Remembering the Victors of Lepanto

Don Giovanni d’Austria, Marcantonio Colonna and Sebastiano Venier

In memory of the Victors of Lepanto, Don Giovanni d’Austria, Marcantonio Colonna, Sebastiano Venier and all the heroic men of the Holy League, who defended Christendom and defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, we pray for the happy repose of their souls.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen

A Talk on Truth at the Shrine Church of the Holy Innocents in New York City

Pontifical Requiem Mass at St. Joseph's Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Feast of San Renato di Sorrento

San Renato di Sorrento, ora pro nobis

October 6th is the feast of St. Renato of Sorrento, one of the co-patron saints of the city. Little is known with certainty about his life, but tradition places him in the fifth century and remembers him first as a hermit, living in prayer and solitude in the Sorrentine Peninsula. His reputation for holiness eventually led the local community to choose him as its bishop.

The site associated with Renato later became an important religious center, and the primitive Cathedral of Sorrento stood near the ancient monastery that bore his name. His cult is attested from at least the early Middle Ages, when he and St. Valerio were already invoked as protectors of Sorrento. Relics traditionally identified as those of the two saints were discovered there in 1603.

During the Middle Ages, Renato’s story became intertwined with that of St. René of Angers, giving rise to later traditions identifying the two saints. Modern scholarship, however, cannot establish that they were the same person. The Roman Martyrology commemorates Renato simply as bishop of Sorrento in Campania. Evviva San Renato!

In celebration of his feast, we offer this prayer:

O Holy St. Renatus, faithful confessor of the faith and ancient shepherd of the Church in Sorrento, you dedicated your life to prayer and the service of God. We ask for your powerful intercession today. Pray for us, that we may stand firm in our Christian faith amidst the trials and confusions of the world. Obtain for us the grace to live with courage, love, and unwavering devotion to our Lord, Jesus Christ.

The Relics of St. Bernadette at the Shrine Church of St. Bernadette in Brooklyn, New York

A Brief Sojourn in Parma

Carlo di Borbone, Duke of Parma and
Piacenza, later King of Naples and Sicily
and, eventually, King of Spain, 1732,
oil on canvas, Giovanni Maria delle Piane.
Palacio Real de La Granja de San Ildefonso

I’m headed to Parma for a few days on business. My writing and correspondence may slow down a bit while I’m away, but I’m hoping to find some time between obligations to explore a city whose history has long fascinated me.

Parma was the ducal seat of the Farnese, and later of Carlo di Borbone, who inherited the duchy through his mother, Elisabetta Farnese, before going south to claim the crowns of Naples and Sicily. It was also under Francesco Farnese that the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St. George established itself in Parma, with the magnificent Basilica of Santa Maria della Steccata becoming its conventual seat.

God willing, I’ll have the opportunity to visit the Steccata and a few other places connected with the Farnese, Carlo di Borbone, and the old duchy.

Work comes first, of course, but I hope to make the most of whatever free time I have.

Photo of the Week: Statue of Calliope, Vatican Museum

Photo by New York Scugnizzo

Rievocazione storica della fucilazione di Gioacchino Murat

The Flight of Eros

Terracotta lekythos in the form of 
Eros, 2nd half of the 4th century BC

Among the antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a small Attic terracotta lekythos from the second half of the fourth century B.C., fashioned in the form of a flying Eros. Wings spread, his body is suspended in motion, carrying an incense burner. It immediately caught my attention.

Originally, the figure was embellished with color, but little of that splendor remains. More than two thousand years have rendered him quieter and stranger, a pale apparition emerging from a vanished world with an unsettling beauty.

Eros belongs to desire, youth, and the mysterious force that draws one person toward another. Yet here he seems almost funerary, neither playful nor triumphant. Bearing incense, he might just as easily be approaching a tomb as the chamber of a lover.

Perhaps the ancients understood more clearly that love and death were never very far apart. Beauty fades, desire passes, and the beloved disappears. And still the little god flies, bearing his offering across the centuries, from forgotten lovers to those not yet born.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, October 3rd, Feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux

New Book: Sicily in the Flavian Literary Imagination

A new title that may be of interest to our readers. Available at Amazon.com

• Sicily in the Flavian Literary Imagination by Antony Augoustakis and R. Joy Littlewood

Publisher: Oxford University Press
Pub. Date: November 26, 2026
Hardcover: $145.00
Language: English
Pages: 320

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Novena Schedule for the 127th Feast of St. Gerard Maiella at St. Lucy's Church in Newark, New Jersey

In Search of Isabella di Morra with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato

In Search of… with the Ghost of the Count of Sciancato explores mysteries where history and legend blur and conjecture begins—along with the strange, the macabre, and the uncanny. What follows suggests possible explanations—though not the only ones.

