the infinitely fascinating subject of clerical TV tastes. The cartoon Family Guy and scandalous, surreal Father Ted seem to be faves at the North American College. I also bummed some free theological advice off him, which he didn't mind.

The newly-discovered Pope Innocent III action figure and my Catholic Nerd friends with their hagiographic practical jokes also were sources of amusement. Though they were largely lost on the rest of the company, as it probably should be.

Soon the plates were cleared away and the great u-shaped table of drafting boards vanished in short order. The storage room returned to its humdrum, familiar half-empty self. Some of us lingered to watch a movie in the hall upstairs. Outside, the rain started up again. I decided to call it an evening.

And so I called home from my little hotel room in the shadow of Sant' Andrea della Valle. For it was now time for me to feel the warmth of my own family hearth.

Join we all with one accord,
Praise we all our common Lord.
For we all have heard His voice,
All have made His will our choice.

Fellows with the Saints of old,
No more strangers in the fold.
One the Shepherd rule us ought,
One the flock His blood hath bought.

Branches on Christ our vine,
Leading on His life divine:
As with the Father With the Son,
So in Christ we all are one.

--American Moravian hymn, 18th century (Gaudiemus Pariter).