An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town Hardback - 2009

by David Farley

A tour through the centuries and through a bizarre Italian town insearch of an unbelievable relic: the foreskin of Jesus ChristIn December 1983, a priest in the Italian hill town of Calcatashared shocking news with his congregation: The pride oftheir town, the foreskin of Jesus, had been stolen. Somepostulated that it had been stolen by Satanists. Some saidthe priest himself was to blame. Some even pointed theirfingers at the Vatican. In 2006, travel writer David Farleymoved to Calcata, determined to find the missing foreskin,or at least find out the truth behind its disappearance.Farley recounts how the relic passed from Charlemagne tothe papacy to a marauding sixteenth-century German soliderbefore finally ending up in Calcata, where miracles occurredthat made the sleepy town a major pilgrimage destination.Over the centuries, as Catholic theology evolved, therelic came to be viewed as something of an embarrassment,culminating in a 1900 Church decree that allowed the parishto display it only on New Year's Day.An Irreverent Curiosity interweaves this history with thecurious landscape of Calcata, a beautiful and untouchedmedieval village set atop four-hundred-fifty-foot cliffs,which now, due to the inscrutable machinations of Italianbureaucracy, is a veritable counterculture coven. Blendinghistory, travel, and perhaps the oddest story in Christianlore, An Irreverent Curiosity is a weird and wonderful tale ofconspiracy and misadventure.