Firenze and Fr. Alessandro

Friday October 10^th (Happy Bday Missy!) we left early for Florence. We had the joy of touring some major churches, monasteries and museums with our Art and Architecture professor, Dr. Elizabeth Lev. (Google her if you have the chance. She’s a rockstar). She is absolutely brilliant and absolutely hilarious. It was a wonderful opportunity to get to know the city with a brilliant guide to explain the history through an artistic lens. We were fortunate to visit a lot of places and receive a lot of knowledge and wisdom of the faith from our professor.

Most memorable though was our time at the Duomo. We were rushing to mass at the Baptistery. We nearly overwhelmed the priest and congregation at the Gospel as we tried discretely slipping into the back pews. This is quite difficult to do with twenty-eight college-aged students and only five rows deep of pews in the church. We tripled the congregation and caught the server quite off guard as he scattered off to find more hosts to be consecrated. At the homily the priest asked us to move up and fill in, which we did—we packed the pews full. The priest himself was somewhat of a spectacle. He was quite overwhelmed and excited to have over two dozen young adults added to the congregation, and even though we couldn’t understand much of his rapid joyous Italian, we picked up “giovani” exclaimed excitedly many times, which we realized was the Italian word for “youth!”

He was short, gentle and old, but his huge vibrant eyes and enormous wide smile made up for any frailty he had—the energy from him immediately penetrated the hearts of us all, even though we could only understand a few words of his rapid Italian. We knew from his eyes and smile that he was very excited to have this enormous addition to his congregation.

After mass he came out to greet us, and a woman from the congregation who spoke English and who was a great friend of Fr. Alessandro translated his joyful message to us.

His love for the Lord permeated our hearts with his passionate words. His eyes watered with tears of joy to see so many young students and seminarians wanting to know the Lord more. His message was simple yet profound: love Jesus; love others.

Each of us carried his words with us, but more importantly the deep yearning to live the love he had for our Lord more deeply in our lives.

As we left the baptistery, he asked us if we would care for a personal tour of the cathedral. Our professor graciously let go of every plan she had for the day. He took us in where no one else was being let in. Behind the main sanctuary of the church were three side altars. At one we were most privileged to pray before were the relics of John Christendom.

Then he took us where only the priest of the cathedral is allowed to go—the sacristy. Now this is not any ordinary sacristy. The wood detail in all of the cupboards is very intricate and beautiful. It is a wood inlaid—every shading on all the pictures is a different piece of wood. Dr. Lev was very impressed and made sure we knew to soak this up because no one gets led back here. Also this is where a very important priest (whose name I forget) hid when he was being sought out to be killed.

The rest of the day paled in comparison to that experience…but Dr. Lev scrambled to rearrange our schedule. We got tours of another church and a museum, and the rest of the group left and eight of the girls stayed overnight.

We finished off the night by finding our hotel and a place to eat.

Saturday we got up early to go see the David. We went to the wrong museum and ran across town to the Academia…to find out it was going to be 14 Euro and that we were not quite willing to pay that much to see a large naked man…so we opted out and went to the Duomo again to try to make it to daily mass. We were late…only by 10 minutes but they were already at the consecration! (Italians are pretty quick!) so we went to pray before the tabernacle and who was there but Fr. Alessandro. J He saw us as he was walking out and was so full of joy to see us again! He said yesterday when he was with us and the seminarians he was in PARADISE. He spoke again of the love of Christ and to listen to Him with all our hearts. It was again such a blessed encounter with such a loving man.

The rest of the day we worked at our own pace around Florence…which was lovely. We basically just checked out all the markets, had a long relaxing lunch, went to the markets some more, ate some gelato, sat down outside the Duomo, people watched, and headed back on the train to Rome.