art and travel

I guess you could say I'm into religious art.

In college, I spent a summer studying in Italy with a friend. We visited Cinque Terre one weekend without booking a place to stay. Cinque Terre is not one town but a series of 5 villages strung throughout a several mile stretch of cliffs and beaches dotting Northeastern Italy. We took a train to the first village and got off to hike to the next. We managed to get dramatically lost in the hillside grape vineyards and finally reached the town of Manarola, famished and dirty, at dusk. All we could think about was dinner, even though we still had no place to slumber and bathe. At around 10pm we finally realized the reality of our predicament. The handful of inns and hostels in the tiny village were all booked.

We were lounging on a city bench, trying to devise a radical plan and come to terms with the distinct possibility that we would be street-dwellers for the night, when a young man came by and told us he'd stayed with a kind elderly couple, natives of Cinque Terre who spoke no English, the night before.

He led us through the open-roofed stone corridors, so typical of a mountainous seaside neighborhood, until we reached her doorstep, knocked, and asked in my very rusty Italian for a place to lodge.

She understood, let us in, showed us the tiny bathroom and the upstairs room where we would stay. It was the most Catholic room my Methodist-turned-Episcopalian eyes have ever seen. It was adorned in Rosaries, beautiful portraits of the Virgin Mary, a tapestry of Pope John Paul II, ornate crosses, and gilded icons. It was a cozy room. It felt oddly safe and so, so quiet.

Before that experience, I don't remember being very fond of religious art for the home.

This particular artist paints enchanting landscapes, too. But these angels are what strike me. They exude such peace, such a feeling of safety in an often chaotic and desolate world, such silence in an often noisy mind.