Last year we initiated an Italian book club at Bella Italia.  Once a month a group of us gets together to discuss an Italian-related book of our choosing, enjoying a bite to eat, a glass of wine and the camaraderie of our like minded group.  And over that period we have enjoyed some very interesting reads – The Leopard, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Cleopatra, Italian detective novels including Inspector Montalbano and the offerings of Donna Leone, books on wine and travel reflections.  Our club even spawned a new monthly movie day at Bella Italia, growing out of our book club’s discussion of the documentary movie Valentino: The Last Emperor.

With such a high minded group, then, it was a slightly pinch yourself, surreal experience discussing last month’s book, An Irreverent Curiosity, a non-fiction account by American author David Farley about his year in Calcata, a town less than an hour from Rome, in search of a missing religious relic.  The relic in question is nearly as weird as the town Farley describes, il santo prepuzio, or the holy foreskin.

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Holy foreskin, Batman!  This book is rife with double entendres, taboo subjects and all manner of things that appeal to the sophomoric instincts within.  Which is why I found this edition of our book club so completely enjoyable.  And when, by happenstance, we happened to be travelling to Italy just a couple of days after bookclub, by way of Rome, it was clear that a visit to Calcata was in order.

So as the lumbering mass emerged from our intercontinental flight, bloodshot eyes squinting in the bright Roman morning sun, flat, matted hair licked by the cool March breeze, we fired up the GPS and charted a course for the mystical town of Calcata, home of Christendom’s most unusual relic.  Within the first several hours of our arrival in Italy, we were headed off on an adventure.

Calcata is not your typical tourist destination, although I’m sure it receives its share of foreign visitors now, thanks to An Irreverent Curiosity.  It is a town that, despite its proximity to Rome, has remained isolated from the hordes due to a slightly hostile topography.  But today it would be receiving six intrepid visitors, undeterred by its inhospitability.

We are often asked to arrange a brief stopover on the way from Rome’s Fiumicino airport to the villa, a drive of about two and a half hours.  And we have often recommended a stop in Rome’s periphery to visit the catacombs.  But at an hour’s distance from Rome and nearly half way to the villa, Calcata may actually make a better stopover than the catacombs.  It just depends on which one floats your boat.

We departed Fiumicino and headed in the direction of Florence, joining Rome’s version of the beltway, the G.R.A., and then exiting on the SS2 Bis rather than our usual route north on the A1 autostrada.  The difference between the SS2 and the autostrada was apparent from the moment we got on the state road.  And not necessarily for the better.  This region, just north of Rome, is a developer’s dream, with vast stretches of open land to the north, disposable income seeking an escape from urban life just to the south.  And what we saw for the first half hour or so was the faux country life that busy urban dwellers with little connection to the land and the ways of the country, as well as a limited bank account mistake for country life.  Lifeless replicas of farmhouses, each one chosen from the same building catalog as its neighbor, each one painted in the same shade of paint just slightly wrong for time and place.  House after house, jammed together into staggeringly unattractive developments, each development surrounded by, thankfully, open space, the openness only to be shattered by another brutally ugly development.   Throw in a golf course (flanked with homes described by billboards as prestigioso) and you get the sense that carnival barkers with oily hair and flamboyant red topcoats and tails are behind this modernization.

For half an hour the countryside gave us a slightly nauseated feeling, a sense of sadness that the worst impulses of Americana have made their way across the ocean.  Like an Asian fish species that finds its way to an isolated Virginia lake and, absent its own natural enemies, multiplies, crowds out and corrupts the local ecosphere, this American development mania, visible in the explosion of American-style shopping malls as well as real estate developments like these has few enemies here.

Which is why, as we neared Calcata, entering an area of national forest, that a different feel began to calm the upset.  A dozen kilometers from Calcata the character of the land changed – the development petered out, the houses became farms, the plane begat hills and hills begat bigger hills.  We had finally left America, which we thought we had left half a day earlier, and arrived in Italy.

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In his book, Farley, who lived in Calcata for a year describes it as one of the strangest places in Italy and as a place with an indescribable power and energy.  The oddness comes from the town’s inhabitants, recent arrivals who squatted in the abandoned Calcata Vecchia, the old town, which had basically been condemned by the Italian government in the last century.  Seeking to protect its population against possible earthquake fatalities, the government built new housing on safer ground than the old town, which essentially is a town built on what resembles a floating island, a cliff that drops off around the entire perimeter of the city walls.  It’s as though the town had been designed by Wiley Coyote.  When the town’s inhabitants left Calcata Vecchia for Calcata Nuova, hippies, artists and bohemians filled the void, proving once again that nature abhors a vacuum and that you can’t beat free accommodations.

It is easy to see why Calcata would appeal to the slightly off kilter.  Besides being designed by Wiley Coyote, many of the houses and dwelling spaces are essentially caves with facades built on the fronts of them to make them appear as houses.  And what hippie wouldn’t want to live in a cave?  Its narrow streets defy logic and ordering, another plus.  And the setting, perched high above a verdant valley with a quiet river running through it allows one to discover his inner child, even without the aid of recreational drugs or too much wine. According to Farley, however, the inhabitants didn’t let this get in their way.

We parked well outside the old town in Calcata Nuova, giving up on parking closer when we were unable to quite decipher the sign that led into the old town’s main square.  The new town’s parking is connected to the old town by a narrow footpath that is steep, slippery and panoramic and within ten minutes we were wandering narrow terraces that hugged the perimeter of the old town and offered unbelievable views of the town.  In a word, Calcata is breathtaking.

We wandered about the town for slightly under an hour, encountering very few locals (it was still before noon, after all).  What we did see were very tidy, one might say beautiful, shops, homes, public spaces.  This is a town with an artist’s touch, an artist’s flair in the little details.  Flowers in flowerboxes and little vases tucked in nooks as you rounded a corner, signs announcing that a cat lived in this store, respectfully asking you to refrain from bringing in your dog, archways decorated with macraméd ornamentation.  There were sarongs mixed with heavy dour black dresses and electric cars parked next to ancient, rusting Fiat Puntos.  The old and the new, the traditional and the less than traditional seemed to mix easily.

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Without giving away the exciting conclusion of An Irreverent Curiosity, we happened upon the town’s church that plays so prominent a role in the story of the search for the prepuzio.  Sitting at one end of a large piazza it is plain and unadorned yet clearly the focal point of the square.  It doesn’t announce that it is a church, but the cross on the roof tells us so.  And just to its left are three stone wheels converted into chairs that almost resemble thrones.

Like everything in Calcata it just is.

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Farley tells us about the locals’ belief that there is a special and powerful energy that emanates from Calcata, springing from the earth below that spot.  We did not spend nearly enough time to even begin to feel it, to explore whether it is true or not.  But after spending nearly a day on airplanes and cars, driving through the worst of what Italy has to offer and landing in this quirky, lovely place, we cannot deny that Calcata did indeed provide us with a jolt of energy, an Italian version of Red Bull, that will serve us well as we begin our two monthly odyssey in our second home.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy