On the Dante Trail trail: Shamed By Diane

After a quickie food pic revealing the sort of accommodations you're never going to enjoy in Italy, follower, as well as a coy tease of the mysterious Casella's slender right arm, finally a post not immediately wallowing in appetite and other narcissitic self-indulgence, one obviously a product of having been directly shamed into it by Diane. Which is only to say this, really: there were four pictures of art and architecture, allowing the tide of food and selfies to recede for the moment. For those who may be wagering in an office pool:

Total pics: 13 - 100%

Selfies: 7 - 39% of total

Things Rod Ate: 3 - 22% of total

Fear not. We are still following the same Rod. If you didn't know how devout he was, he's Johnny-on-the-spot  here ready to remind you he's one of the elect:

There were only about 30 people there in the side chapel; the cathedral only let people in who wanted to pray. I prayed before the relics of St. Zenobius (337-417), the first bishop of Florence, and again in front of the famed painting of Dante presenting the Commedia to Florence (it is much, much darker than the usual depictions).

But what's drehery devotion without the requisite intramural one-upmanship?

Earlier in the day we had been to mass. Casella and James C. are Catholic traditionalists. I couldn’t find an Orthodox liturgy around town, so I accompanied them. It was a beautiful mass, but it really made me feel how deeply Orthodox I have become liturgically.

Gee, what a shame Dante's Catholic Italy couldn't have been more appropriately Orthodox. But...oh, dear! Is Rod taking risks with his health as the price of taking us with him?

After a while, I began to feel a little dizzy, and had to step out for air. I walked around the block, looking to buy a bottle of water. I found one, then returned to the church and sat on the steps reading the Purgatorio, Canto 10.

Thank God he made it through that, and bless him for informing us of every beep in his health mood. Oh, he makes a brief comment about Dante, too. After the intestines are packed like sausages, that's what it's all about, you know.

And...here we go: like a Berkshire hog awkwardly tottering on his rear trotters, sheepishly trying to mumble his way through a Rosary while remnant slops dribble from his snout, Rod ensures we will not be bereft of a foodie peek:

We had lunch after mass, then gelato — fig and ricotta, black sesame, and pistachio for me — then picked up our tickets for the Uffizi.

But it's as a guide to the art he's experiencing for us, living the experience for us because we can't be there that he truly shines in this post. Here's the description, so richly nuanced with detail that only Rod can describe it this way:

The luminous genius of Botticelli and Michelangelo, in particular, defy my ability to describe. Eventually I just stopped trying to articulate to myself why these paintings were so great, and tried to allow myself to experience them directly....Eventually it’s too much. All that light and beauty is overwhelming.

Okay, sorry. I lied. Like most of the ideas he tries to take credit for articulating, he just fakes his way through this, too. Wouldn't "Wow!" have just been more honest and succinct?

And the takeaway from today's following of Rod following in Dante's footsteps on the Dante Trail trail: why, how Rod confronts his mid-life crisis head on, of course.

Heading toward 50, married to a woman who while she's aged tremendously from the post-teen he initially snagged is currently reveling in her biological prime, just having assumed another mortgage in a rural suburb whose locals forced him to delete his local blog - where, where can Peter escape to?

Back to youth, of course, back to the dreamy Never Never Land of all night college bull sessions:

Tonight James, Casella and I finished with dinner in our apartment. We ate good Italian food and drank good Italian wine and listened to Sidney Bechet, and then Louis Armstrong, and talked about God and Dante and Florence. Stepping into the kitchen to get more water for the table, I thought that this is the kind of moment I dreamed of when I was younger — a night like this, filled with friendship, music, food, and conversation about ideas.

We aren't really on the trail of Dante here at all, followers, we're on the trail of Rod's youth, fleeing him ever more rapidly with each passing month. Adulthood and its responsibilities will be left to Mrs. Dreher, back home where she belongs.

Oh, but he did give a beggar woman a few coins, so there's that.

Will that be enough to save our spiky-haired Pan once Italy is behind him, after he's back, marooned in rural Louisiana with a woman in her prime ten years younger and the kids' college depending on him selling the Dante book he'll still have to write? We'll just have to wait and see.