For the tourists who come to Lake Orta for the weekend, the three-minute boat ride across the water to the Basilica of Saint Julius on San Giulio island is part of their weekend doings, “an attraction” and part of the local economy all of which means that by the time you unload from the boat and walk up to the church the usual amusement park rules apply.
Packed with sainted frescoes, hand-carved icons and benches that may as well have the blood of Christ splattered on them, even the most godless soul will get, here, a whiff of “someone really cares about this place, thinks it sacred” senseabilty, though neither this, not the signs urging you to refain from taking pictures does anything of the kind.
(Would Jesus object to the day tripper from Milan or wherever she is from standing on a bench so she can get the shot we wants? Would The Pope? Would the mysterious nuns who live here and who you have yet to see?)
Every visitor, the day tripper included, crosses themselves when entering the church, fyi.
But the show is the Sunday mass where, exactly on time, the 70 or so nuns who live in this monastery enter from the back of the church singing a Gregorian chant until and after the lead nun places the painting of Mr. J she has been on carrying on the altar and the young priest (maybe thirty or so, does he live on the island too?) shows up to run everyone through the usual hocus-pocus of a catholic mass.
While I can see something noble, even envy inducing, about giving up everything to live on one of Italy’s most romantic spots so as to do no more than pray and make things (in this case for The Church) and, further, how this church is particularly packed with signs of devotion to all of that, that very devotion adds to the immature fairy tale nature of what’s going on here, the way this institution, serving this order in unique fashion as it may well be, can neither speak to the world nor stay removed from it, as if all involved are children at play who, having long ago forgot the joy of the game thy began to play now hold onto its old pieces with their own weird and particular desperation.
Indeed, while the wearing of Covid masks by all the nuns (a little weird itself) and everyone in the audience too makes such detection a little difficult, by every other account and for the duration of the mass, no one ever smiles.