Glimpses of the forsaken eternal

Amid Italian rubble, there are questions I can't avoid

Above is soaring quietness, a soft rendition of symmetry broken by ruthless fissures that zig-zag through the plaster, bathed in a mild orange light. Rough cement and exposed bricks scar the surfaces where paintings have been prised and chiselled and smashed from the walls. This is still a sublimely beautiful space, but pure, blunt ugliness is winning.

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Welcome to the pages of my Travel Journal, featuring meandering portrayals of life on the road. This one comes to you from the Abruzzo region of Italy. For lighter reading, you might prefer my series of Sketches.

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A slow gasp comes involuntarily as I step through the staleness of the air into the lonely nave. Suddenly a clatter breaks up from the littered marble – my foot has knocked a fallen picture frame, and I pick it up to discover within its boundaries a still-sequestered, pastoral scene.

We shouldn’t be here, but my friend who lives nearby knew a way in. In one corner, a slab marks the grave of a beloved local dog. “When I came here with one of my dogs a few months ago, she stood there just looking down at it for ages,” she whispers. More recent intruders have smashed a hole. (“Bastards...”) An old wrench is lying on the marble, coldly insisting upon the pre-eminence of function over form. I move it to a less prominent spot.

Behind the altar, organ pipes rise defiantly up the walls, but the manuals and pedalboard have been toppled onto their back, like the lost hull of a ship lying broken on the ocean floor.

Through a passageway, an abandoned vestry. Neat, hand-written scores are piled together with dusty robes and the scattered paraphernalia of worship.

Despite the thrill of being here, part of me is laden with a pervading sense of loss. My head runs rings around the same questions, swerving between the specific and the universal. What happened here? How could this happen? How could Italy allow it to happen? Who made the decision, and who turned the key? What good would a thunderclap have done when the altar received its final kiss – but how deathly the silence without one.

There are many abandoned and ruined churches in Italy (and many preserved ones). Here in the ancient town of Penne, in the hills of Abruzzo, earthquakes have played their part. At its centre, the duomo was damaged by tremors in 2009, along with many of the town’s medieval buildings – still cordoned off, scarred and made crooked by sudden gaps in their brickwork. After renovations, the duomo re-opened in 2014, only to be shaken again in 2016 and 2017; its doors have been closed ever since. A destructive natural phenomenon that isn’t the result of human activity – it seems a strange concept in 2024, but there it is. Demonic earthly rumblings with no-one to blame.

Another nearby church is now open to the sky, destroyed completely. At least two more within a few minutes walk are also shut indefinitely.

Life in motion

Origin stories

A towering baroque facade of elegantly curvaceous brick beckons me to enter the Chiesa Dell’Annunziata.

Inside, an older lady sits on one of the chairs near the rear of the nave, reading a book. (Psalms? A dirty novel? I can't see.) I find another chair a few rows behind; for some reason it feels less intrusive to sit here than on the older wooden pews just a couple of rows ahead. Maybe she feels it too. Strange – why come to an ancient building like this and choose to sit on something modern and manufactured? Perhaps when we are outside our domestic environment, we feel less conspicuous amid mass-produced artefacts, manufactured products. They have no human story to grind against our own. (Why else do I feel comfortably anonymous in Costa or Starbucks where something akin to homeliness is commoditised, streamlined and faked?) Perhaps, like me, the lady with the book is not at home here.

Despite the pale light and the gold capitals atop each column, there’s a mildly morbid atmosphere. The sculpture of Christ’s prostrated corpse might have something to do with it. The painted ceiling is deteriorating, dotted with paper sheets like a patched face after a hurried shave. I presume their purpose is to protect its most fragile parts.

At one side, where once were living flames, now are rows of battery-powered plastic tat. Each one wears a sticky label with a pixelly variation on a doleful theme – a gawky-looking Jesus, a vapid Virgin Mary, a lily, a generic nativity scene – alongside clues of their worldly origin: a bar code and the email address of an importer. Underneath is an off switch for when no one is looking. Is this better than no candles at all? Perhaps no sacred space has room for what is mass-produced. I resent the plastic I’ve chosen to sit on.

Say a prayer, flatten a battery…

These churches are the fruit of an ingrained culture of specialised creativity, iteration upon iteration, an intergenerational overflowing of artworks and buildings to the glory of God – divinity blockchained down the ages. But their upkeep is the ever-flowing responsibility of a recipient community that now has other things on its mind.

Should we save only the masterpieces, knowing that most art is not masterful? Who will judge, who will pay, who will benefit, and how? How can we quantify the ineffable so that our finite resources may be equal to it? What will Generation Alpha want with the extravagance of the baroque – the frescoes and the capitals, the reiterations of putti, the dolorous Virgin Marys, the bleeding Christs? In a hundred years time, or ten thousand, whose churches will stand? Who, or what, will write the algorithm that decides when our children’s graves shall be mowed? How long will their eternal rest be before a driverless excavator scoops up their pieces, to make room for something more essential?

We creep around the questions we can not answer, squinting ahead into a post-tonal turbulence we call light.

Two citizens of Abruzzo.

Thanks for seeing this glummery through to the end. I’m not really here to indulge in cataclysm and fury, so less torturous writing will hopefully follow.