Relics were venerated in Constantinople but dispersed after the Fourth Crusade, such as Our Lady’s mantle (the Maphorion), Christ’s sandals, the cloak of Saint John the Baptist, an ampoule of Christ’s blood used to sign certain solemn documents, the parapet of the well where Christ met the Samaritan woman, the stone on which Christ’s body was laid after his death, Solomon’s throne, Moses’ rod, the remains of the innocents slaughtered by Herod, a piece of dung dropped by the donkey on which Jesus entered Jerusalem, the icon of the Hodegetria (an image of Mary and child said to have been painted by Saint Luke), other icons considered miraculous since they were not painted by human hand (acheiropoieta), and the Mandylion, the cloth imprinted with the face of Christ (originally at Edessa, where it was famed for making the city impregnable when displayed on its walls).
I wouldn’t wish to give the impression that the conservation of relics is exclusively a Christian, or indeed Catholic, practice. Pliny tells us about the treasured relics of the Greco-Roman world, such as Orpheus’s lyre, Helen’s sandal, or the bones of the monster that attacked Andromeda. And by the classical period, the presence of a relic already provided a point of attraction for a city or for a temple, and was therefore a valuable tourist “commodity” as well as a sacred object.
The cult of the relic is to be found in every religion and culture. It depends, on the one hand, upon a sort of impulse that I would describe as mytho-materialistic—so that by touching parts of the body of great men or saints we are able to experience something of their power—and, on the other hand, upon a normal antiquarian taste for the past (so that a collector is prepared to spend money to have not just the first edition of a famous book, but also the book that belonged to an important person).
In this second sense (though perhaps in the first too) there is also a secular cult of the relic—all we have to do is read Christie’s auction catalogs to see how a pair of shoes belonging to a famous diva is being offered at prices higher than that of a picture by a Renaissance painter. These kinds of memorabilia can be the actual gloves of Jacqueline Kennedy or those simply worn by Rita Hayworth for the filming of Gilda. In that respect, I have seen tourists in Nashville, Tennessee, going to admire Elvis Presley’s Cadillac—which by the way wasn’t the only one, since he changed them every six months.
The most famous relic of all times is, of course, the Holy Grail, but I wouldn’t advise anyone to set out in search of that (or those) since past experiences haven’t been too encouraging—in any event, it has been scientifically proven that two thousand years aren’t long enough.
[An earlier Italian version, titled “Andare per tesori,” appeared in Milano: Meraviglie, miracoli, misteri, edited by Roberta Cordani (Milan: CELIP, 2011); a second expanded version (“In attesa di una semiotica dei tesori”) was published in Testure: Scritti seriosi e schizzi scherzosi per Omar Calabrese by Stefano Jacoviello and others (Siena: Protagon, 2009).]
Fermented Delights
MY RELATIONS WITH Piero Camporesi were always very friendly and cordial, marked by a mutual esteem—or at least I hope they were—to the point where I plundered choice quotes from him for my novels The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before and he asked me to write a preface for the English edition of his book on blood. But we always tended to meet in academic circles—at university course committees, in faculty corridors, or perhaps in the porticoed streets of Bologna—and I never got to know him in any private setting or to visit his library.
So far as I know, Camporesi was a gourmet. He enjoyed good food and I’m told he was a good cook: no surprise for a writer who dedicated so many pages not just to the pains but also the pleasures of the body—to milk, sauces, and dressings. Nor should we expect anything else from someone who once declared (in a newspaper interview in August 1985) that, after having studied Petrarch, the baroque, Alfieri, and Romanticism, his discovery of Pellegrino Artusi toward the end of the 1960s had been devastating.
But my knowledge about Camporesi’s passion for food is only bookish; I have dined with him only in the pages of his books.
I am therefore qualified to celebrate Camporesi the gourmet simply as an avid reader of his work. He wrote about squalor, bodily waste, and putrefaction, and at the same time about his lusts and ecstasies. But he did so by delving with his scalpel into the bodies of books, by which I mean into books describing bodies, and—like a latter-day Mondino de Liuzzi—he went about dissecting not corpses stolen from cemeteries, but books unearthed from the musty depths of libraries where they had often languished forgotten, concealing their delights, in the way that the character des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours went about rediscovering in neglected early medieval chronicles “the stammering grace, the often exquisite clumsiness of the monks, stirring the poetical leftovers of antiquity into a pious stew . . . verbs of refined sweetness, substantives smelling of incense, and strange adjectives crudely fashioned out of gold in the delightful barbaric style of Gothic jewellery” (translated by Robert Baldrick).
Of course, if Camporesi had wanted literature in which to lick his lips while savoring excessive intemperate and obsolescent words, he could have turned to such classics of linguistic corruption as that Italian forerunner of Joyce, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or the macaronic macaroni of Teofilo Folengo, or—if he had wanted to gorge himself on modernity—Carlo Emilio Gadda. Instead he went off in search of unknown texts, or books that were familiar in other respects. Having read Camporesi’s works we certainly know much more about blood, bread, wine, and chocolate, in the same way that we learn extraordinary things about hunger, worms, buboes and scrofula, fiber, intestines, vomit, greed, as well as fun fairs and carnivals. But I would venture to suggest that these explorations would be fascinating even if the phenomena he writes about had never actually taken place, even if Camporesi had been telling us about bodies and bodily nourishment of aliens from Venus, somewhere too far away to arouse any sense of attraction or disgust. By which I mean that it is fascinating to know that remote centuries were peopled by bands of vagrants, but more fascinating still to discover this purely flatus vocis, and to read about fake monks, charlatans, rogues, swindlers, beggars and ragamuffins, lepers and cripples, peddlers, tramps, ballad singers, itinerant clerics, scholar gypsies, cardsharps, jugglers, maimed soldiers, wandering Jews, madmen, fugitives, convicts with docked ears, or sodomites.
It is not pharmaceutics but lexicography or linguistic history that we are most aware of when reading his descriptions of poppy syrups, ointments, unguents, baths, inhalants, powders, tinctures, spongia somnifera soaked in opium juices, henbane, hemlock, mandrake . . .
We open The Anatomy of the Senses (1994) at the first chapter, “The Cursed Cheese.” We know that cheese, though it comes from a pure and sweet liquid, milk, is more appetizing the more it tastes of putrefaction, and reminds us of molds and those body odors we usually try to get rid of with foot baths and bidets—and this is well known not only to the glutton but especially to the gourmet. Yet I doubt whether Camporesi would have been able to write twenty-eight pages on the iniquities of cheese by simply sniffing Gorgonzola and Stilton, or letting the taste of formaggio di fossa, Reblochon, Roquefort, or vacherin linger on his tongue. He had to go off exploring forgotten pages of Campanella’s De sensu rerum et magia or, worse still, retrieving from the seventeenth century, that most neglected period, Il mercato delle maraviglie di natura by Nicolò Serpetro, the Physica subterranea by Joachim Becher, De casei nequitia by Johann Peter Lotichius, and Intorno ai latticini by Paolo Boccone, thus superimposing on the actual aroma of cheese this even ranker and more putrid collage of quotations: