Three Kinds of Martyrdom

The year was 1545. It was late in November, and the German preacher, frozen to the bone, had barely made it over the last mountain pass on his journey south. He stopped at a crossroads, and before him he saw a pretty Tyrolean city called Trent nestled in the valley at his feet.

He stood there for a few moments, contemplating what the coming ecclesiastical conference might hold. He wondered if church officials from Rome might finally be willing to hear him out, perhaps even to revoke the label of heresy hovering over the radical ideas he had nailed to that church door. For seemingly the thousandth time on this journey, he started going over the words he planned to use in order to orate the members of the Papal envoy around to his point of view.

As Martin stood there, lost in his deep thoughts, a figure appeared toiling up the hill from the town. It was a farmer's wife, returning from a moderately successful day at the market. She still had some fruit in her basket, so the reformer asked politely if he might buy some, adding a casual comment about how Trent must be in a tizzy with preparations for the Great Council as she handed him an apple and he slipped her a silver coin.

"You got that right, sir." Said the woman in that odd, thick, medieval dialect of German the locals spoke, her eyes sparkling at the sight of the silver.

"All the church dignitaries already arrived I suppose." Martin asked offhandedly, biting into the apple.

"Oh, I don't know about all that." She replied, slipping the coin into a fold in her layers of clothes. "I'll tell you one thing though: that Martin Luther fellow isn't there yet, and he better not show up, neither. I poked my head into the church of Santa Maria this morning and saw that they were getting ready for him. They were building a big bonfire in the center of the aisle, and had a pot of oil boiling off to one side." She cackled with glee. "Oh, yes, if that German blasphemer is stupid enough to come down here, he'll get what's coming to him!"

Though Luther may have been deft with a quill and handy with a hammer—and dead certain he was the one to reform the Catholic Church—he didn't trust his personal rapport with God enough to assume he'd miraculously been made fireproof as well. He thanked the woman, who trundled off down the side trail to hide the silver under the big rock in her back yard.

Martin took one more look at the pretty little city spread in its valley below him, tossed the apple core into the bushes, and turned around. He clambered back up toward the mountain pass, hoping he'd make it back to the Austrian side of the Tyrol before the first big snow shut down the Alps for the winter.

THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
Trent is where Catholics held their Great Council of 1545-63, which repudiated that German proto-Protestant Martin Luther and his wacky ideas about reforming the Church. Luther himself was invited to this esteemed liturgical conference, and they even had a seat of honor waiting for him—after a fashion.

The first council actually started in December, and I've no earthly idea of Martin Luther really was arriving at the last moment—or even if he bothered coming at all to what was bound to be an ecclesiastical (if not actual) auto da fée for him and his reform-minded colleagues.

The little scene I just laid is merely my own rendition of a folk tale told in the valley above Trent about a fruit seller and the strange German fellow she met on the road that winter. I have neither the historical background nor the desire to dig through ponderous tomes regarding this watershed event in church history to discover whether Luther even made it as far as the high Trentino valley before wisely turning on his heel and avoiding the trumped-up council entirely.

For the whole council was a sham. Oh, sure, it was touted as the grandest debate of its time, a chance for Paul III and his loyal papal cardinals to listen—really listen for once—to the worrisome reformists gathering in their proto-Protestant clouds north of the Alps. In fact, a full 700 bishops had been invited…but a mere 31 turned up for the first session, along with 50 other theologians of lesser stripes.

By the tail-dragging end of the great ecumenical council—18 years later, in 1563—the rolls of attendees still only totaled 270 bishops in all. And even that deck was, shall we say, stacked slightly in the pope's favor (the pope by that point being Sixtus V, Paul III having given up on the Council, and his time on earth, in 1555).

Of those 270, 187 of them were Italian and, presumably, archly loyal to His Holiness. Another 32 were Spanish (keep in mind, this was less than a century since the Christian re-conquest of Spain, so the Spaniards, too, were as fervent as Catholics can get), and 28 of them were French, also not known for rocking the religious boat (at least not until the age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Napoleon). In the end, a whopping two bishops were contributed by any of the countries that were, at the time, in any way seriously engaged in questioning Holy Truths and the bureaucratic architecture of the church, and they were both from Germany. Neither of them, of course, was Martin Luther.

