Every Day in Tuscany by Frances Mayes Read Free Book Online Page A

Borromeo, Lotto, Pomarancio, my guy Signorelli, Sangallo, and others. Inside the church, Mary’s Santa Casa, Holy House, may be the magnet, but Bramante’s staggering marble surround of the dwelling makes this place worth a detour. The Virgin’s house is encased in elaborately carved marble depicting scenes from her life. The best section shows Gabriel, the Annunciation angel, before a Virgin half-turned away and wary. Sansovino, who carved this section, managed the illusion of the angel defying the weight of stone; he appears to have landed with an airy step. A marble bench surrounding the house has twin grooves worn into the stone by the knees of pilgrims who circumnavigate as a penance.
    Even a big doubter of the story like me has to feel that the inside of this tiny sacred house transcends legend. Maybe it’s the somber black Virgin statue looking down from above the altar. She replaces one supposedly carved by the apostle Thomas, later destroyed in a fire. Maybe it’s the humble stacked brick walls, or just that I feel heavily claustrophobic, but the inscription Hic Verbum Caro Factum Est gives me a shiver. Here the Word was made flesh . Maybe some of the bricks and boards were brought back by a monk. If, if, if Mary were born here, received the angel, raised the Baby, then this comes as close as one can get to the very taproot of Christianity. A true believer in this site would have to faint or get the gift of tongues from the power of the place. A believer might echo William Sloane Coffin’s soaring belief. “I love the recklessness of faith,” he said. “First you jump, then you grow wings.”
    I’m drawn. Powerfully. Even in college, I was fascinated by relics. While walking in a cemetery in New Orleans, I found a vertebra near a collapsed grave. I kept it in a small glass box and carefully labeled it in calligraphic hand, vertebra of the Virgin . Soon I had a shelf in my bookcase devoted to my relics. Tooth of St. Mark, shell from the bottom of the Red Sea, splinter of the cross, vial of Mary’s tears, a stone from the road to Damascus, small quartz shafts that I called Jesus Wept tears. Faux they were, but I thought that probably ninety-nine percent of those hoisted above altars in gold reliquaries were gathered in the same way. My shelf was a place of devotion, strange as it was, along with books of poetry and Greek plays.
    Later, I began to collect ex votos , the itinerant paintings on tin or scrap wood to record thanks. I became attracted to them after seeing the Immaculate Conception, a church in Real de Catorce, a mining ghost town in Mexico. I found, and still do, the impulse of thanks tied to the gesture of making art one of the profound human expressions. Usually an ex voto shows an accident, such as a cart turned over, the driver almost crushed but saved by holy intervention from a saint or Mary, shown hovering above in the sky. One of my prizes from 1929 shows a man falling off a rickety chair while screwing in a lightbulb. Fortunately a saint intervened in his fate. Many are scenes of sick children with the parents praying near the bed. Almost always the initials P.G.R . and the date appear in the sky. Per Grazia Ricevuta , for grace received. As a humanist and a pantheist, I can’t not believe in grace received, though the what, where, when, and how of grace remains mysterious to me, and hopelessly entangled with grace not received: suffering. But venerating some tiny fragment from the past, yes, I’m stirred by that efficacy. Touch the object and feel time spiral back: That scratchy brown bit of St. Francis’s robe in San Francesco in Cortona, the amber necklace of my mother’s, that first-cut lock of my grandson’s soft blond hair, the crown of thorns I made from brambles, the nineteenth-century wedding dress hanging in my study, the worn handle of the rotary beater that whipped many whites to a froth so many years ago.

    I FIND LUCA’S unusually restrained hand in a small octagonal