On day 5, I woke up, and thought, "Oh, no. I'm getting my usual cold....this is bad. This is really bad."
You may say, "Allyson, it's just a cold. You cough a little, you sneeze a little. No big deal."
Wrong. Very, very wrong. When I do something, I can't do it halfway. When I get a "cold" I get post-nasal drip. So...to not spare you the disgusting details...this means that snot runs down my throat and I cough it back up. And when I say "cough", I really mean, "hack up my lungs and wish I were dead or at least could live without a nose...forever."
This would've been uncomfortable before 2020. It is 2022. I now live in a world that is obnoxiously paranoid: "She's coughing! She has COVID! WHY ISN'T SHE WEARING A MASK?!!!"
Uh, because wearing a mask would make my nose run faster, thereby making the coughing worse. Genius, I know.
Covid world paranoia + miserable with a "cold" + miserable with a cold in a foreign country = "Noooooooo....why?"
So, back to September 23rd: our fifth day in Italy wasn't boding well.
Get up early, eat breakfast, get our luggage to the bus, make sure I have cough drops...not that they are going to help me get better.
On the way to Pietrelcina, we saw Monte Cassino:
Francesco had to call ahead to the museum to request that they stay open longer so that we could have a bathroom break, because the museum had the only public toilets in the entire town...which were not free, of course. Remember that in many places in Europe, people work in the morning and then have a break in the afternoon when the business actually shuts down and they can go home if they want before returning to work in the evening, especially small towns. There is no such thing as "Let's get lunch at 2:30 pm," in Pietrelcina.
After stopping at the bathrooms, Francesco gave us details about roads and landmarks to look for on our way back. I don't know if I've already mentioned this, but most of the time, he would give us a summary of what we would do that day, go with us to a main spot, be with us for a tour, whether he was giving it or someone else, and then we were free to go off for something to eat, shopping, or visiting other places by ourselves. It was our responsibility to meet back at the meeting place or the bus again at the end of the allotted time in a particular place.
Pietrelcina is such a cute, quaint little town. I think, even after coming home, I can confidently say that it was my favorite place I was in Italy. I'm not so sure it is the safest for people who aren't steady on their feet though. All of the streets are of slippery white marble. As we were walking, Mom and I comment that we couldn't imagine walking up and down all those hills when the roads were wet. I'm not sure how much snow they get (it is pretty high up in elevation, in my Indiana opinion), but that seemed pretty like a pretty treacherous predicament. Mom also commented how we were quite a pair: her leaning on me the entire time so that she didn't fall, and me starting to cough up a storm with that darn cold.
Okay, so this next picture I quickly took as we walked up many hills to the house in which Padre Pio was born:
After quite a walk, we made it:
The house was interesting, because they had two totally separate rooms for the kitchen and the bedroom. And when I say "separate," I mean that you went out of the house and went in the other door to get from one to the other. At first, I thought, "Well, this would help keep the kitchen heat out of the bedroom in the summer." But then I figured, "These people probably thought they were freezing in the winter without that heat from the kitchen." So, I guess I could've handled it, but I'm just not sure if this was the real mindset of having this kind of house setup or if that was just how this building was made and they were too poor to care.
Either way, we visited the kitchen first (on the left of the house).
As I posted on Facebook, I want to note again that the doorways were so short! I had to dunk under them. And some of the tourists forgot and smacked their heads against the wooden beams. I felt so bad for them. But I felt really special being one of them, having also to bend to get through the doors. Mom, being one inch shorter than me, wasn't so lucky and walked right through. 5 ft 1 isn't so short now, is it? 😜
Here's Mom walking right through the doorway from the first room into the back room of the kitchen. Five feet never looked so tall:
Almost everything was behind glass:
We had to turn around and go back out the way we came in. Then we went to the second door on the right to the bedroom where Padre Pio was born:
Padre Pio's parents:
After going to his house, we went to the Church of St. Anne. This was where St. Padre Pio was baptized, received First Communion, and was confirmed. It was also the church where he celebrated Mass and heard confessions when he still lived in town.
Before going in, I took a panorama picture. Not my best, I admit.
Inside St. Anne's:
The baptismal font:
To the right is a side altar that I thought was pretty (Diane accidentally photo-bombed my pic):
Relics of Padre Pio are under the other side-altar:
Further up is the confessional he used in his hometown:
The organ was at the front of the church:
Another thing I forgot to mention: We were in Padre Pio's hometown where he was born on his feast day. It was cool. It was also really nice that most of the tour groups were not there yet, so most of my pictures on the walk back to the meeting place with Mom are free of people!
You may be wondering why I have a picture of a random dog. I will have you know that this isn't just some random dog, but our personal guide who walked our group up to Padre Pio's childhood home and to St. Anne's. In all seriousness: it seems that the towns in Italy have community dogs that everyone takes care of. I guess it's the equivalent of French neighborhood cats. We saw two in Pietrelcina, but this one really stayed with us most of the time. After we went into St. Anne's, it started walking down back towards the town center. Mom and I, usually being the first ones to head back to the meeting point, saw our guide again and I got a picture of him:
Being a neighborhood dog is so tiring.
I really like this picture and think it's pretty good, if I do say so myself:
We made it back to our meeting point: outside the museum and the basilica
I wish I could remember, but I just can't think of what the name of this church is...and I can't remember if it's a basilica or not. Either way, we went in because it wasn't quite time to get on the bus yet.
It was nice enough, but as we sat there, I couldn't help but think that the hands on the side were a bit freaky/not nice looking. They remind me of the hands that hold the torches in "Phantom of the Opera," but these have the stigmata on them.
Another relic of Padre Pio:
See the freaky hands under the stations?
I found St. Anthony! As if he was lost...
Afterwards, we headed to our hotel in San Giovanni Rotondo on the east coast. This town was where the saint lived from 1916 until he died in 1968. We will get to pictures and tour details about this place more in the next post, if I'm not mistaken. The reasoning for St. Padre Pio living in Rotondo, we were told, was because it was higher in elevation and it would help with his tuberculosis. I kept thinking, "Why would you want to go up higher in elevation if you have TB? To get less oxygen doesn't make any sense. I kept asking Mom, who kept talking it over with the other nurse, Julie, in our tour group. The consensus is that, apparently, you eventually start making more red blood cells or something in order to get used to the higher altitude. Whatever. I still think it would've been better for him to go down in elevation. But I'm not even "just a nurse" (That's an inside joke. you'll have to ask Mom about it sometime).
I will say that our hotel in San Giovanni reminded me of a dorm-like prison. You could literally hear everything from the people in rooms on both sides and above you. And now I'd like to take the time to apologize to the people who had to put up with hearing me hacking all night long (as if they are ever going to read this post). I was in more pain than you ever were, trust me.
I kept praying to St. Padre Pio to please ask God to heal me because I heard that he made it his mission to pray for people who were sick and suffering. Spoiler alert: either God said no to him or he didn't bother asking. I got worse.
More in the next post.
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