Calcata

For awhile now I have been trying to make it to a small town about 30 miles north of Rome called Calcata. I have been unable to get there because it is nearly impossible without a car, as best I figured out it would have involved taking the metro to a bus to another bus, and it was basically impossible to find time schedules for the buses so I can only assume they run on every third Sunday at times they don't bother posting. So the only answer was a car. I have been in favor of renting a car in the past but to get somewhere so close for a brief afternoon it did not seem worth the trouble. Finally a friend came through with a car on a weekend. It is still unclear how she got it, it was from her company but she only had it for the weekend, and was not working, not exactly what I think of as a company car for business use, but who am I to complain.

I had heard of this town quite some time ago as the closest equivalent to a little hippie town in all of Italy. Very small, but interesting art scene and a few good restaurants and a gorgeous setting. That was all I needed to hear, but I did some more research, which only fed my fire to want to see it.

Calcata has two very interesting stories, and I will start with the first, more recent one.

A medieval town perched on a rock out-cropping with steep drops on three sides, it was condemned by the Italian state in the 1930's as structurally unsafe. Not just a building or two, the ENTIRE town, structurally unsafe, impressive. Two pictures are below.






After they cleared out all the residents they boarded up the one entrance to the town in the medieval wall. Everyone moved to what became known as Calcata Nuova - New Calcata - which is just to the right of the pictures above - hidden by the tree in the foreground in the top one. In the 1960's artists began moving back into the old town and squatting in the deteriorating medieval structures, which they apparently decided had not moved in 30 years and were not going to move any time soon. After a few years the Italian state reversed the condemnation order and the squatters were able to by up the buildings had been living in. Today the population of the entire town is about 800 and is made up of quite the colorful bunch. From the old man dressed in a rainbow jump suit and gold earrings who spoke with an effeminate smokers voice, to the trinket shop owner who looked like she was ready to walk on stage in Vegas.

The town's second story I had never heard anything about, but gave me quite a laugh. Calcata is known as one of the final resting places of the Holy Prepuce, which, for those not fluent in church speak is the Holy Foreskin.

That's right, this town was a pilgrimage site for Jesus' foreskin.

At various points throughout history there have been as many as 18 different reported locations for this oh-so-holy piece of skin. The most well known and well documented of these was in Rome, where Charlemagne reportedly gave it to Pope Innocent III upon his coronation on Christmas day in 800. It remained in the Sancta Sanctorum of the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, across Rome from the Vatican, until the sack of Rome in 1527 when it was seized by a German soldier. I imagine he grabbed it for the richly decorated reliquary it was encased in, not the relic itself. This enterprising soldier only made it as far as Calcata on his way north out of Italy, where he was caught and imprisoned. He hid the relic in his cell and it wasn't until 30 years later that it was found, must have been a large cell, or he took the relic out of the reliquary, not sure I want to know which.

Until 1983 the relic was displayed on the festival of circumcision on Jan 1st, but then it mysteriously disappeared from the shoebox in the back of a priests closet where it was kept. Yes, you read that correctly, the only piece of Christ's body believed to still be on earth was kept in a shoebox in the back of a closet.

A found an interesting article that goes into this in more detail if you're interested.
http://www.slate.com/id/2155745/#sb2155752
And if you're really interested a book also came out this summer about it, An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town, David Farley.

Stories aside, the town is a delight to walk around on a sunny fall afternoon. The friend with a car, Laura, had been to Calcata a year or two ago and remember the restaurant a friend had recommended to her so we called and reserved a table. It was called Il Gatto Nero - the black cat.



It was very small, maybe 50 seats in two rooms, and decked out to the nines with everything cat. Cat clocks, cat pictures, cat print table clothes, you get the idea. Even with the odd decorations it was quite charming and really fit with the town. There were four of us for lunch and no one could decide what to order to we all got different things and passed our plates around. There was a fettuccine with wild boar ragu that had that rich gamey taste I love, a fettuccine with mushrooms, a polenta smothered with a rib and sausage ragu, a garden lasagna that had every kind of vegetable imaginable, I mean everything, and for a second course we split a plate of collo di maiali - pig neck - with apple, prune and onion and slow cooked until everything was falling apart. It was unreal. With a liter of wine, two bottles of water and coffees all around at the end, the meal came to a deliciously reasonable 20 euros a head. I'm getting hungry just thinking back on it, and I just had dinner.

Here's Melissa and her roommate Laura in one of the many little piazza/front porch areas we found.



Below is not where we ate lunch, but, if I ever find myself back there, where I will eat. It's a little hard to tell from the picture, but just to the right of the people seated at the table the cliff begins and drops off close to 300 feet. The view looking out is amazing, there is not another structure in site. If you strain your eyes on the valley floor below you might find a small bridge helping a path across the stream, but that's it, nothing else but green.