May in Italy: Mary's Month and the Pasquarella Pilgrimage

Benvenuto in Italia! In this slightly wacky chronology of our time in Europe, we're now back in Italy. We drove here from the summery southern coast of Spain, arriving in mid April when Umbria was just entering springtime. So it is that chronology and seasons are mixed in this blog, just as they are my experience. 

painting by Janet Strayer: janetstrayerart.com

We arrived in mid April and are still, as I write this, in Italy. You can see my first postings from Italy on this blog (e.g., Jump Right In; Asparagus Hunting in Umbria) by looking at my April Archives (sidebar). We've seen springtime here move from tentative to true awakening, and now we're approaching summer. But let me go back a bit to catch up (!) with some things in Italy I didn't have a chance to share with you  as they were happening.  

Wild Ginestra, JS Photo

You can see photos of our stone house and its setting in the Umbrian hills in my April postings. We live in Morruzze, a small community that’s wonderfully isolated in the countryside, but close enough to a fine set of people and sights worth seeing. Most of all, it’s a fine place to experience living in rural Italy: a slow yet intense manner of life in tune with the changing seasons and seasonal chores. We’d lived here before six years ago (not that much has changed); so it’s comfortable for us. But along with a renewed appreciation, it’s also full of new discoveries.

Somehow, perhaps because it’s Mary’s month and I’m in Italy, my mind wandered back into The Name of the Rose, a book I’d read some time ago by Umberto Eco. He’s a literate academic who can also write. It’s a great book for lovers of Italian history and the mystery novel. Set in1327 (which you can more easily imagine if you’re here walking upon the same medieval stones), a series of murders in an Italian abbey call forth a detective-like monk, Brother William of Baskerville (shades of allusion to Sherlock), and his young protégé. I’d recommend it: a wonderful romp and a richly developed book. I’m often reminded of one of its minor characters: a relatively uneducated monk who nevertheless speaks a polyglot of languages. Trouble is, they’re all poorly mixed together into his own “Esperanto” stew that’s a riot to read. That’s just like me here, speaking my own mix of SpanFranIt-alian. I get by… (but as the Beatles added, “with a little help from my friends).

greens changing colors, JS photo

May is Mary’s month but also the month the deep and rich-greens of early Spring turn more yellow as time goes by. There are still areas of rich contrast to delight your senses. The red-orange poppies catch the sun against the green shade. Flares of bright yellow ginestra glow as you turn a corner in the daytime, and remain bright against the blue evening sky. Fields of flowing tall green grasses, left to grow in early May, are cut by the end of May, and the ground is spotted with drying hay-colors.

JS photo, super-saturated colors

How is it that all the Mediterranean countryside (especially in France  and Italy) falls into such beautiful patterns? I never had such a sense of satisfied intricate design when looking, say, across the US Midwest farmland area. Is it that here the arable land has had so much longer a time to settle into organized space? But the colors too – seem like a pathwork quilt of harmonious hues.  I’m thinking of a friend back home who has become an enthusiastic quilter. How these lovely patterns in the land might inscribe themselves in her view. Sewing the landscape! What a glorious map for a quilt-maker. 

May is the Month of Mary in Italy. That’s what I’m told by the locals here. So many festivities and pilgrimages are held in honor of the Madonna throughout the countryside. Why May? I’m told, with a shrug, that it’s probably because it’s when the flowers fill the land, especially the roses in bloom, suggesting the feminine, the blooming virgin.  All the many little Madonna shrines along roadsides and houses are filled with flowers.

Today’s Thought

Awake, thou wintry earth -

Fling off thy sadness!

Fair vernal flowers, laugh forth

Your ancient gladness!

-- Thomas Blackburn

On May 1, the first Sunday after Easter, we went to one of the local religious festivities typically held in Italy. The timing of this event happened to coincide with International Workers Day on May 1, also a holiday celebrated in Italy. But since this was Sunday, the event celebrated was a religious one.

It’s called the Pasquarella (Little Easter) and involves a pilgrimage to a local church or shrine. The Pasquarella held here in the Baschi part of Umbria ends up in a small church built into part of a cliff-face, long ago the home of  hermit monks.The sturdy (or very penitent) can cross miles of fairly rugged terrain to get there on foot.  But, there are alternatives. Like many others, we drove that Sunday to the nearest stopping point. It happened to be the highway from Todi to Orvieto, upon the edges of which parking was permitted for that Sunday’s pilgrimage.

Even from this reduced distance, the truncated walk to the church requires ambling down a well-trod path from the highway bridge to the river bank below and then continuing on foot along a fairly steep, but well-paved trek to the other side and up again along the other bank of the river to the medieval church on the cliff, known as the Santuario della Mondonna della Pasquarella.

Along the way, there are stands selling trinkets, drinks and food.Especially prominent are the stalls serving Porchetta (pieces of roasted pork) sandwiches so popular here. Families seem to make an outing of it, and there’s a festive mood. Both old and young are seen along the path to the Church in different states of glee or exhaustion, greeting others they know.  It actually wasn’t too bad a trek for me to manage, even though it was a hot day. I missed the singers and musicans that in times gone by would have accompanied us as well

Food for Thought: Recipe for Porchetta 

Traditionally, Porchetta is made with pork shoulder flavored with lots of herbs and spices. You can even stuff the roast with roasted peppers, prosciutto, etc. For a recipe for roasting porchetta at home, click here. 

While you’re at it, you can hire a truck, take along big white rolls stuffd with  some of your great-tasting pochetta and sell them. You’d be a hit!
For more about food in Italy now, check out Elizabeth Minchilli's blog, which informs deliciously well about varieties of different local cuisine and restaurants. For example, click here.

The Santuario della Madonna della Pasquarella is an inviting little church, simple as it ‘should’ be in this setting, yet also cared for, with a worn fresco above the altar . Some people lit candles outside or inside the church and left; others sat resting or  waiting for the mass to begin. We bought an illustrated book commemorating the history of this sanctuary, sat there for a while, then left to resume the down and up walk back to the car. 

Sanctuario della Madonna della Pasquarella, photos by JS

 

Back home in Morruzze, I filled a jug with roses. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, pagan, or whatever. Making a pilgrimage or a paean in honor of spring, in celebration of life, in appreciation of roses, in tribute to the land itself… however one does it, it seems to me, the effort is paid back by a sense of being part of a living world: growing, dying, growing again. And, though I love spring, I don’t mourn its passing. To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring (George Santayana).