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I am pretty sure many of you have read Il Nome della Rosa, Umberto Eco's cultural development from his early thesis on the aesthetics of St Thomas Aquinas, Recall the passage of the reliquary, with fragments of the bones of St "Something" at the age of 34 and, kept in another another reliquary box, the fragments of the same Saint at the age of 57. Both set of fragments found in the two (different ?) place of his martyrdom. A digression: Viewing the relics of a Saint always induces me in a trance-like state; I feel like being seized by an overwhelming loss of will. Once, after a very decent and interesting three-days International congress on the Literature of Voyage in Southern Italy, we all went to visit the local Cathedral, in Ravello, where the relics of a Saint (Saint Bartholomew's , if I remember well) were kept - (yes, now I recall...St Bartholomew's blood yellowish and clotted platelets where immaculately kept in sealed container made of gold and glass) . Under the effect of that spell, while standing in the darkened chapel in front of the reliquary, among the crowding group of colleagues - I grasped the hand of one of the French academic (who had had a paper on Wagner's Parsiphal in Ravello) and held it tightly against my stomach for the entire 3 minutes visit of the Holy site, out of which , the French Professor's eyes out were of the orbits.....Later on, solicited by his pressuring courtship, I resorted to the excuse of a post-hypnotic amnesia, saying that I was completely forgetful of what had taken place in the trance under the effect of St Bartholomew's relics. Erminia http://communities.msn.com/ErminiaPassannanti http://www.lycos.it/dir/Arte_e_Spettacolo/Letteratura/Autori/Novecento/ ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%