III.vii. Brother Nicholas

"The Pistoiese are enemies of heaven."
- Michelangelo Buonarotti

    "Are you a priest?" the old woman asked me. She was standing by the door of the church along with a younger woman that must have been her daughter.
    "Excuse me?" I replied, not sure if I had heard her right. This wasn't the sort of situation I had anticipated in learning Italian.
    "So young and clean shaven. Aren't you a priest? I am sure I have seen you here before." Several people nearby were becoming onlookers in the situation.
    "No, madam, I'm sorry, I'm not a priest." I said to her finally, genuinely freaked out. I moved on, but solicited stares from strangers for the next few minutes.
    This is my chief memory of Pistoia, another city of art near Florence, not fifteen minutes from Prato on a midday train crowded with chatty high school students. Like most cities here, it is home to its own unique monuments of art, in this case being a supreme series of carved pulpits from the thirteenth century, as well as its glimmering green and white marble buildings. Fortunately, perhaps, the city's legacy of being militant and pigheaded has faded.
    But still, I was accosted and accused of being a priest. How erroneous of that matron; I was in town to look at pulpits, and not to preach from them. I spent a good hour alone in the out of the way church of Sant' Andrea communing with Giovanni Pisano's masterpiece, a carved pulpit about twelve feet high that took him six years to carve. Unlike the other Pisano pulpits in Pisa and Siena, this one is hardly ever visited nor is it cordoned off from the viewer. All it takes is a fifty-cent Euro piece for the lighting machine. This is quite reasonable, really, even though it only lasts for five minutes. Having only one coin of the right denomination I had to appreciate the sculpture in the dark for most of my time. It was a good deal though, because in Florence, the going rate for church interior illumination is between one and two Euros. Even after my lit time had run out, I stood up on one of the pew chairs and ran my palms along Giovanni's incredible carvings.
    For all the vehement objections of the art conservator, I am all for touching art, especially sculpture. Doing so exalts the work but also brings it down from an iconic level to a more personal one. Too many students go through their academic careers learning through slides, and many more are content simply to look. One of the benefits of exploring places somewhat off the beaten track, even more so in the winter months, is that it affords the chance to be alone with art, the chance to use all the senses. I'm not spending a year in Italy only to see; I'm here to use all my senses.



Some of the striped marble buildings for which Pistoia is famous


A lion trouncing a gazelle, part of Giovanni Pisano's masterful Pistoia pulpit


The striped façade of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, literally Saint John Outside the City