Having enjoyed Rome so much on this, my fourth visit, I still find some things about the city odd:
1. The post office will not sell you stamps. They will frank a letter with stamps and take it from you to mail, but they will not sell you stamps to take away;
2. The price of postage is very high: The price quoted me by the newsdealer the day I tried and failed to buy stamps at the post office, about 2 Euros and a bit more, is the same as the price offered at the post office;
3. The postal clerk who told me they had no stamps to sell me may well have run out of international stamps.
Here's are a few other items:
All over the city a black and white calendar with a large photo of a young priest is being sold as a Calendar Vaticano.
When I first saw the image of a dark-haired, dark eyed young priest with a winning half-smile, I thought perhaps he was someone who had lived an exemplary life and was being proposed for Vatican recognition. However, the name on the photograph was that of Paolo Pazzi. I turned over the calendar and found a total of twelve photographs --a priest for each month, each young and fetching.
After doing some research on the Internet, I found the following story by a "Variety" reporter, Nick Vivarelli :
Casting call … Seeking: hunky Roman Catholic seminarians for calendar sold from Seville to Sydney.
Italo photog Piero Pazzi claims he indeed shoots real priests for Calendario Romano — known in Rome as the Vatican beefcake calendar — which has become such an international cult item that Rizzoli recently snapped up rights to publish an American edition.
Bolstering his claim, Pazzi has posted casting calls in four languages on his website, calendarioromano.org. And while they don’t say hunkyness is required, the English version oddly states that “single clergymen” are being sought for the shoot.
“It’s just intended as a souvenir,” Pazzi tells Variety, noting that he gets plenty of orders for the calendar from Protestant female ministers in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
The shots “are mostly pictures of real priests, which I take during my travels. But sometimes I do get Catholic priests who respond to the casting call,” he says.
As for hunkyness, “I pick them young to signal that their calling is still very much alive,” is all Pazzi would concede.
Pazzi’s clever cottage industry, of course, has no ties to the Vatican, but he does seem to have a tacit Holy See seal of approval: Copies of Calendario Romano were being handed out in June by organizers of World Youth Day in Sydney as an unofficial marketing tool for the massive Roman Catholic teen shindig.
But more recently the Vatican chastised an Italian priest with a similar initiative: a beauty contest for nuns between 18 and 40.
Father Antonio Rungi made Italo headlines in August when his planned Sister Italia pageant was shot down by his superiors despite his claims that it would help “boost sagging vocations.”
***
I wonder how the priests photographed feel about being used in this way. The traffic on the Internet reveals that the calendar fulfills a homoerotic fantasy.
I suppose the best way to approach the whole thing is to ignore it, if possible. --Which reminds me of the story about Pope John XXIII at a dinner party:
Before Angelo Roncalli became Pope, he was a cardinal attached to the church of Santa Prisca as well as Patriarch of Venice. He was much in demand at lay functions in addition to his priestly duties. One night he was invited to a dinner party and seated opposite a woman in a scandalously low cut dress, considering the presence of the Cardinal. Cardinal Roncalli was accompanied by a priest who was there to attend to him and seated next to him.
Seeing the woman in the low-cut dress, the priest, horrified, whispered to Cardinal Roncalli:
"Do you see that woman? Her dress is causing scandal! Everyone is talking about it and looking at her, it's so inappropriate."
Unperturbed, Cardinal Roncalli replied to his aide-de-camp as follows:
"Oh no, you are incorrect. Everyone is not looking at her. They are looking at me to see whether I am looking at her!"
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