Fully immerse ourselves in Italy and all it had to offer.
Venice does not believe in working on Sundays. I found out the hard way when our Ethernet connection was down our first weekend, posing some minor difficulties in our travel plans (we weren’t able to check the change in the vaporetto schedule that Sunday for reasons I forget) but was a refreshing break from the outside world, allowing us to fully immerse ourselves in Italy and all it had to offer. I’m so used to the hustle and bustle back home, the never-ending routine of work, work, and work; it was nice to just be able to kick back and enjoy life, especially as Italians do, by taking a break from their work on Sundays.
Venetians have a very big church culture, which makes sense, given their history, especially their questionable claim that they have the body of Saint Mark supposedly stolen from Egypt wrapped in pork. My friends would fret on Sunday mornings, wondering if their outfit would be conservative enough for an Italian service, as church was taken quite seriously there. But this worry was not restricted just to Sunday service, but to all church entries, as I would find out later in nearby Padua, at the Basilica of Saint Anthony. Like all the churches we saw, it had overwhelming architecture, with many arches and domes meant to impress. Inside, it was lined with mosaics and paintings, filled with relics – gold and precious stones, valuables, but even the rumored toe of a saint. It was in the room full of relics that my classmates and I were yelled at by a priest, angry and finger wagging, in spitfire Italian. We were then rushed out of the room, and told that he’d thought us “indecently dressed,” a crime that was “sacrilegious.” We’d been told by our professor that our shoulders needed to be covered up for this church visit, but that wasn’t enough: our knees had to be covered as well. Italians are indeed strict with church visits, even by tourists. It just goes to show how seriously they take religion and church, so much that they demand a certain amount of respect, even from people that they open their country to.
Church was never a big part of my life, and I can’t say that Italy has changed that. I was raised in a sporadic Buddhist household, though I did have an aunt who was Christian and took me to church a few times. Admittedly, I know little about religion and its institutions; I never felt comfortable in that kind of atmosphere, and after experiencing that little run-in with the priest, I can’t say that I feel more comfortable. But in traveling abroad, I realized that if I wished to truly immerse myself in another culture, I had to keep an open mind and even venture out of my comfort zone (though, of course, when you consciously choose to spend a month in a country whose language you have no knowledge of, as I did, one could say that you were asking for it). And I’m glad I did, because now I have a deeper understanding of the Italian culture and I’m able to better connect with my Italian-American neighbors back home.
Article written by Becky Chao.
