In Santa Croce with no (need for a) Baedeker

The second day of our Italian experience in Happiness, Vice, and Virtue in Medieval Italy (PHIL 097) began with my brief medievalist/music-and-liturgy nerd debriefing of the first day’s liturgies at San Miniato del Monte. It was a more authentically medieval experience than I had expected. The mass was mostly chanted in Latin, the celebrant faced east, the tower bells were rung at the words of institution, and all of the music at both mass and Vespers would have been very familiar. Our Dominicans would have been pleased that the preacher made a serious and sustained attempt at bringing the congregation into the Gospel (which was the Transfiguration story), and they would certainly have followed the Italian a good bit better than I did. (I understood the stuff about wonder; I missed how he got from there to Ukraine and immigration policy, which was probably just as well.) There wouldn’t have been pews in those days, though, and people mostly would not have been paying attention, being engaged in their private devotions except when the bells directed them to focus on the miracle at the altar. There would not have been so many communicants, either: I reminded the students that Catherine of Siena got a good bit of flak for insisting on receiving the Sacrament so frequently.

And that was basically my whole contribution to the day (except for one brief moment to be noted later). Everything else was in the hands of our chaplain, who led us in an Examen that invited us into deeper reflection on the experiences of the day before, and our tour guide. She took us on a walking tour of the city center and gave us a lot of really interesting history, though today was particularly focused on the Florence that Dante would have known.

Lucy Honeychurch wishes to be left alone to think about Dante. Clicking on the photo will take you to a blog post about this scene in A Room with a View, which I gather none of my students has seen yet.

After a fine lunch (at which my poor esophagus gave me some very anxious moments), we were off to Santa Croce. When we arrived, we were told that the rector of the Franciscans would shortly be inviting people into the chapel where Donatello’s famous crucifix is located, an unusual privilege. He gave a short lecture on the crucifix and its significance, speaking so clearly and slowly that I was able to follow every word, even words I didn’t know I knew. (I would not have thought, for example, that I knew how to say ‘thoracic cavity’ in Italian.) Then he led us in a brief devotion that included a reading from Philippians 2—deftly connecting the humanity of Jesus, which Donatello so emphasized and made vivid, with Christ’s obedience unto death, even death on a cross—and prayers over the five wounds. He concluded with a lovely ecumenical prayer of blessing.

It was all more powerful and moving than I know how to express, and it gave a savor to the remainder of our time in Santa Croce that, for me, at least, set it all off as a particularly holy experience.

Off the first cloister is a Renaissance gem that I gather is much less often seen, the Pazzi Chapel (Cappella dei Pazzi). After telling us about Brunelleschi’s architectural vocabulary and explaining the figures of the four Evangelists, our tour guide draws our attention the perfect acoustics. “I know one of us can sing,” she says; “I’m going to ask permission.” She looks in my general direction and I earnestly hope she means the guy two seats over from me who does musical theatre.

No. She means me. Fine. She gets permission, and I stand up and begin what I’ve come to think of as the theme song for the course—it’s sung (by the Preoccupied, fittingly enough) in Canto VII of the Purgatorio, it was sung last night after mass, and here I am, belting it out like some kind of very pious wackjob in the Pazzi Chapel:

Salve Regina, mater misericordiae:
Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.
Ad te clamamus, exules filii Evae.
Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes,
In hac lacrimarum valle.

I think the valley of tears gets us far enough in, so I stop.

There is a bit of clapping, and I try to disappear into the wall.