I'm not going to get into the whole Council thing here—let alone any sort of religious debate—except to say this: like so many political to-dos, it was trumpeted as the instrument of great change, but ended up merely solidifying the status quo (and, I might add, gave the Protestants up in the British Isles all the excuse they needed to go on persecuting my own Irish Catholic ancestors). I'd rather focus on the city Trent has become since its 15 minutes (er, 18 years) of fame in the 16th century.

A LAND OF TWO COUNTRIES
Trent lies in one of those hotly contested corners of Italy that hasn't always been, technically speaking, Italy—let alone Italian. Given the way all locals will speak to you in the Tyrolean dialect of German first, and only in Italian (mit ein Strong German Accent) if you force them to, you may wonder if it's part of Italy at all. That's because it's not, really, Italy. Not Germany, either. Neither is it Austria. It's the Tirol.

There's a region of Europe's central Alps—stretching from the Bavarian border with Germany, through Austria, over the Brenner Pass, and down through this section of Italy's Adige River to the sheer, craggy Dolomiti Mountains—which has a common culture, dialect, and style known as Tyrolean. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with liminal cultures, the cohesive region of the Tyroleans now has national boundaries running right through the middle of it.

The Tirol is split into two main halves: the North Tyrol in Austria (Innsbruck would sort of be its capital), and the Südtirol (South Tyrol) across the Italian border, with centers such as spa center Meran (Merano "in Italian"), the Alto Adige capital Bozen (aka Bolzano), and the northernmost of the major towns, medieval Brixen, so solidly Teutonic that Mussolini really had to engage in some queer linguistic gymnastics in order to nationalize and Italianize its name into "Bressanone."

They tried to make Trent sound Italian, too, by tossing an "o" on the end of the city's name on maps, but Trento around here is always called "Trent," and while on the minutiae scale of cartographers it is part of the Trentino region and not the Südtriol proper, in the bigger cultural picture, Trent is Tyrolean every inch of the way.

Trent's hilltop Castello di Bonconsiglio, the "Castle of Good Council" where many of the Council of Trent meetings took place, was a big part of the flip-flopping of this province between Austrian and Italian control over the centuries. (Local control ended when the Austrian Hapsburgs took the lands away from the Counts of Tyrol.) But even though they're most comfortable as semi-Teutonic Tyroleans, the locals are also very well aware of the fact that, unlike their brethren in Innsbruck, the Südtirolischer live on the sunny side of the Alps. Though nationalistic sentiments have understandably always been (and always will be) split, there has always long been a strong pro-Italy sensibility in these parts.

SACRIFICING TO ITALY
When speaking of the Italian nationalist movement in this corner of Italy (not only the Trentino/Alto-Adige but also Trieste's neighboring Friuli region to the east), everyone mentions Gabrielle d'Annunzio, the poet turned patriot whose private little war to grab more of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian empire for Italy so embarrassed Mussolini that the dictator ended up giving d'Annunzio a gorgeous lakeside villa and helped fill it with art and antiques just to shut him up.

If another name pops up, its usually national martyr Cesare Battisti (1875-1916), hero of the Irredentiste movement to return the Trentino and Südtriol to Italy. Intellectual, publisher, father, one-time member of Vienna Parliament, socialist, and military commander, Battisti was also, I might add, something of a colleague, as early on he tried to make a go of it writing a few Trentino guidebooks (which still sell in Italy). Caught up in the region's changing fortunes and political allegiances, Battisti ended up imprisoned in Trent's Castello di Buonconsiglio and later hung for treason in the castle's long-since-drained moat.

No one, however, mentions Bice Rizzi. I only discovered her by carefully reading all the tiny 3x5 cards typed up to accompany the displays (mostly photocopies of yellowed documents and photographs) jammed into the glass cases of the Castello's museum. Bice Rizzi (1894-1982) was sentenced to death for high treason by the Austrian military in 1915 for her part in the Irredentiste movement. The sentence was later commuted to 10 years of hard labor in Wiener Neudorf.

