You've Just GOT to Hand It to Him

We have just got home from a multi-day trip to Verona, so we'll probably have a few posts of our adventures there. One that stands out in my mind, though, happened on the second day of our visit.

As we were touring the Duomo, I wandered into a side chapel (actually a second church that the Duomo had been smushed onto); Michael came hurrying in to find me, and said, "If you want to have a delightful experience, you should get back into the sanctuary quickly."

Nothing loth, off I trotted to find three men in the elevated pulpit with a life-sized plastic statue (missing an arm...I wasn't sure exactly who it was), and a Mamma on the ground directing. This was bound to be good, so I happily took a seat and sat back to enjoy the show.

The plan appeared to be to perch the statue so that the armless man was standing between the column (it was one of those pulpits wrapped around the column) and the edge, as though he were surfing on the pulpit's rail. Very, very promising from the standpoint of humor potential.

The statue was plastic, as I've said before, but that doesn't mean there was no weight to it. And bear in mind, it was large and unwieldy AND there were three men trying to move around each other in a rather cramped space. Well, Mamma needed to give the artistic direction, so the next five minutes entailed her walking to the door of the Duomo and deciding that the hero needed to be rotated 6 degrees counterclockwise. Then she walked to a spot underneath the pulpit and decided that perhaps 12 degrees clockwise would be better. No. That just wasn't going to work. Another trip to the door. Let's shoot for 2 degrees anticlockwise. Sigh. Gesticulations. Much rolling of eyes from the pulpit (not the statue's, mind you). You have to envision that the statue's peregrinations involved much rocking and unsteady movement, so that we spectators were on the edge of our seats: we were convinced that he'd come a-tumbling at any moment.

Mamma was finally happy. Great! Then came a whirr of an electric drill/screwdriver, and the statue was fixed in place.

But wait! The finishing touch! Remember that the statue was armless? Turns out it wasn't: For some unknown reason, our workers had decided to leave the (bent) arm off until the statue was in place. I had the bonus treat of watching them make the statue windmill...quite a ridiculous spectacle. Tears were streaming down my face as I was trying to keep my giggles to myself.

Turns out that I was looking at a statue of a resurrected Jesus.

Love,

Alexandra