Isabella di Morra: The Poetess in the Tower

High above the Sinni Valley, on a rocky spur in Basilicata, stands the castle of Valsinni, its walls thick, its windows narrow, its towers looking outward across a landscape both beautiful and isolating. In the sixteenth century, the fortress was home to Isabella di Morra.

Born into a noble family around 1520, Isabella spent much of her life confined within those stone walls. Her father, a baron allied with the French during the turbulent wars between France and Spain, fled into exile. The castle fell under the authority of her brothers, men said to be stern and suspicious. From within her enforced seclusion, Isabella wrote poetry: verses of isolation, longing, resentment, and a profound sense of imprisonment.

Alleged portrait of Isabella di Morra

She wrote of the “horrid valley” that enclosed her and of a fate she could not escape. In a world of arranged marriages and rigid honor codes, her voice was strikingly personal and dangerous.

At some point in the 1540s, Isabella began corresponding with a Spanish nobleman, Diego Sandoval de Castro, a married poet and official. Whether the exchange was romantic or literary remains debated. What is certain is that her brothers discovered it and killed her in the name of family honor. Sandoval was later ambushed and slain. The castle became the scene of blood, and Isabella’s brief life ended within the same walls that had confined her youth.

Centuries later, scholars rediscovered her work, recognizing in it one of the most original female voices of the Italian Renaissance.

Yet in Valsinni, another tradition endured. It is said that Isabella never left. On certain evenings, when the valley falls silent, a solitary figure appears along the battlements, gazing toward the horizon she once cursed.

Visitors to the castle speak of a presence in the tower rooms. Of sudden drafts in enclosed chambers and footsteps echoing where no one walks. Some claim to hear faint recitations rising from the stone, and lines of lament carried on the wind.

Was Isabella di Morra merely a tragic poet silenced by the violence of her age?

Or does the weight of injustice linger in the stones of Valsinni Castle?

……………………………………

Sebastiano III, Conte di Sciancato, a minor prince of forgotten Lucania, was said to have loved his wife more than his soul. When his beloved bride, Donna Lucrezia di Nerafiora, died in a tragic accident, he could not accept the will of fate. In his grief, he turned to ancient books and desperate learning, searching for a way to restore her to the world of the living. The attempt cost him his life. The ruins of his torre lie hidden, and when the earth trembles, some whisper he still searches for her.

Rosary and Revelation Retreat at St. Joseph School Auditorium in Raritan, New Jersey

Spring, the Amazon, and the Warrior Poet

(L) Ida Rubinstein as Le Trajet (The Crossing)
and (R) Femme avec des fleurs (Spring)

While browsing an old exhibition catalogue, Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks, I found myself drawn to Romaine Brooks’s Spring (1912). Its pale, solitary figure, wrapped in a great black mantle embroidered with flowers, immediately took hold of me. Strange and dreamlike, it is sensual, melancholy, and vaguely otherworldly.

Ida Rubinstein, ca. 1911, by
Howard Gardiner Cushing

There was something familiar about the experience. Not long ago, while looking through a book on Tamara de Lempicka in search of her portrait of Suzy Solidor, I unexpectedly stumbled upon Gabriele D’Annunzio, knowing nothing of his connection to the artist. Now, while browsing Brooks, it was happening again.

Ida Rubinstein, the woman who would become Brooks’s great muse, lover, and subject in Spring, had already shared a famous artistic and personal relationship with D’Annunzio, performing the title role in his scandalous Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien in Paris, which Catholics were forbidden to attend under threat of excommunication.

In 2024, at the Morgan Library’s Crafting the Ballets Russes: The Robert Owen Lehman Collection, I had already encountered Rubinstein as Saint Sebastian in Léon Bakst’s illustration for D’Annunzio’s play, displayed alongside a portrait of her by Howard Gardiner Cushing.

Ida Rubinstein as St. Sebastian by Léon Bakst

Brooks herself moved in the same Decadent artistic world as D’Annunzio. When she exhibited La France Croisée in 1915, D’Annunzio supplied four accompanying sonnets. The two also had an affair, followed by a friendship that endured until his death.

Perhaps it is merely another coincidence, but none of these connections had occurred to me when I first opened the catalogue. Still, after Tamara de Lempicka, the encounter at the Morgan, and now Romaine Brooks, Il Vate seems remarkably unwilling to fade away.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, October 1st, Feast of St. Remigius

Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City, New Jersey

A New Home for Old Books

I once wrote about wondering what would become of my books when I was gone. For some of them, at least, I no longer have to wonder.

