When I was four, I lied to a nun.
At the time, I figured that was a fast-pass straight to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks.
It happened like this. The nuns at my preschool served us tomatoes for lunch, and I hated tomatoes, as in the cold slimy texture and funky smell made me queasy. So I did what any four year old would do: I chipmunked them inside my cheeks.
Mumbling over the tomatoes, I asked to go to the bathroom. Sister Louisa looked at me and asked, “You’re not going to the bathroom to spit out those tomatoes, are you?”
Wide-eyed, I furiously shook my head.
I barely made it to the bathroom stall before the tomatoes came spewing out of my mouth. A good liar is one that covers her tracks, so I flushed the toilet, and then went to the sink to rinse the nasty tomato taste out of my mouth.

The rest of the day, I felt a troubling sense of disquiet. The source of my anxiety was two-fold. First, I’d lied to a nun. Second, I’d just realized that my fierce loyalty to Winnie-the-Pooh might have been eclipsed by my new love of The Aristocats. I was eaten up with guilt about it. What if Pooh found out? What kind of a friend was I?
In the years since then, I’ve shed my dutiful obedience to … well, pretty much all forms of authority. I’m what’s known as a gregarious loner. But I’ve never lost my fascination with depictions of Mary/the Holy Mother/the Blessed Virgin/the Mother of Jesus/the Madonna. She was always so pure and holy and remote, never gazing at the viewer, her eyes perpetually cast toward heaven.
I remember being very confused about the virgin part. What did that mean? Why was it important? Was it contagious, or were we original sinners granted some kind of immunity?
The nuns at my preschool described Mary as “having never known the touch of man,” and that really gave me a start. Mr. Armstrong at the corner grocery gave me a piece of candy and a pat on the head every Sunday, so I guessed that meant my name was getting crossed off the list. Frankly, I was a little relieved. It was serious business, being Mary. I wanted to be Duchess from The Aristocats.
In oh-so-Catholic Italy, I’m surrounded by Mariology. Even the train station in Rome has a Mary shrine, which surprises me since I thought Christopher was the patron saint of all travelers. There are Mary alcoves in walls, municipal buildings, along deserted roads, next to ATM machines. My favorites are the freestanding Mary shrines that look like little houses, usually supplied with Italy’s famous terracotta roofing tiles and bestrewn with humble offerings: bouquets of plastic flowers, candles in glass holders, a paper printed with a saint’s image.
The thousands upon thousands of shrines in Italy usually mark the appearance of an apparition or, perhaps, a miracle performed by the saint being venerated. The wall alcove Mary Shrine in Civita Castellana bears a plaque describing how a child in the 1950s saw the figure of the Blessed Mother standing right before her in the piazza. Hey, you can’t disprove an apparition, right?

In my recent novel, THE GROWING SEASON, which is being pitched by my agent in New York right now, one of my primary characters, an old Italian woman named Giuseppina, sees a Mary shrine.
When things got bad—and without that house blessing, things were already getting very bad—Giuseppina usually pulled out her rosary and prayed to the Madonna to protect her from the Evil Eye. Instead, she made a bouquet out of wildflowers and set it in front of the shrine of the Virgin. The shrine had existed since before she was born, one of hundreds of devotional alcoves in Canto del Lupo.
Giuseppina made the sign of the cross and gazed tenderly at the old, paint-faded Madonna, eternally pure, eternally beautiful, protected inside her red-tiled enclosure.
Please protect me from the Evil Eye, Santa Maria.
Please smite my ungrateful children.
Please teach me to be patient and how to save my vineyard.
With older Italians, who are usually the most devout, you see this kind of obsessive worry all the time. Will the Madonna hear my prayer? Did I do anything to make Her angry? Will She help my son Antonio be less of a casinaro?
Contrary to belief, the Church is actually very thorough in its investigations of otherworldly phenomena. And it’s interesting to note that Catholics are not obliged to believe in specific apparitions. If someone is pretending to see them when they are, in fact, lying, there are consequences. I don’t pretend to know what they are, but there are consequences, and they’re probably unpleasant.
Traveling south toward Naples, you start to see wall niches missing their saints. Is it good luck (or eternal damnation) to steal a religious icon? I hope to never know.
Whether you’re religious, irreligious, or merely superstitious, you will be surprised and, perhaps, fascinated by the number and variety of Mary shrines if you come to Italy.
You will also be so enraptured by the flavor of the tomatoes, you would never dream of spitting them out in the toilet.
Do you have any “shrine stories” or opinions you’d care to share? If so, leave them in the comments section below.
I got my "fire insurance" when I was in Jr. High, then allowed the premiums to lapse when I was in High School proper. (Thought I was clever for "discovering" the problem of evil. I was only a few thousand years late to the party ... ) I have, though, always loved the final prayer at the moment of death to Mary.