X.x. Pilate's Well

"In Bologna, I was in the company of men with hearty appetites… and they
talked, as far as I could understand when they spoke Italian, of only three
things: of good food, the joys of love, and the pleasure of music…."
- Otto Von Taube

I couldn't help but smile as little Maristella Patuzzi, the virtuoso eighteen-year-old violinist from Ticino, took to the makeshift stage that had been set up in the cloister of Santo Stefano, a warren of seven different churches much revered by the local population. Maristella was pretty, in a pink dress with her hair made up, gracious under the watchful eye of her father who accompanied her on the piano. The little gargoyles, the audience, even the Benedictine monks on exchange from Ghana, all looked on as the first few notes rung off the enchantress' bow, an unaware Saint Cecilia.
    Or perhaps the enchantress was the city itself, reinventing itself as the summer set in, with its stagnant heat and only slightly cooler evenings. The students and less desirable seasonal occupants had begun to leave, and in their place a flurry of musical festivals had cropped up, part of an ambitious cultural program intended to reinvigorate the parched city. I had to walk past no less than five of these such concerts before taking my seat in the floodlit cloister of Santo Stefano, my back to Pilate's Well, a stone basin said to have been used by the Roman governor himself, but in reality dating only to the ninth century. I wondered if the venue, anchored in the millennial mist of the city's birth, had ever hosted something so young, elegant, and ephemeral as the sweet-sounding violinist.
    Two days prior I had been to a concert of medieval behind the towering apse of San Domenico, watched over in that case by Dominican monks in robes white like ghosts. The performance had included fire-throwers and jugglers, adding to the hues that had been lending the city an air of pageantry all month. Even the pale presiding abbot, introducing the concert, couldn't help but jealously mention the colour returning to the cheeks and tunics of the city's audiences.
    Perhaps I seem to be spending an odd amount of time in the company of clergy, but to experience any sort of culture in the red city one has to be either firmly liturgical in taste or resolutely socialist, and I am definitely more inclined towards the former, all technicalities aside. Santo Stefano, though, a Bolognese favourite, is less ecclesiastical than one might think considering that it is made up of seven interlaced churches. It is more a Pantheon than a place of devotion. Its aged walls, some of the city's oldest, have become an unexpected shrine to the city's war dead; dozens of marble plaques bear witness to the legions of young soldiers who died in distant, far less peaceful places. Corfu, Gorizia, Somalia mark the defeats of a tearful Italian century otherwise forgotten in as capricious a city as Bologna.
    In a lighter vein Santo Stefano is also home to a little museum-cum-apothecary shop, whose elderly guardian surveys a small collection of fourteenth century paintings, sadly not for purchase, which rub shoulders with highly saleable monk-made products such as Camaldolese anti-wrinkle balm and fennel liqueur. An animated if somewhat senile figure, the old Benedictine tends to ramble on about the superiority of his merchandise, the chocolate hand made without preservatives, the rhubarb distillate excellent for adding to an after dinner coffee. I have made the store a compulsory stop on my tour of Bologna. The eccentric monk's salesmanship is as important and unusual a part of Santo Stefano as the ancient decagonal chapel or gloomy Lombard basilica; he once asked my friend Esther, nineteen years old, whether she had gone through puberty and would be interested in acne-fighting cream, all the while referring to my friend Aldous as "the Japanese one." In the niche market of trappist cosmetics, a quaint lack of political correction is an integral part of the customer's experience.