By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Florence is a lovely place to visit anytime of the year. Being in Italy during Easter five years ago with my whole family, however, was unforgettable.
We travelled in the spring of 2013 with a group of students, faculty, and friends from Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City. The trip, organized by our friends Tim and Jen Soran, also included visits to Pompeii, Assisi, the Cinque Terra, Verona, Venice, and, of course, Rome. Fresh off the plane in Rome on a Wednesday morning we hurried, with sleepy eyes and mussed up hair, to St. Peter’s Square to participate in one of the first general audiences of the newly-installed Pope Francis.
In Florence, we saw the tomb of Galileo at Santa Croce Church. Michelangelo is buried too, just footsteps away from some of his greatest works of art at the Galleria dell’Accademia, including the spectacular statue of David. Once in the museum, our eyes were drawn immediately to one of David’s most prominent features. Obviously, of course, I mean his serene face responding to the gigantic threat posed by his pending confrontation with Goliath.
A highlight of the visit was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to go to Easter Sunday Mass in the Florence’s Duomo, the famous Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, St. Mary of the Flower. Work on the church started in 1296 and finished in 1436, with the completion of the iconic dome engineered by Filippo Brunelleschi. The Easter Mass we attended was completely in Italian and Latin, but the comforting aspect of a Catholic liturgy is you can attend one anywhere in the world and still know what is going on.
A Florentine tour guide told us that the city’s native-son poet, Dante Alighieri, helped establish the national language of Italy with such epic works as The Divine Comedy, which he finished in the year 1320. In the great poem, Dante travelled into Hell on Good Friday, but emerged on Easter Sunday, paralleling the Christian doctrine of Christ’s death, descent into hell, and ultimate resurrection.
Dante used to sit on a stone in the Piazza del Duomo. From that vantage point, he admired the initial construction work on the cathedral, and in his head constructed poetic phrases he later included in The Divine Comedy. This means that on an Easter Sunday about seven hundred years before my own Easter visit to the Duomo, Dante likely sat nearby, crafting his classic description of God as “the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”
I have enjoyed many an Easter with friends and family, but never before one where our guests were the likes of Dante, David, Brunelleschi, Galileo, and Michelangelo. There truly is something special about Easter in Firenze.