In the meantime, the Friuli did, indeed, become part of Italy. When she as released, Rizzi returned to Trent and became director, from 1923 to 1970, of the Museo Storico in Trento's Castello di Buonconsiglio, which to this day celebrates the unification movement for which she and her more famous compatriots fought so hard.

DEATH BY SLIPPER
The Duomo museum, on the other hand, is full of images of local ecclesiastical hero San Vigilio—by himself, or keeping St. John the Baptist company, or posing alongside the Madonna and Child, or watching St. George defeat his dragon, or otherwise just generally making the rounds of the saintly fetes and Major Biblical Moments pictured in countless Renaissance and baroque altarpieces. Virgilio was an evangelical bishop (Trento's third) and was invested, supposedly at the age of 20, by Milan's Sant'Ambrogio himself in 381. Vigilio died in 400. So much, we know, is more or less true.

Later Lombard texts brag that Vigilio was martyred by "slippering," an odd sort of stoning that apparently was supposed to involve many everyday objects (including farm implements, sticks, and, yes, stones) being hurled at him, though the primary missiles of choice were the nail-studded sandals of common workers. (Apparently, Vigilio's destruction of their beloved Saturn idol didn't sit too well with the peasants of the then-pagan Val Rendena, whom was trying to convert.)

And though the (most likely invented) history texts pin the martyring on sandals, since the late 15C his icon in art has nevertheless been the zoccolo, a soft silk slipper. That is the martyrdom item what he always picture holding—like Catharine with her spiked wheel, Stephen balancing teensy boulders on his noggin, Lorenzo hefting his human hibachi, or Peter Martyr sporting a big ol' knife stuck in his head. Vigilio, the weenie saint, is invariably shown carrying a pillow on which are perched a pair of silk slippers. Poor Vigilio.

Still, it's nice to see some consistency in a place. Trent didn't truck with its traditions and identity being changed back in pagan times, and it doesn't now. It didn't appreciate strangers coming along and explaining patiently just why the locals' ways of worship were wrong in the 4th century, and they still felt the same way by the 16th century. And the staff at the museum in the castle will proudly explain—in the thick accents of a medieval German dialect—how they can be proud to be both Tirolisher and at the same time a part of the Italian state, just like their Lombard, Veneto, and Fruili neighbors who live here, in the mountains and valleys on the sunny side of the Alps.

The Heights of Monte Bianco, the Girth of Entreves

An older British couple shared my four-seater gondola for the long, dangling ride back from Mont Blanc's Aiguille du Midi to Punta Helbrunner. This is the world's longest cable car without any supporting pilons. Instead, an impressive set of cables stretches horizontally between two rocky peaks about halfway along intersect the main cables and help keep us from plummeting to our deaths. At one point, when we were hanging roughly three kilometers over the canyon-sized cracks in the Mer de Glace glacier, they nervously asked me whether there were any U.S. military bases in the area, a clear reference to the Aviano catastrophe a few years ago when a hot-dogging pilot clipped the line of a cable car over in northeastern Italy, killing all 29 people inside.

On the way back down, I spent half an hour relaxing and sunning in the scrabbly (but beautiful up close) botanical gardens half-way down the Italian side.

Back down in Entreves, I finished washing out my laundry in the sink and hung it on my wrap-around Alpine balcony to dry some during dinner. I strolled to the other end of the village and to the Maison de Fillipo and one of the most remarkable dinners I have ever had. The restaurant occupies the ground floor of an unassuming little chalet, and to enter I had to duck through the low doorway. Or rather, I had to duck through after first squatting to hold a brief but earnest conversation with the curly-haired toddler who was blocking it; he eventually deigned to let me pass. Inside was a converted farmhouse, all low ceilings, stone arches, and odd ancient farm implements nailed to the walls.

