Small Miracles in Sacred Naples

Campania: Day Two: Part I

The sign outside the hotel advertised it had a carpark; if you took the electrified totem at face value, we would have been staying at someplace called the Hotel Prato Garage. Uh huh. Another reason not to have much confidence in our lodgings was our complementary breakfast was on the fifth floor. It consisted (I was told) precisely of one roll and some juice, probably measured out in thimbles. Metric thimbles, probably, which are smaller than the Imperial kind. So, feeling neither athletic nor ascetic, I went around the corner and picked up a biscotto amarena and ate it gleefully in the charmingly shabby lobby as my classmates drifted down from the feast upstairs.

Then we split into groups and got down to the serious business of trying to see as many churches as possible in the space of a morning. I’m something of an expert in that field. One memorable spring break spent with my cronies Dan and Andy in New York resulted in the three of us seeing at least sixty churches in the vertigo-inducing span of a week. Roaming around the Eternal City, which has got nine hundred of their own at last count, has further strengthened my resolve. Lesser men might go cross-eyed after seeing so many cherub derrieres fluttering amid the organ lofts, but not me. Bring on the hanging baldacchini and curvilinear altar rails, I say.

Of course, crazy old Naples is a premium place to test your mettle as an urban church-crawler. It rivals Rome for the number of baroque oratories crammed into every conceivable urban space. Warped pediments and curving pilastered facades pop up on cobbled squares and off laundry-hung alleyways, facing grand streets or rising atop curvilinear stairways. Hole-in-the-wall chapels face each other across piazze or sit next to each other a stone’s throw apart.

This manic frenzy of baroque sacred space reaches a surreal climax at one of Naples’ most pleasant intersections. From the high balustraded podium of San Paolo Maggiore—itself rising atop the plinth of an ancient temple—you can see the facade of San Lorenzo (also Maggiore) and the delicate onion-domed bell tower of the convent of San Gregorio Armeno. In terms of numbers, this has got to set a pound-for-pound scenographic record.

But there’s more to the vista than meets the eye. There’s the additional Neapolitan grace-note of the fact that San Gregorio’s campanile actually straddles the street. It becomes a rococo casaponte soaring over that famous and crowded alley of nativity scene vendors, transforming the panorama into a hyperrealist nexus of local color unbelievable outside the world of film. Considering that Totò—festooned in his sieve-epaulets and Gilbert-and-Sullivan drum major headgear—has begun to worm his way into the expansive supporting cast of the Neapolitan presepio, this circular game of life and art seems strangely appropriate.

Sadly, so many of these little gems, with their settecento squiggles and melting gelato convex-concave fronts , are deconsecrated or shut up behind ornate ironwork grills, their altars dusty and their pews rotting. As I walked past San Paolo, I saw the saddest sight of all. In the corner of a cluttered antique shop full of gilded picture-frames and dirty Russian icons, I saw a shadow-box full of relics. And I bent down, running my eyes over the tiny parchment scraps marked with their names—names that even I have begun to forget—and it seemed the cruelest thing about a city already famous for its criminal cruelty.

Yet, strangely enough, Padre Pio still smiled back from every street-corner and shop-window, in statues and holy-cards. It’s hard to break the habit, but whenever I see him, even highlighted against the neon light of an overgrown wall-shrine, I expect he’s going to tell Luke to use the force and whip out a light-saber instead of a rosary. It’s the brown robe, I suppose. I also saw a street shrine that appeared to have a picture of a soccer player inside rather than the Madonna, though perhaps there was some bit of explanation I missed.

Anyway. The Duomo is grand and vast, with a lofty apse set with glowing oeil-de-boeuf windows that tint the air an ancient, dusty old-gold hue. The treasury of San Gennaro is crowded with ranks of silver reliquary busts looking soulfully up towards the hidden sanctuary of the saint’s boiling blood. It also has a Paulist bookstore next door and plenty of religious article shops around it crowded with baroque candelabra and silken vestments to recommend it. And the Gesù Nuovo has by far the strangest church facade ever conceived, all black-stone facets and fierce rustication, a fortress-cathedral for the soldiers of St. Ignatius. A few volutes on the upper register pay a sort of last-minute tribute to the archetype of their mother church in Rome. In all fairness, the thing used to be a palace.

