Drawings from Roma
Gary Kirkpatrick
Rome: pen and ink drawings
Religiosity in Italy
Rome is the seat of the approximately 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. Strictly speaking it’s the Vatican City State that occupies this position, but as it is surrounded by the city of Rome, it is understandable why so many meld the two.
The Pope was the head of the Papal States, comprising roughly the center third of Italy, from 756 to 1870. By 1860 most of the Papal States had been conquered by what had become known as the Kingdom of Italy in an effort termed Il Risorgimiento. At that point the Pope only controlled Lazio, the province in which Rome is located, but he lost that in 1870. He then governed only the Vatican City. This arrangement was formalized by the 1929 accord negotiated with Fascist Italy under the pugnacious and blustering Mussolini.
What remains of the Papal power is largely religious. How strong is the Pope’s religious holds over the Italian people? This is not an easy question to answer as there are multiple polls providing varying results. I estimate that roughly 75 percent of Italians are nominally Roman Catholic (RCC), with about half of them observant (attending church on a regular basis), about 10% are atheist or agnostic, 4% are non-Catholic Christians including more than 100,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses and about 50,000 Mormons, 3.5 percent Muslim, with 2 percent who are followers of other religions, including Buddhists, Jews (there are about 40,000), Hindus, Sikhs, etc.
The Pope’s celebrity gives the appearance of importance greater than his actual influence justifies, given half of the country’s Roman Catholics do not regularly participate in Church activities, such as service attendance, despite the threat of eternal damnation for failing to do so. This same group, however, when asked, largely express a belief in the Christian deity. For more information check out Religion in Italy and Pew.
Even in Rome churches are closed for lack of attendance, allowing the Church to better manage its resources. This is in spite of the fact that aside from the four large churches in Rome, the rest of the churches in Italy are maintained by the Italian government. In some places elsewhere in Europe, the buildings are converted to secular use such as art museums or turned into paid visits.
Church maintenance is not the only form of governmental assistance. Without his other assistance the Church would probably collapse. In Italy by law 0.8% of every taxpayer’s annual payment is devoted either to an organized religions which performs social services, or to a state-funded social assistance program. The system is called the otto per mille, meaning eight for every thousand. Over €1 billion a year flows into church coffers from this source. The RCC is not alone: recipients include “…the Waldensian Church, the Assemblies of God, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, the Lutherans, the Baptists, the Greek Orthodox, along with the Italian Buddhist Union and the Italian Hindu Union.” Tax payers choose the recipients. The Catholic Church remains the most popular choice in 2024, selected by about 70 percent of those who express a preference. The government generally finishes a distant second, followed by other religious groups. See Crux Without this system, the Church would be reliant on Sunday donations, sales of paraphernalia and its businesses.
The Church owns businesses? Indeed, it does. There are Church properties such as private clinics, hotels, bed and breakfast accommodation and guest houses. The income was not taxed provided part of it was occupied by priests or nuns, or had a chapel or prayer room. This created an easy tax loophole. Then the EU took Italy to court. In March of 2023 the Court ordered the Italian government to collect taxes on Church revenue. The tax obligation mounts into the millions. The matter is ongoing but could result in a significant hit on Church coffers. See Reuters
Rome: What’s up with the 2025 Jubilee.
Rome is just a 2 hour flight from Valencia so even Ryan Air’s uncomfortable seats can be manageable. We plunked our two carry-ons in the overheads and sat with a sizable and friendly Bulgarian fellow living in Valencia somehow wedged between us. There went the manageability. He’s with his wife and children, with them to the rear of the plane although at first I thought they were hiding in the jacket he was wearing. They were heading for a short visit to the Eternal City.
We chose this holiday period to visit Rome as it’s a Jubilee year. Jubilees are always preceded by projects that hope to improve Rome’s infrastructure as well maintaining churches, statues and other works of art. It starts with the opening of “holy doors.”
