Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday

Italy has been a mountain of firsts for me. This was my first time not spending Fat Tuesday with someone that I knew would really appreciate grubbing. For my younger years I was always with my siblings and parents; for the past two years I was with my best friend, Lauren. And it wasn’t that Fat Tuesday was solely about eating, it was about spending quality time together over a common cause. It was the feast before the fast. This year I had to eat alone. And I must get this from Nana but I do not care to eat alone. I would rather prepare food for someone else to eat with me than eat by my lonesome. But for one day out of the year I chose to suck it up and deal. Boy did I go to town on some delicious food. I started with a breakfast of champions. I had 4 cornetti: two of which were plain and the other two were chocolate filled. Amazing. I followed with a light lunch. I only had a chicken sandwich with a scoop of lemon gelato. I topped it all off with a perfect dinner comprised of 3 thin steaks that would be the equivalent of one American eye of round, a plate of French fries, and two bowls of pasta (one plain with butter and the other with melanzane sauce). It was the perfect pig out to precede a day of abstinence.

The next day, Ash Wednesday, I went to church at San Paolo Basilica Fuori le Mure. I guess I thought that if there was one thing that would be the same as back home it would be church, and for the most part, I was right. But there was something that they did during service that really had me stumped. Back home, when you got you would form a line and receive your ashes. The priest, or whatever holy figure, would take their thumb, put it in the ashes and make the sign of the cross on your forehead. They would say something while doing it and you would respond Amen. Well, here they did something very different. We formed our line and waited to be ashed. But when we got to the front of the line, instead of the priest making the sign of the cross on our foreheads, they sprinkled ashes in the figure of a cross in our hair. I was so thrown off. Everything else was pretty much the same but this was so different.

Before I left to go to mass, I went by the Arcadia office to do some stuff online and I was every so lucky to have the opportunity to vote in the Democratic Primaries. In the states it took place on a Tuesday (Super Tuesday) but because of time differences and lack of internet, I had to wait until the next day to participate. I was still really happy and I received an email saying thanks. It was magnificent.