The book
NoonDecember 29, 2022 – 10:36 pm
In search of the crossroads where those opposites come together that reveal our being. «Sacred, extraordinary and mysterious Italy» by Luigi Ferraiuolo
Of Vladimir Button
There is an Italy of eight thousand bell towers, squares, towers, churches where every town, one can say, celebrates and makes at least one jewel shine in the sun. A jewel of art, history and taste that can transform it, in the eyes of the visitor, into a small center of the world. This country of innumerable art capitals also has its own secret counterpart. A reverse made up of little-traveled places of devotion, semi-unknown cults, historical legacies placed on the margins of mainstream tourist itineraries and flows. Or that “sacred, extraordinary and mysterious Italy” (San Paolo editions) which has always been at the center of the profound interests of Luigi Ferraiuolo, a globe trotter journalist who declares his vocation in the touching subtitle affixed to the volume. In that «Journey for explorers of the soul», where the soul belongs as much to the traveler who is open to the unusual, as to the genius loci which manifests itself with his unexpected flashes.
It is precisely in this sense that Ferraiuolo’s book differs from the often cloying guides – digital and paper – usually on the market. Guides that limit themselves, in general, to a well-known or stereotyped illustration of canonical places in the history of Italian art, often simplified to clichés. Ferraiuolo’s text escapes this destiny in a programmatic way as it is not a guide but, in fact, an account of multiple journeys governed by the red thread of a pilgrim’s spirit. A pilgrim who knows how to vary from the altitudes of the Sacra di San Michele or the sanctuary of Montevergine to sink, the following chapter, into the subsoil of Palermo crypts or among the excavations of a mithraeum in the upper Caserta area. A lay pilgrim who knows how to alternate the materiality of monuments, places, works of art with the immateriality of devotions, rituals, cults. And thus the receptive eye of the author guides us along his path between the Holy Shroud and the mamuthones of Mamoiada; between the monstrous garden of Bomarzo and the dance of knives in Torrepaduli; between the bloody rites of Guardia Sanframondi and the abbey of San Galgano, with its invisible ramifications that lead up to the saga of King Arthur.
Needless to say, however, that the most touching passages in the long itinerary sgranato by Ferraiuolo are achieved when one arrives at the junction points where material and immaterial merge. That is, when the two dimensions reach a symbiosis and ancestral practices become inseparable from the equally immemorial suggestion of the physical place in which they take place. In those cases, as I mentioned earlier, that one-to-one passage between the two worlds really seems to take place which, I believe, Ferraiuolo calls precisely «soul».
It is as much for me, perhaps for sentimental and autobiographical reasons, seems to take place with particular significance in the case of the Fontanelle cemetery. The gigantic ossuary intended to collect the remains of about forty thousand individuals, victims of the great plague of 1656, then of the cholera which reached Naples in 1836. The so-called «pezzentelle souls» which look like skulls, tibias, femurs piled up in a land consecrated and anonymously. There, as never before, the immaterial of the soul overturns and almost denies itself in the violent, desecrated form of bones, of matter stripped down to its ultimate and roughest essence. There the shocking otherness of death is humanized in the forms of an exchange that makes the deceased part of the human world, transforming the survivors into interlocutors of the invisible. It is the do ut des, the intrinsic sociality of mutual aid between the living and the no longer living. The somehow adopted skull is combined with a name, or rather that appellation that extracts each individual from the indistinct, from the mass. An individual and imaginative story, a social or sentimental role is associated with the poor remains. In return, tradition has it that the living adopter receives from the deceased – in that middle ground represented by the dream – inspirations and signs for the numbers to bet on the Lotto.
The dead speak a language foreign to us as much as their condition is alien to us; the cultural code of the Grimace provides us with an attempt at translating the message. A message that can enrich those who know how to understand. That is to say the one who, like Ferraiuolo, makes of his own existence a search for the crossroads where those opposites come together which, finally, can reveal each of us to himself.
December 29, 2022 | 10:36pm
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