A Jubilee is celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church every 25 years. For the faithful it has spiritual significance, being “A Holy Year of the forgiveness of sin, conversion and joyful celebration.” Catholic Life. In days gone by this pilgrimage came with a promised reduction in the time spent in purgatory but nowadays it is wrapped in aspirational themes.
Wondering, as I was, where the “jubilee” came from? In the Hebrew Bible, aka the Old Testament, it is a year of “emancipation and restoration.” Every 50 years you were to emancipate enslaved Hebrews, restore lands to their former owners, and not cultivate the land. Sounds like a pretty rough year unless you were an an enslaved Hebrew or had lost your land somehow, aside from the travails of the then current owner.
The first of the Roman Catholic Church jubilees occurred in 1300. At first it was celebrated every 100 years, later dropped to 50 and then 25 years, where it remains. But wait! There were ‘special jubilee years in 1983, the 1,950th anniversary of the death of Jesus, and 2015, the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council. There will be another in 2033, 2000 years after the death of Jesus. Nothing like a jubilee to cheer you up, I guess.
This Jubilee has various themes including 1) the world of communication (24 January) , 2) Armed Forces (8 February), 3) artists (16 February), Jubilee of Deacons (21 February), 4) Volunteering (8 March), 5) those who are ill (5 April), 6) adolescents (25 April), 7) People with disabilities (28 April), 8) workers (1 May), 9) Children (24 May), 10) Families, grandparents and elderly people (30 May), 11) sports (14 June), 12) young people (28 July), 9) migrants (5 October), 13) the poor (16 November). The jubilee is a way of highlighting causes deemed worthy of attention.
Planners anticipate that some 35 million plan to make the pilgrimage in 2026, with a million or so choosing this Christmas period. The Jubilee officially started on December 24, 2024 with the opening of the so called “Holy Doors” at St. Peter’s Basilica, and ending on January 6, 2026. There are ‘holy doors’ at all the Vatican churches in Rome and elsewhere. My favorite is the huge door at San Giovane in Laterano, being that taken from the Roman senate at the forum, which is just a short distance away.
Above: Pope Francis at St. Peter’s “Holy Door” on 12/24. He’s nearly 90 and not in the best of health.
There a number of events of note during the Jubilee. See Program Expect Concerts and exhibitions galore (the Vatican’s ‘concerts’ link is not working as of this writing).
There are numerous infrastructure projects in Rome, with a total of 115 planned. The total cost of the projects is estimated at €1.2 trillion, about $1.5 trillion USD. The city expects to recoup a significant portion of the expenditures from the additional anticipated tourist taxes. Among the projects:
An €85 million infrastructure project created a new tunnel along with the pedestrianization of Piazza Pia. It now links Castel S. Angelo to Via della Conciliazione and St Peter’s Square. Trevi Fountain was just reopened to view, sparkling clean and with crowd controls limiting visitors to 400 at a time, according to a local in the know. The main Tram stop for the Vatican, Line 19, now has been cleaned up and beautified with stone pavements. San Giovanni in Laterano is currently enclosed by fencing on the front side. It is due to open on December 28, along with a host of others before year’s end, Mayor Gualtieri running about with sharpened scissors as a host of other projects come to conclusion.
At last! Our narrated video “From Amsterdam to France 2024”
Filming and narration by Peg Kirkpatrick, editing and production by Gary Kirkpatrick. Copyright 2024
Plovdiv
About 350,000 people live in Plovdiv making it the second largest city in Bulgaria. It was founded on the Marista River. People support themselves here on tobacco production, food processing, textiles and brewing, as well as high tech, festivals and tourism. There are six universities in this small city. It is known for its Roman era theater, still in use, and centrally located. There are old Orthodox-style churches, mosques, and a large Jewish temple. It was the European Capital of Culture in 1999 and 2019, no small honor.
We came in a van capable of seating 20, but there were fewer on this typical cold but sunny day. They waited for us on a side street near the Cathedral. We were accompanied by a guide. I’ll call him Boris. A big friendly guy, he speaks excellent, American accented English, the country’s second language, so this capability is pretty common.
