Padre Pio

Erminia asked us if we would like to go to St Giovanni Rotondo to see Padre Pio. Padre Pio is an interesting phenomenon in Southern Italy and I believe also in Spain. He was a monk who prayed either for the ending of the First World War or the second and was rewarded with the stigmata for his efforts and walked around with bandages on his hands and feet for the rest of his days. After the Second World War he decided to raise money for the building of an enormous hospital for the poor in St Giovanni Rotondo, the tiny hill town in northern Puglia where he lived in the local monastery. His stigmata were regarded I believe with scepticism by the Catholic Church, but he was a friend of Pope John Paul, who ultimately made him a saint a year or two ago (he died in the 1960s). You see Padre Pio’s image everywhere in Southern Italy, in shops and houses, outside public buildings and frequently in the cabs of Italian HGVs and St Giovanni is now a huge place of pilgrimage, full of tacky hotels and souvenir shops.

To me the veneration of Padre Pio is not entirely straightforward, it has something of the popular working class movement about it and there is something almost subversive about the whole business. I think this may be because he is thought of as someone who stood up for the working people of Italy and with some Italian peasants there’s a kind of “no one looks after our interests except Padre Pio” kind of bloody-minded attitude.

Anyway, sometime in April Erminia started to talk to us about whether we wanted to go to see Padre Pio and if we did she would try to get us tickets. We weren’t exactly sure what it was all about, but we decided to go for it. Slowly it dawned on us that what we had actually signed up for was a coach trip to St Giovanni Rotondo (about 100 miles north of us). Erminia also made it clear that in order not to miss the coach we would have to leave home at 4.30am. Come the big day we take the car into Paolo and Erminia’s drive at the crack of dawn to find Erminia in her best frock and Paolo in a natty sports jacket and flat hat. They direct us to a shop in the middle of nowhere to which we have never been, but which is no more than 1.5 miles from our house. Here we realise is where we buy our pannini (rolls) for the journey. Things are very expensive in St Giovanni we are told, so it’s a good move to stock up here. More and more people arrive in the shop and at 5.30am the coach rolls in all the way from Locorotondo, already more than half full. By the time all the folks from the shop pile in it is full and we and a couple of teenagers are by far the youngest occupants. Erminia catches up on all the gossip of the last year and Paolo sits aloof, hands on walking stick.

The journey North is interminable, with toilet stops every 30 minutes. As we get closer to our destination the boredom and bum ache is broken a little by someone reciting “Hail Marys” over the coach’s pa system: “Madre di Dio prega per noi peccatore ….” Etc, etc. For most of the journey my face is fixed in a smiling rictus I reserve for situations where I haven’t a clue what is going on or what people are saying to me. Then after what seems like hours we turn off the motorway, but not for St Giovanni. Eventually we pull up at some sort of shrine where there are already a couple of coaches and we cram into a little chapel for a service given by some kind of lay preacher. Then we cue for an hour for what appears to be a small bottle of holy olive oil. This is dispensed in another chapel, next to the first one, by a big, unshaven villainous looking man. I can tell by the huge pile of discarded leg irons, wheelchairs and other apparatus for people with disabilities that this is a serious shit sort of shrine. We rumble off on the coach with our little bottles of holy oil, me none the wiser.

After another hour we reach the Gargagno, the mountainous spur of the Italian boot and climb up and up to St Giovanni. When we get there it’s a kind of religious version of Las Vegas, full of hotels and cheap tat for religious maniacs. Our coach parks on the outskirts of the town where parking we are informed is much cheaper than in the centre and we all troop off to the outside tables of a nearby restaurant. Here we realise that the organisers have pulled another stroke to save money by agreeing with the management that we can eat our own rolls and drink our own drinks, provided the odd table orders a plate of chips. So we get the rolls out and Erminia pulls out a bottle of wine. I drink from a plastic cup while Paolo swigs the bottle, poking Erminia from time to time with his stick if he can’t get her attention. This gets a predictable 100-decibel response from Erminia.

After lunch Erminia goes to the loo and Paolo decides to set off for the town centre while we wait for her. It’s at least a mile away and is a strain for more than a few of the octogenarians on the trip. We catch up with him just as he reaches the great big hospital built by Padre Pio. We decide to walk on to the new church, built by the architect Renzo Piano. Paolo decides not to go in the new church as it doesn’t have Padre Pio’s tomb, which is still in the old church (and perhaps also his feet are hurting). The new church is a great dome of wood and concrete and steel and very impressive with great views over the Gargagno and it is said the biggest organ in Europe. We leave the church and catch up with Erminia and Paolo and I ask if I can get a photo of them and Sue. Sizing up the shot with all three of them smiling into the camera I realise: “This is Erminia and Paolo’s big day out of the year. They are intelligent, subtle and humorous people, but their tastes really are this simple. What’s more they are delighted to be sharing the day with us and showing us things of which they are genuinely proud. These people love us and we love them.” I felt the tear well in my eye and thought what a long way from Blackheath we were.

The day wound on in its interminable way. The coach journey back was of course hell and we finally delivered Erminia and Paolo to their doorstep at 8.30pm, sixteen bloody hours after we left.