An older lady with a string of pearls, hot pink jacket, and eyeglasses on a chain sat me at a table already laden with several small dishes containing broad beans, anchovy fillets swimming in oil, and the local equivalent of chow chow. This, it turns out, was the beginning of my antipasto. Dinner, as I eventually gathered, is a fixed-price deal over which I was to have little, if no control, and for which I would eventually gladly hand over 60,000L ($28), too stuffed to do otherwise.

Soon a platter of long salamis with a tiny cutting board and sharp knife balanced on top arrived, as did a plate with paper-thin slices of cow tongue under a tomato sauce. My waiter was short and wiry, with sinewed forearms and small, serious black eyes fixed between graying wavy hair and a bushy moustache. He kept bustling by bearing platters laid out with little florettes and rondels of various goat cheeses, each dolloped with a tiny bit of tomato or pesto sauce, and he'd toss an example of each on my plate as he passed.

After a bit, my water and a full bottle of the house wine (a Dolcetto d'Alba so dark red it was almost black) appeared, as did a basket of bread with those great, thick, buttery Valle d'Aosta grissini—the best homemade bread sticks in the world. Feeling full, I placed my knife and fork across the plate to indicate I was done with the appetizers (hell, from a sheer stomach-capacity point of view I was done with dinner, really, but didn't want to seem rude), and my waiter asked what I wanted for primo. The tortellini were the thing to get, he confided, so I complied.

While I waited, my waiter dashed by again, pausing with a silver plate smothered in wedges of roast pepper topped with a bit of some kind of pesto and slid a few onto my plate, explaining "The antipasto isn't done yet." No sooner did I clean my plate of those than he spooned out some kind of kraut with giant white raisins. I finally got that down, and they bussed the plate away to replace it with another. Ah, finally. The primo will come before the antipasto does me in completely.

But it wasn't over yet. A young lady came by with a huge serving platter supporting half a pig, explaining: this here was the cooked prosciutto, this pile of pale greenery next door was the sauerkraut to go with it, oh and here are some potatoes and fresh, warm applesauce and some kind of spiced meatloaf just for good measure. I was, by this point, to say the least, stuffed. She smiled conspiratorially and whispered, "Don't worry. This is the last of the antipasto."

Bloated and still waiting for the tortellini, wondering vaguely where they would fit inside my stomach, I tried to stretch my legs out under table, only to run into something soft, giving, and furry with my shoes.

?.

I lifted up the tablecloth to discover a medium-small sheep herding-type dog under there, who looked up at me with mournful, sleepy eyes as if to ask why I felt the need to kick it, when all it was trying to do was take a nap. I looked back at him accusingly, as if to say "Why didn't you tell me you were under there earlier? I could have been slipping you the bulk of my antipasto all this time!"

After a full hour and 15 minutes (remember, I started eating the instant I sat down), a primo finally made its appearance: spinach and ricotta tortelli under a fondue of Fontina and other mountain cheeses.

These mountain folk don't know how to do anything light. If the concept of a low calorie, low cholesterol, low-fat diet ever caught on here, it would obliterate the entire regional cuisine.

Mercifully, the tortelli were served on a separate platter, which meant I was able to get away with spooning just a few over to my plate (though some explaining was in order when the waiter came to reclaim the shamefully unfinished remnants of my primo). For secondo I opted for the camoscio, meat of the local mountain goat we call chamois, provider of the soft, soft wool that has given its name to the "shammy" with which (though now made with synthetics) one polishes one's car or one's glasses. It came with a chunky—and, need I say, filling—polenta.

Dessert consisted of prunes and dried figs soaked in honey, sweetened chestnuts, and both crema and hazelnut gelato with hot fudge and homemade whipped cream. No, I am not joking. Mercifully, they spared me the cheese table (though seemd disappointed in me) and let me get away with just a caffè and a shot of blackberry grappa while the woman put her chained glasses on to rummage in an old red leather purse for my change.

I stumbled back to my hotel, threw open the balcony doors to cool the place down, and fell with a groan into the bed—on my back, of course. My stomach wouldn't fit anymore.