Rome is a great city. So much history, as they say. For example, the colorful Maestro Titte. His name may not be pronounced as one would hope, but he is the most famous executioner in Roman history, a man who took great delight in his work, turning each execution into a spectacular event. He detailed his obsessive, sadistic preparations in his published diary. Of course, since only ten executions happened in a good year, he had a lot of free time. Needless to say, he spent it making umbrellas.
Then there is one of the most notorious women in modern Roman history. She made her name, which I can’t remember, by serving women who, no doubt with the best of intentions, poisoned their husbands. Inventing a singularly undetectable poison involving arsenic, she became very wealthy throughout her career helping over 650 wives become very wealthy overnight. Only after she had retired and left the business to her daughter did the authorities get wind. Over fifty women—including the daughter but not the mother—were convicted and sentenced to execution, a one-shot record.
I saw the homes of these two infamous infidels. On the same walk, I passed by the church of the Fellowship of Death. The Fellowship’s history goes back to the Renaissance period, when peasants couldn’t afford proper burials. Fellowship monks would go out to collect the littered bodies from the countryside and bring them back to headquarters in Rome—storing them, making shrines of them, decorating with them, making crosses and emblems from skulls, doing who cares what. Theologically, they are just another Christian denomination. Carved above the church entrance was a slogan roughly akin to “truth lies with the dead,” or something similarly banal. In the 19th century the government put an end to the body-collecting, but the Fellowship continues to be privately active, consisting of twenty-six monks: normal professionals by day who lead secret double-lives at night.
Like most death-dwellers, these people are probably attracted to its non-threatening stillness. They find comfort and security in the shades of darkness, whose fear-numbing monotony invites an unconditional sympathy that can be so soothing to offer. Above all, they find meaning in the permanence. What they don’t realize is that this is all too easy; in itself hardly enough; that superficiality is no less vacuous in permanence than it is in breezy motion.
That, and they’re necrophiles.
