An Irreverent Curiosity
In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town
Farley, David
Hardcover
List Price: $25.00
booksXYZ price: $16.25
$0.81 of your order (5%) will be donated to the school of your choice.
VIEW MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS ONE
Submit a book review
BOOK SYNOPSIS
A tour through the centuries and through a bizarre Italian town in search of an unbelievable relic: the foreskin of Jesus Christ In December 1983, a priest in the Italian hill town of Calcata shared shocking news with his congregation: The pride of their town, the foreskin of Jesus, had been stolen. Some postulated that it had been stolen by Satanists. Some said the priest himself was to blame. Some even pointed their fingers at the Vatican. In 2006, travel writer David Farley moved to Calcata, determined to find the missing foreskin, or at least find out the truth behind its disappearance. Farley recounts how the relic passed from Charlemagne to the papacy to a marauding sixteenth-century German solider before finally ending up in Calcata, where miracles occurred that made the sleepy town a major pilgrimage destination. Over the centuries, as Catholic theology evolved, the relic came to be viewed as something of an embarrassment, culminating in a 1900 Church decree that allowed the parish to display it only on New Years Day. An Irreverent Curiosity interweaves this history with the curious landscape of Calcata, a beautiful and untouched medieval village set atop four-hundred-fifty-foot cliffs, which now, due to the inscrutable machinations of Italian bureaucracy, is a veritable counterculture coven. Blending history, travel, and perhaps the oddest story in Christian lore, An Irreverent Curiosity is a weird and wonderful tale of conspiracy and misadventure.
AUTHOR BIO
DAVID FARLEYs travel writing has appeared in The New York Times (including a feature on Calcata), The Washington Post, Condé Nast Traveler, Slate, and many other publications. He teaches writing at New York University.
FOR RELATED BOOKS
History Books :: Europe Books :: Italy Books
Travel Books :: Special Interest Books :: Religious Books
Humor Books :: General Books
MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 1592404545
ISBN(13-digit): 9781592404544
Dewey Decimal: 232.9
Library of Congress: 2009003761
Book Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 291
Paper Weight (lb): 1.00 lb
