In April 2022, I travelled to Rome for the month. That’s Easter month, for those not pumped with spiritual propaganda in primary school or lucky enough to escape the commercialism that’s latched itself to Christianity, the West’s mothering religion. 

One morning I woke up to find the population of Rome, who at that point were still clad in thick duffel coats and jackets to stave off the cool 17 degree spring, carrying unidentifiable branches around. I Googled it, obviously. They were palm branches for Palm Sunday, obviously. My religious education had never extended past picture books of Noah’s ark, and for longer than I can reasonably admit, I believed the Easter bunny was a genuine religious figure in his own right. Despite my enforced ignorance, the sense of community is always a call. I wanted my own palm branch. 

At the church of St Ignazio, I travelled to see the dome illusion. Inside the church that took up only a small frontier in the busy cosmopolitan square, the interior stretched out and wide like it had been stolen from Gallifrey. Its completely flat roof was painted by one brother Andrea Pozzo. Covered in pale pinks and lilacs and oranges, the heralds of the heavens and the cherubs of catholicism all in a radial angle, the genius painter raised the roof into a dome the Vatican should, and probably doesn’t have the personality to, be envious of. Unlike the Vatican, people were welcomed into the closed mahogany doors of St Ignazio to marvel at the marvel for free. They made their money in other ways. Next to the assortment of small brown benches sat a sign. “1 euro for a candle,” it read. I resigned to reconcile my relationship with God. Being forced to light the tea light on one of its sister flames, I burnt my fingertip (a burn that itched consistently for the reminder of my holiday) and placed the candle among its hundreds of counterparts. It’s customary, I had surmised from eyeing keenly the patrons before myself who completed this small and intimate ceremony for one, to kneel in prayer after lighting your candle. The ancient prayer bench creaked with a decibel level to attract everyone in the church as I knelt two hefty legs in subservience. It’s true, I’ve never been the Lord’s best supplicant, only ever calling out to him in my childhood when I wanted something and blithely ignoring him in my agnosticism ever since. This occasion was no different. I said a small prayer, not in thanks but in begging, ‘The tiramisu last night was good. Please let the rest of this holiday be a good one.’  I left quite proud of myself, which is a deadly sin by the way.

This was the first of my troubled dalliances with Christianity on this holiday. 

Later in my time there, I embarked on the tour of the Capuchin Crypts. If never you’ve seen them, these crypts are not simply a pile of bones like the imagination conjures, but morbid and long standing works of art formed with the skeletons of Rome’s deceased exiles to convey strong messages from beyond the grave. ‘This one’ my guide Alan, or Ah-lahn if pronounced correctly, tells us ‘depicts a running theme of cappuccin art. A reminder that our time, from the moment we’re born, is running out. One day our bones will be like these. ‘Are you spending your time wisely? Are you ready for death?’. Having been forced to the front of the group to kneel on screaming calves that were already struggling with the 25,000 daily steps I was forcing them into through fear of foreign public transport, I didn’t bare much though to the metaphysical enquiry beyond that I was more than ready to get up and get out of there. No such luck, as the next stop was the Roman catacombs. 

Emerging from the empty caves that once held Rome’s elite families, now pillaged by travellers from across Europe (one of which had left some graffiti – ‘Mario 1777’ which made my historian heart sing with delight) I would buy a white string of rosary beads for 10 euros from the gift shop. The next stop on our tour was another church. The Irish woman, the only other one who had purchased a rosary and about as archetypal in shades of apricot that matched her hair as you can imagine, made a beeline over to the priest who took her hand willingly and blessed her new rosary chain with a few words in latin. Oh, I thought, is that what you’re supposed to do? For the second time, I Googled it.

Google told me you can bless your rosary yourself as long as you have some holy water. Not wanting to appear as though I was uneducated, which I was, I resigned to do it in the bathroom sink of my AirBNB that evening. Serendipitously, as I browsed through the money grabbing tat markets along the stewing tiber at twilight, I noticed among the nicknacks and merchandise of calendars of Vatican priests, a selection of small and very alluring bottles. In the shapes of hearts and crests and crosses, of course, they were placed next to the tag ‘holy water – 5 euro’. The gaggle of Americans got to the bottles before me. Picking it up, the southern mother in a beautiful floral dress and her small son in strapping green suit fingered the trinkets. 

‘It’s empty!’ Her son said with all the confidence of youth. His mother truly hadn’t noticed. 

‘How can you sell holy water with no holy water?’

They giggled, and I joined them, before they moved onto a selection of souvenir spoons emblazoned with Italian flag. 

Holy air, I thought to myself.

God knows all, and if he truly does exist then I chose to count his actions not as a blockage to his kingdom, but the wise and thoughtful decision to steer me away from spending 5 euros on an empty bottle. I blessed the rosary in my bath water, about as holy as I could get. It still hangs above my bed and I remain firmly agnostic, safe in the knowledge there will always be a bit of my heart devoted to it.