I recently found a new home for about two hundred volumes from my collection, mostly history books I no longer reference and others I simply haven’t picked up in years. I’m glad to know they will be read and appreciated rather than remain untouched on my shelves.

Someone suggested that I sell them online. Sensible enough, I suppose, but I have neither the soul nor the instincts of a merchant. The thought of hawking and bargaining over books acquired through a lifetime of interests holds no appeal for me. Better that they pass freely into the hands of someone who values their contents than be reduced to so many little transactions.

This is hardly the end of my library. I’m keeping the books I still read, cite, and value. What will eventually become of those remains an open question.

Still, there is something reassuring about seeing part of the collection move on. Their future, at least, is no longer mine to worry about.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, September 30th, Feast Day of San Girolamo

A Prayer to St. Agatha of Sicily for Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Happy National Italian American Heritage Month!

October is National Italian American Heritage Month, a time to celebrate the rich history, vibrant culture, and numerous contributions of Italian Americans. From the arts, science, and education to the cherished traditions of food, family, and faith, Italian Americans have left an indelible mark on these United States.

This month is not only about remembering the struggles and sacrifices of earlier generations who came to America seeking a better life, but also about celebrating the ongoing spirit of creativity, resilience, and community that continues to shape our nation today.

May this be a time of gratitude, reflection, and joy as we honor the Italian American experience.

Feast of St. Bruno at St. Mary of Mt. Virgin Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey

New Music — Domenico Scarlatti and Jose de Nebra: Stabat Mater and Salve Regina

New music that may interest our readers.

• Domenico Scarlatti and Jose de Nebra: Stabat Mater and Salve Regina, performed by La Grande Chapelle

Label: Lauda
Release Date: July 30, 2026
Audio CD: $20.99
Number of Discs: 1

Available at Amazon.com

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Feast of St. Bartolo Longo at the Shrine Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in Raritan, New Jersey

Feast of Beato Nicola da Forca Palena

Beato Nicola da Forca
Palena, ora pro nobis

September 29th is the feast of Blessed Nicola of Forca Palena, priest and founder. Born around 1349 in Forca Palena, Abruzzo, Nicola entered the priesthood and served for a time near his birthplace. Drawn increasingly to solitude and penance, he eventually journeyed to Rome, where he joined a community of hermits devoted to spiritual life.

Nicola later established a hermitage on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, which developed into the church and monastery of Sant’Onofrio. His community was eventually united with the Poor Hermits of St. Jerome associated with Blessed Pietro Gambacorta, helping form the Jerolamin tradition.

After nearly a century of devotion to God, Nicola died at Sant’Onofrio in Rome in 1449. He was buried there, and his reputation for sanctity endured among the faithful. Pope Clement XIV formally confirmed his longstanding cult in 1771.

In celebration of his feast, we offer this prayer:

O Blessed Nicola of Forca Palena, Jerolamin, humble servant of God, who found true peace in solitude and prayer, intercede for us before the Lord. Help us seek unity and spiritual strength in times of tribulation, and guide us with your wisdom to the heart of the Holy Trinity. Amen.

My St. Michael’s Lent

San Michele Arcangelo, ora pro nobis

As St. Michael’s Lent draws to a close, I have been thinking less about what I accomplished and more about where I fell short. Traditionally observed in the weeks leading up to the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, this period of voluntary prayer and penance offers an opportunity to impose a little more discipline upon ourselves and turn our attention back toward God.

I began with good intentions, trying to pray more consistently, practice greater self-denial, and become more conscious of the small comforts I normally take for granted. Some days went better than others.

Fasting proved especially difficult. The Feast of San Gennaro fell right in the middle of my observance, and anyone familiar with the street fare can probably appreciate the temptation. My resolve was not always as strong as I had imagined it would be.

At first, it is easy to regard that as failure. Yet perhaps recognizing how easily our resolutions collapse is itself part of the value of voluntary penance, leaving us more conscious of our weaknesses, more aware of the need for discipline, and with a renewed desire to do better.

And so, on this Michaelmas, I am grateful not because I completed the devotion perfectly, but because I attempted it at all, and because next year, God willing, I will attempt it again. Evviva San Michele Arcangelo!

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, September 28th, Feast of San Venceslao I

Photo of the Week: Artemis (Diana) of Ephesus, Vatican Museums (III)

Photo by New York Scugnizzo

Feast of St. Therese at St. John Vianney Church in Colonia, New Jersey