However, it’s San Gregorio, tucked away on a narrow street and highlighted by an acrobatic bell tower , that seems the archetypal Neapolitan church. It’s densely baroque but strangely serene, and just grimy enough to be comfy. It has enough decoration to exhaust even the most ritalin-deprived pilgrim, and yet all I felt was perfect harmony; that clash of illogical logic, that hidden harmony that is the hallmark of Naples.

We had the advantage of getting the behind-the-scenes tour first. Professor D. has some pull with the convent, I was told, and we were marched abruptly down a frescoed corridor and suddenly found ourselves—

Well, it was dark and full of swirling gilt and the flesh-pink faces of cherubim and dark wooden choir stalls. And then it hit me. We were in the nun’s choir, the cloistered nun’s choir, hidden high above the nave of the church behind an ornate iron grill, a magnificent sight that few outside the convent—much less an average and conspicuously male personage like myself. Below, the dilapidated church’s nave sparkled like a rusty rococo fairyland. I tried to sketch and scribble and scrawl as I futilely tried to record sections, elevations, something, anything, and my pen simply failed. It was too glorious a moment.

And then we were outside again in the cloister, the lofty high-arcaded cloister rich with foliage and golden-yellow stucco. All was silence and the serene sobriety of Renaissance arches. An undersized sister tolled a bell marking eleven o’clock in the morning, and I could understand, in however shallow and sentimental a way, what these little sisters, these consecrated virgins, saw in this oasis of silence packed into a tiny block in the middle of the loudest city in the world.

We eventually made it down to the lower church, a wild and wonderful fantasy of Neapolitan invention, but I kept glancing back up beyond the grill and remembering with pleasant smiles those five minutes in a hidden world. Though there was plenty to down below, like the shrine of St. Patricia’s tomb off on one side-chapel. A three-foot tall nonna, in striped head-scarf and scowl was guarding the ornate glass-sided sepulchre. The world’s shortest Italian grandmother. Another record for Naples.

I’d picked up a pamphlet dedicated to her during our whirlwind convent tour, and I discovered after I slipped it into my sketchbook that it was two stuck together by accident after they’d spilled out onto the pavement. Strange enough until I found yet another days later. The miracle of the multiplication of the holy cards. A small and silly wonder, I suppose.

Amelia herself ended up with six, which has to count for something, too.

St. Patricia’s one for miracles big and small, though. She was a Byzantine princess of some sort who turned nun and ended up in Naples back when the city was still a Greek outpost rather than an Angevin conquest. Her blood boils just like San Gennaro’s on her own feast-day, though her shrine hasn’t got the publicity team that the Duomo possesses. Her miracles may never get televised, but they’re just as real.

I was traveling with someone who was virtually living proof, or at least a first-person witness to the saint’s intercession. Professor D.’s connection with the Mother Superior was rather an unusual one. He and his wife Jane, a self-described “repentant” lawyer-turned-art historian, owed the birth of their sweet little Anna Magdalena to the Byzantine nun. A packet of blessed rose petals dropped on the tomb did the trick. A small miracle, I suppose, if you must go by mere pounds and ounces (or even kilograms), but a real one all the same.

We broke for lunch, and I wandered up and down looking in on crowded tangles of Christmas props in the nativity shops, frothy-watered mill-races with recycling electric pumps, and the more incongruous and secular souvenirs of satanic satyrs dressed as Pulcinella and busts of Totò in a Charlie Chaplin bowler. No escaping that man.

I suddenly realized that I was exhausted and my stress was through the roof, even though I had a satisfying stomach-full of suave gnocchi alla sorrentina and I was on one of the quaintest streets in the world. Then suddenly, it hit me and everything was better.

Something was different. Some unplaceable it.

The noise had stopped. The omnipresent noise that had seeped into my subconscious since I’d set foot in the city, it simply stopped. There were no motorini buzzing by. No oversized, American-sized station-wagons plowing their way through pedestrian crowds to a fanfare of car-horns. No bums shouting at you incomprehensibly in the Galleria. No venders stepping brazenly onto the funicolare to loudly shill their improbable wares—a demented screwdriver, in this case—with the Italian equivalent of “It slices and dices.” Nothing. Just the subtle hum of people, real live people quietly going about life in the shadow of siesta-time. And it was perhaps the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever felt on a journey.

Another small miracle, even if St. Patricia doesn’t want to claim it.


Tune in tomorrow for Matt’s continuing adventures in Naples, including that promised run-in with the socialists, the Veiled Christ of Sansevero the alchemist, and a terrifyingly close brush with two-thousand year old Roman smut.