Along the way Boris talked about life in the Soviet era. He told the story of his father wanting a car. He was able to accumulate the required 50% down payment. Then he waited. And waited. And waited for eleven years for the notification! When it finally arrived off he went to the official, and one and only, car dealership in the country. He’d ordered a red car. We have no red cars, they said, but here’s a green one. He could not refuse delivery without having to start the waiting period from zero. This was not unusual, our guide said. Generally consumer goods were hard to come by and the only imports allowed were from bloc countries. East German products were prized, though not by anyone in the West.
On the plus side, you could count on a job and if none were available, an income nonetheless. There are still people who prefer the communist era for its safety net. Also, while there were no real elections, government was stable. Maybe a few heads would roll now and again, but the government never fell. Nowadays the government is unstable. There are plenty of real elections, in fact, but there have been seven of them since 2021.
Once in town we walked up one of the city’s seven hills to take a look at some of the interesting architecture from the Ottoman period, something you do not find in the young (1887) city of Sofia. A mansion we passed was built by a well to do merchant. He was forced to change his name to a Turkish one and convert to Islam in order to do business.
Under the Ottomans, Christian churches were allowed, but they were not permitted to look like a church but rather but to blend in with the Ottoman architecture. Mosques were subject to no such restriction. Non-Muslims paid higher taxes. These sorts of policies made the Ottomans very unpopular.
We walked to the well preserved Roman era theater in the old center. As was normal for the Romans, the theater was carved out of the hillside, so seating followed the hill’s climb. No need to erect grandstands.
Nearby is the Circo Massimo, an oval race track, located beneath the area’s main drag. They have excavated only a small portion of the track, a main entrance. It was built at ground level and buried over time.
There are numerous eateries in the area, so this is where Boris dropped us off at lunch time. We saw lots of kabob shops, a contribution of the Turks, and places selling a variety of freshly baked doughy goodies like the one below. You can eat cheaply and well but you have to sit outside. Crossing back over the Circo Massimo you can find plenty or restaurants with indoor as well as outdoor seating, with plenty of people preferring the outdoors even at daytime temperatures around 5c/40f. The one we chose had a dozen salad offerings, which Bulgarians love, along with a variety of meat dishes. Lunch for two cost us around $20, payable with credit cards, almost universally accepted in the country.
\
Flood stories from Picanya
It was getting dark when we boarded the Picanya metro replacement bus, but there was enough light to see the fields of cars piled 4 and 5 high in fields near Paiporta. You can still see white bits of clothing and paper scattered about, sticking onto small trees and broken branches, left there by the raging waters. Unfortunately the bus was going too fast for shooting photos. On the walk into the center of Picanya from the bus stop, this being further away from the Rambla than the center of town, there was little sign of damage other than undamaged cars had obviously been driven on muddy streets, their windshields splattered, their tires terracotta colored, the paint badly in need of a wash.
We were on our way to see the youngest children of Picanya sing seasonal songs, starting in the center of town at the Centro Cultural. They wore traditional outfits, and were accompanied guitars, bells and a dulzaina, a traditional instrument in the oboe family. I called it a ‘squeaky’ for obvious reasons- they are not easy to listen to. Once we walked out of a concert where there were twenty of them. Insufferable. But here they fit in, part of the culture.
We went to a second location with the the children (they sang at 9), an ancient convent’s garden, then made our way with our friend M through town, first for a coffee at one of the local bars. They serve coffee, beer, wine and the like, as well as various pastries and gelato with loudly colored ice creams under glass at the entrance. Then we walked through town to M’s house across the Rambla del Rozo, the artery for the flood waters. In town you can see the high water mark at around waist level. Many structures with ground level installations, apartments and businesses, were still closed, but the bars, hairdressers etc are up and running.
