A Marian moment away from the tourists

Andrew M Brown

15 November, 2018

A section of Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto: just out of shot are two kneeling beggar-pilgrims (Photo: Wikipedia)

How to enjoy a Caravaggio gem in peace and quiet

The paradox of modern mass tourism is that we all want to visit beautiful places that aren’t spoilt by tourism, and yet each of us is a tourist who contributes in some sense to the destruction of those places.

This is a subject that the visionary French writer Michel Houellebecq (pronounced “Welbeck”) explored brilliantly and with unsparing truthfulness in his 2001 novel, Platform, concerning sex tourism, terrorism and the narcissistic nihilism of the West.

After the death of his unlamented father, the central character Michel reflects on the lust for faraway travel: “The minute they have a couple of days of freedom, the inhabitants of Western Europe dash off to the other side of the world, they go halfway round the world in a plane, they behave – literally – like escaped convicts.”

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When I travel I kid myself that I’m not a tourist, that I’m really a local. I never wear shorts, which are a giveaway, unless you happen to be in Bermuda. (And even there, the knee-length formal shorts worn by working folk differ from typical holiday garb.) And I like to find a nice café or neighbourhood restaurant; you only have to visit a few times and you’re treated like a regular.

Sometimes, when visiting a big city such as New York, I’ve gone to the trouble of photocopying pages from the guide book rather than lugging it around. That also saves me (so I imagine) from being identified as one of the millions of gawping globetrotters, ready to be pounced on by a waiter thrusting a multilingual laminated menu into my hands.

The other week I was in Rome with our 13-year-old son – just the two of us, since the rest of the family was back at work and school. Rome can be a profoundly affecting place to visit, as Matthew Schmitz was saying in a recent issue of the Catholic Herald.

But Rome is also one of the world’s biggest honeypots for the touring hordes. Coaches unload their exhausted travellers at the Colosseum, the Roman forum and, biggest lure of all, the Sistine Chapel – where the steam from 20,000 sweating visitors a day, and what has been described as a “wall” of human breath, threaten to ruin the masterpieces of Michelangelo, Botticelli et al. Visitor numbers have rocketed nearly fivefold in the past seven years.

Those willing to make the journey outside the walls of the city can go down into the catacombs, where Christians chiselled thousands of tombs, many for children, into the soft tufa rock in a network of underground passageways. Most have long since been emptied, their relics and marble coverings (carved with fish, doves or the Chi Rho symbol) removed. But you can still see the odd bone, skull, oil lamp; and many of the terracotta tomb coverings of poorer families remain in place.

Sad to report, our intelligent Vatican-approved escort told us of an incident of such crass insensitivity it depressed me. The guide cannot monitor what each member of the party is doing as the group snakes through the tunnels. And, not long before our visit, someone at the back of the line had grabbed a 2,000-year-old bone from one of the tombs and taken a selfie with it. In the process he had crushed it to dust.

It’s impossible to say this without sounding snobby, but it is a fact that the tourist hordes are only going to grow, along with the burgeoning of the middle classes in the East. Even smaller cities in Britain have installed information panels everywhere, displaying pictures and points of interest about the street or neighbourhood’s history.

But there are always things to discover. Near the Vatican we found a newly established fresh pasta maker (pastificio) which also sold utterly delicious lunches at a handful of tables on plastic plates. Best of all was tornarelli (thick, long Roman pasta) with cacio and pepe, a creamy sauce produced only by skilful mixing of pecorino cheese, black pepper and some starchy pasta water. On our third visit I asked for the recipe.

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At a quarter to seven on our first evening in the city we walked through the narrow streets, dodging the rasping scooters, to find the church of Sant’Agostino nearly empty.

We crept quietly in, and in the first chapel on the left there it was – Caravaggio’s painting of the Madonna of Loreto: the sublime and the grubby together, Virgin and naked child appearing in front of two beggar-pilgrims, man and woman kneeling, their hands clasped in prayer. The eye is drawn diagonally upwards to Mary’s luminous face, and in the foreground nearest the viewer are (shock!) the filthy soles of the man’s feet.

In the heaving city, we had this painting all to ourselves.

Andrew M Brown is obituaries editor of The Daily Telegraph