I’ve been to Italy seven times now, in all four seasons and in seven different cities, and I still have never had to use an umbrella while I’ve been there. Regardless of the season, coming back to Zurich from Italy usually entails putting on an extra layer or three of clothing and having an umbrella or rain jacket handy. This weekend was no exception. In Rome, we wore sunglasses and t-shirts, but after getting off the plane in Zurich, we put on rain jackets and heavy sweaters. It’s snowing today, that special Zurich brand of slushy snow that never accumulates more than a couple of inches and makes unfortunate splashes whenever you trudge through the streets. It’s not just an Italy vs. Switzerland thing, though, even the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland enjoys a warmer and sunnier climate than the German-speaking region, which makes me think that the weather gods, if there are any, must prefer pasta to potatoes.
It seems as if there are almost as many churches in Rome as there are Starbucks in New York, and we went into a few of them over the weekend. One church boasts that it has the heads of Peter and Paul, other churches have fingers, arms, pieces of skin, and other scraps of various people, long dead. Further research shows that another church in Italy has almost the entire hide of Bartholomew, who was skinned alive. Other churches around Europe claim to have other pieces of the unfortunate Bartholomew.
Assuming that all of these body parts are as advertised, it’s a bit crazy to imagine how it all happened. Take our friend Bartholomew. After he died, someone thought, "He was a great guy, I'm going to keep him." Back then, without walk-in meat lockers, Bart’s remains probably started rotting pretty quickly. Yet this person kept them until he had a talk with some other folks, and then they chopped the body up into little pieces and carried or sent them to their eventual destinations? Alternatively, were the remains all kept in one place until much later, when some priest decided to ship Bart bits to other churches to keep his memory alive? I can’t imagine anyone doing that today. Was Mother Teresa divvied up in anticipation of her possible future sainthood, or will that happen later?
We also went to the Capuchin crypt, which is made up of five rooms decorated with the bones of 4,000 Capuchin monks who died between the 1500s and the 1800s. They didn't just pile the bones up, which is what I had been expecting, they decorated with the bones. It was as if they had run out of ornate wallpaper with scrollwork and flowers, so they made the patterns with ribs, jawbones, and vertebrae, instead. It was like walking into someone’s grandmother’s apartment gone seriously morbid. The bones had originally been buried, but were dug up, cleaned off, pulled apart, and arranged. If those 4,000 monks had been told that one day, their ribs would become 3-D wallpaper, and their femurs would be stacked into peaked arches interspersed with their skulls, would they have changed careers?
On the way back, we realized just how accustomed we’ve grown to the Swiss way of life. We frantically boarded the train to the Rome airport, afraid that we would miss it, and were taken aback when it left five minutes late. Upon our arrival at the airport an hour before our flight (which would have been more than enough time in Zurich), we saw something very strange – a forty-minute line to go through security, and another line to get through passport control! We were flabbergasted, and would have missed our flight, had we not, with much begging, cut in front of hundreds of other people.
It seems as if there are almost as many churches in Rome as there are Starbucks in New York, and we went into a few of them over the weekend. One church boasts that it has the heads of Peter and Paul, other churches have fingers, arms, pieces of skin, and other scraps of various people, long dead. Further research shows that another church in Italy has almost the entire hide of Bartholomew, who was skinned alive. Other churches around Europe claim to have other pieces of the unfortunate Bartholomew.
Assuming that all of these body parts are as advertised, it’s a bit crazy to imagine how it all happened. Take our friend Bartholomew. After he died, someone thought, "He was a great guy, I'm going to keep him." Back then, without walk-in meat lockers, Bart’s remains probably started rotting pretty quickly. Yet this person kept them until he had a talk with some other folks, and then they chopped the body up into little pieces and carried or sent them to their eventual destinations? Alternatively, were the remains all kept in one place until much later, when some priest decided to ship Bart bits to other churches to keep his memory alive? I can’t imagine anyone doing that today. Was Mother Teresa divvied up in anticipation of her possible future sainthood, or will that happen later?
We also went to the Capuchin crypt, which is made up of five rooms decorated with the bones of 4,000 Capuchin monks who died between the 1500s and the 1800s. They didn't just pile the bones up, which is what I had been expecting, they decorated with the bones. It was as if they had run out of ornate wallpaper with scrollwork and flowers, so they made the patterns with ribs, jawbones, and vertebrae, instead. It was like walking into someone’s grandmother’s apartment gone seriously morbid. The bones had originally been buried, but were dug up, cleaned off, pulled apart, and arranged. If those 4,000 monks had been told that one day, their ribs would become 3-D wallpaper, and their femurs would be stacked into peaked arches interspersed with their skulls, would they have changed careers?
On the way back, we realized just how accustomed we’ve grown to the Swiss way of life. We frantically boarded the train to the Rome airport, afraid that we would miss it, and were taken aback when it left five minutes late. Upon our arrival at the airport an hour before our flight (which would have been more than enough time in Zurich), we saw something very strange – a forty-minute line to go through security, and another line to get through passport control! We were flabbergasted, and would have missed our flight, had we not, with much begging, cut in front of hundreds of other people.
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