Beauty & the Beast

A SUMMER IN ITALY (248 pp.)--Sean O'Faolain--Devin-Adair ($3.50).

"One is constantly meeting travelers who . . . are puzzled that Italians gossip in their churches, kiss behind a pillar, spit in the aisles . . . wheel a bicycle in one door and out another. These observers are equally shocked by the sight of unshaven friars with faces like pirates, begging nuns in the capital of Christendom, gaudy and grubby dolls, tinsel bambinos, baby Virgins and the like in lovely quattrocento churches cheek by jowl with exquisite sculpture; and when I say that I find these bambinos both horrible and funny, even this will probably shock; as if religion were not sometimes so funny that one must laugh at it with God."

Laughing with God will probably always strike most North Americans and North Europeans as something indistinguishable from laughing at God, and kissing and spitting in churches as indistinguishable from gross irreverence. But even if this gap of custom between Northern and Southern Christendom is never likely to be wholly bridged, men of good will on both sides will always appreciate honest, intelligent attempts to throw some sort of span across it.

City of Flowers. Irish Catholic Sean O'Faolain (Come Back to Erin, King of the Beggars) is the latest in a long line of Northerners to make such an attempt. A Slimmer in Italy is not only an excellent, heartfelt guide to most of the principal cities of the peninsula, it is also admirably designed to salve the blows of disillusionment that many a pilgrim to Italy this Holy Year is sure to suffer. For the North-South gap is cultural as well as religious, and the new visitor to Italy had better know before he goes that though Florence, for example, signifies "the City of Flowers" its "characteristic smell. . . is horse-dung, its characteristic noise motorcycles and its characteristic sight [black-market] money-changers." To view the beauties of this masterpiece among cities, visitors must still, like Poet Robert Browning, nose their way through smelly, dingy streets, searching for some church or belfry embedded and lost in a garish market place of

. . . fire irons, tribes of tongs, shovels in sheaves Skeleton bedsteads, wardrobe drawers agape, Rows of tall, slim brass lamps with dangling gear And worse, cast clothes a-sweetening in the sun . . .

Headstrong Men. Many a traveler for many a century, says Author O'Faolain, has savagely refused to accept the fact that the cities of Italy "are not museums." Burgeoning with the exuberance that makes every Italian "a great, bursting bag of life," these cities have from time immemorial massacred their own beauties, thrown out long sprays of indiscriminate architectural splendor and ugliness--"gems set in pig-iron."

The men of the Middle Ages spent hundreds of years destroying the grandeur that was Rome and rebuilding it in their own image--only to have it razed in turn by the headstrong men of the Renaissance. The process has never stopped: Art Pundit John Ruskin, making a pilgrimage to the ancient refectory of Santa Croce in the 19th Century, found it had become a bustling carpet factory; to view what remained of its frescoes he was obliged to scale a loom. He saw a whole street of Florence, including the quarters of Donatello and Bronzino, torn down to make room for a cheap-jack row of shops devoted to "bijouterie and parfumerie."

If you can't take it, don't go to Italy at all; stop off only at museum pieces such as Belgium's Bruges--"a lovely stuffed bird." If, on the other hand, your stomach is strong enough to take the parfumerie with the campanile, the tinsel bambino with the David of Michelangelo, the abysmal filth with the supreme sunlight-then make your pilgrimage to the cities of Italy, remembering always the words of a loth Century Irish bard:

To go to Rome may little profit. The King you seek you will not find, Unless you bring him with you.

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