Now that I have finally returned to Italy I will be beginning a series of articles based around my travels and my disparate musings. I hope this will be of interest to you. There will be no grand introduction, no flowery narration, but only a crude and disjointed series of meditations.
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Two statues have haunted my thoughts over the last week.
Two statues united in both their subject matter and their mundane inertia. Both are perfectly unremarkable, both perfectly ugly. Neither statue possesses the necessary magnetism to draw the masses into starry-eyed orbit. I doubt either idol can recall the last flash of a portly tourist’s camera. Both statues in question bore all the hallmarks of that familiar and distinctly Catholic kitsch style, painted saints fit for an abuela’s mantle. To be clear, I do not dislike the gauche and tacky aesthetics of Catholic low art, I have always found something appealing about prayer candles and little crying saints. There is an earthiness that hangs to such trinkets. Maybe this is why I noticed both figures.
The statues were of Padre Pio, and therefore a quotidian sight in the peninsula. His presence is ubiquitous in Italy, from pizza shop counters to city squares, you are bound to come across his gaze at least a couple of times a week. But these two were different. Both Pio’s were marked with specific stylistic abnormalities, a series of aberrations, that were themselves amplified due to curiosities present in their respective vicinities.
When certain discrepancies, certain signatures, align themselves within a particular topographical locus, the resulting constellation tends to conjure up a mad curiosity in the soul of the observer, or at least in the one capable of charting them.