As you approach the Rambla the streets slope downwards to where the pedestrian bridge once was. It’s laying on its side, replaced by a temporary pedestrian bridge installed by the army engineers. A smell of rot is in the air. Photos of volunteers and soldiers are attached to the fence. The Rambla, once lushly vegetated, including a tree from which I once pulled a few ripe figs, is now stripped of everything green and gone is the waist high wall that kept people and their cars from going over the edge and down the 10 meters or so to the bottom of the normally dry gully.
There were 11 deaths in Picanya. One was a young woman who was found between cars. Apparently she was carried there from Chiva. A young man survived after being whisked downstream from here to Paiporta, a distance of about 2 kilometers, a bit over a mile. He beat the odds, didn’t he.
We went inside M’s house. A temporary plywood doorway was installed to replace the large heavy door that the flood had ripped from its hinges. Inside on the ground floor there was a half meter/18″ of mud that relatives shoveled out. They then cleaned and disinfected everything. The ceramic wall tiles are largely intact, with just a few broken ones. The hallway was flooded to some two meters in height. The garage door was ripped off. The car was pulled out, floated to the corner, where it took a left, went a block and parallel parked!
There had been six or seven floods during the fifty plus years she’s lived in this house, but never anything like this, including the disastrous flood of 1957 that led to the re-routing of the Turia River. Without that re-rerouting, the city of Valencia would have been a major disaster area, the streets around our apartment surrounded by waist deep water and a half meter of mud, with many times the number of ruined cars.
Family History Part 2: Who was Tony, really?
Tony
This is another atypical post as it treats my family history, whereas I normally write about travel related matters. Nonetheless this may have some general interest for the twists and turns it brings. In my experience it was a mystery-like in slow motion.
My motherś sister Anna aka Annette was married twice, first to a fellow named Mike Rini on March 17,1928. All I know about him is that he was a pharmacist who died in 1940. Annette was a good natured woman who then met a jolly good fellow we knew as Uncle Tony, last name Nunez, and that’s about all us kids we knew about him.
They married on May 4, 1946. At some point he became a roofer. We were told had his own company. He built a lovely house in Rockville Center, Long Island NY. I have many fond memories of that house. There were many fine Italian meals and the occasional paella on the Sundays we made the two hour, 50 mile drive from Pearl River. The drive seemed interminable to me as a child of 3 or so when I first went there.
I am told Tony was very fond of me, why I do not know. Tony fed me caracoles – snails (I still like them). I recall Annette making paella, although my brother says that Tony made the paellas. The rice dish they served up included pork, chicken and seafood, peas and the roasted red peppers you buy in a small jar. Valencianos shudder at the thought of this combination of ingredients yet this is what Americans generally know as paella, if they know anything about it at all, calling it a “paella de cosas,” a paella of things.
One day at the house in Long Island everyone was preparing for a wedding. I was standing by the door leading to the cellar facing Mathew’s bedroom at the end of the hall next to the small bathroom- there was another larger one behind me. Whack! Tony opened the door, hitting me in the head with the door knob- that’s how small I was at the time. This was probably in 1953 as I doubt that before age three I have memories. I cried loudly. I remember him expressing great regret, although of course he could not have known I was there. He and my father whisked me off to the emergency room for a few of what must have been painful stitches. I think we went to the wedding right after but I have no memory of it, nor any idea who was getting married, but I remember the hospital room or doctor’s office.
I also remember when Tony died. I was in August of 1953, so I was three, going on four. I recall Annette telling me that she found him in dead in bed. She said he liked to eat bacon deep fried in olive oil, blaming this for his early death. I remember feeling sad, without really understanding anything other than he was not coming back and he ate too much bacon.
Everybody loved Tony. Every photo I saw of him showed a smiling guy, a little round and rather short. He was sorely missed.
Annette died of a stroke in 1985, as I recall. It was some time after that my mother told “us” (who exactly she told I do not know, as I was not there) that when Tony died a lawyer representing a Spanish women sent her a letter demanding money. She claimed to be Tony’s wife. My mother said that Annette cut a sizable check to settle the claim. Apparently Annette found the claim to be credible. I recall that the amount was something like $10,000, a substantial sum in those days.
That was the last development in the matter until in 2016 I received a message from someone who said she was my uncle Tony’s granddaughter.
What? Tony had a grand daughter?
Her name is Cristina. She told me that Tony’s full name was Antonio Nuñez Pazos. I had never heard the second last name and in fact I had never given the matter of his last names a second though even though I knew about Spanish naming practices since before I spent the summer of 1967 in Spain. I learned that he was born on October 16, 1903, per the interment document that she sent me. This document records his date of birth and death. I knew his approximate death date and this appears to be him.
Cristina said that his wife’s name was Maria Samperdro Nuñez. The three children were named Frank, Consuelo (both deceased) and Tony, from Palmiera, Spain, which is southwest of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, part of a town called Riveira. Their family story, like ours, says our Tony left Spain after the civil war. Not long ago, though, I discovered that he entered Ellis Island in 1936. Cristina recounted that Tony sent money back regularly through friends or contacts who worked on the ships going between the US and Spain. Once he entered the armed services the communication and the payments stopped. They presumed he had died in the war.
I found records of Tony landing in New York in 1936. He arrived on the SS Washington departing from Le Havre, France. We all had presumed that Tony immigrated to the US to escape the ravages of post-Civil war Spain. It made sense: Franco was murdering opponents by the hundreds of thousands during the post Civil War period. Mass graves have even been recovered in the 2000’s. However there is a record of Antonio Nuñez Pazos at Ellis Island with his birth date and place of birth, which makes me wonder if he fought in the Civil War at all. In addition he entered the US on multiple occasions. He worked on merchant ships that went from Spain to the Caribbean or Central America and then to the New York City.
Christina wrote that his oldest son Francisco (Frank) came to the US around 1950. Somehow he learned that Tony was still alive, and went to see him. That must have led to a difficult conversation, as Frank would have viewed Tony as having abandoned his family.
.Given how well loved Tony was in my family, this was quite a shock. Perhaps he had his reasons, but if so, I do not see how we will ever learn what they were. I do not think that Annette knew of Tony’s family at the time of their marriage. She was pretty straight laced and would not harm a fly. It seems just as unlikely that she learned of his family when Frank found Tony. Her learning that he was a bigamist would have caused quite the storm and provided grounds for annulment from the nearest Catholic bishop, and Anneette would likely have made a beeline to the cathedral.
Maria cared for Tony’s parents in her house until they died. She then came to the US, I do not know when. She lived in New Jersey as did her two oldest children. Most of the family remains in NJ to this day. Her son Frank took her to Tony’s grave, where I think Annette is buried. Apparently Maria never saw Tony after he immigrated. When Cristina’s father Tony came to the US in 1959 (he must have been in his 20’s) he visited the grave. Maria died in 1988.
Where from? A story about Sicily
We’d been living in Spain for 6 or 7 years when at an ex-pat event I started talking to a fellow named Jim. Often these conversations revolve around immigration and other ex-pat issues. At some point the conversation turn to the legal basis for our residency in Spain. I explained that we are Italian citizens (dual with the US) so we can live anywhere in the EU.
“How did you get Italian citizenship,” he asked. I explained that if you can show that a grandparent or parent was born in Italy you qualify for Italian citizenship. In my case my maternal grandfather was born in Italy. “Where in Italy?” ” Sicily, ” I replied. “Really? Mine too. Where in Sicily?” “Partanna,” I told him and he said, “No kidding! Mine too!”
Well that’s quite the coincidence! Partanna is just a tiny rural village.
Then the conversation turned to various other matters and we made arrangements to meet again. “Where do you live,” I asked. He gave me the street name. “No kidding,me too!” We still live just a block apart, some five years later, and still meet from time to time at our bakery and elsewhere.
A flood survivor’s story
We have friends in Picanya. We saw yesterday them for the first time since the flood. I sat with ‘M,’ whose house is located on the Rambla del Poyo, the normally empty gully that serves as drainage for the hills to the west. The Rambla is about 75 meters wide by about 15 meters deep and looks quite capable of holding a substantial amount of flood water as it almost always dry except for a little trickle in the center.
On the day of the flood, October 29, her daughter ‘D’ called to say she was coming by to get her son as it was starting to hail. She was in a nearby town where she had driven with her daughter, and did not want to be out in the weather. She got to her mother’s house, retrieved the son and went home, just in time. It was not raining in Picanya.
M was reading when she heard a whooshing sound. She thought it had started to rain. Then whooshing again. She arose to look out the front window. Horror and fright gripped her. A vast and high speed wall of water was flashing by, rising to within a meter or a meter and a half of her balcony on the main floor, about 3 meters above the street. M looked down the stairs. The water rose to the seventh step as she watched. She knew that whatever was on the ground floor would be ruined or at least mud soaked if it was still there.
Her house has three levels, ground, main and second. She climbed the stairs to the top. Relatives started to call to find out how she was: alone, still safe and dry, but trembling. In the meantime her son S was about a kilometer away at the metro station, waist deep in water. He made it out safely.
The roar of the waters subsided. When able, she descended the stairs to street level. Her large and beautiful curved top wooden door was on the floor, battered and swollen. She would not be able to use it, and a replacement would cost up to €6000, as it is hand made from high quality lumber. There are many such doors in this town. Her car had been ripped out of the garage along with the door that had been closed when the raging waters slammed it. It was down the street. The back of her house was littered with tall cane stalks, a tire and assorted stuff. Clothing and other items she and relatives stored on the ground floor were ruined, although D could not bear to part with a few things filled with memories.
A little more than a month later, after two weeks in her son’s girlfriend’s house, M is back home. The water and electricity are back. She is still boiling the water although she says the authorities say it is safe to drink. The car, a nice BMW perhaps five years old with low mileage, is a total loss. The metal gate entrance gate is still intact and working so she is safe from intruders, although when she was gone L, D’s husband, stayed there some nights while her son stayed others.
D lives close by in a 5 story apartment building, occupying a top floor flat, safe from the flood waters’ immediate effects. The apartments on the first level were flooded. One of the occupants with a child stayed with D until they were able to get to an apartment in Valencia city. There was no water as the main pump was damaged. Soldiers and fireman came to pump the water out of the basement garage. They lost whatever was stored there- typically there are storage units, called trasteros, in these garages. The elevator’s door was broken and its electrics ruined.
D is a psychologist. She owns and directs a residence for people with mental health challenges in a nearby town. She was not able to get to work. While her husband tried to save their car by removing it from the underground garage before the flood waters rose too high, at street level it was still damaged beyond repair. She rented a rental car from the train station in Valencia – how she got there I do not know – so she can now get to work. There were enough employees who lived close to the facility or who stayed in it to allow it to keep functioning. That town was also flooded but the facility remained safe enough to avoid evacuating residents. Her brother also works in the same field but in a different facility. His car is a total loss. He was able to borrow a car for a while but now is trying to find another so he can get to work.
The metro to Picanya still is out of service. Cars still sit on the tracks there.
Soldiers stayed in the day care center while working in the town. The center has now reopened. The elementary school reopened as well.
We met them yesterday at a shopping center near us. They have lost all their holiday decorations as well as clothing and other items so they drove here. While there is an over-abundance of donated items in the town from caring and generous contributors from all over, and World Central Kitchen has been fabulous, coming every day for weeks, there are still many things they need that they can not get locally.
M seems much exhausted by the ordeal. She can not summon the will to do her normal holiday meal where for years she hosted relatives. They are doing the holiday meals, and she will not have to lift a finger.
Photos and videos by M, reproduced with permission
Face from side and below, tilted, Conte pencil
