Marco Sermarini, from Grottomare Alta, on the Adriatic
After church today, I was feeling melancholic, thinking of my disappointments, my failures, and the things I am powerless to change. I came home, went back to bed, and slummed interiorly, as I often do, in the fantasy of selling all my things and going to live somewhere quiet, to withdraw from the world, which is too much with me. Lying in the darkness of my bedroom, I ran through all the places I have been that might suit me in an isolated life, with just my books, my icons, and a dog. I landed on Grottammare — or, to be precise, Grottammare Alta, the older part of the Italian seaside town, the district built on a hill overlooking the Adriatic. My friend Marco Sermarini has taken me there a few times. It’s a beautiful little village. For example:
In years past, I’ve rested briefly in the shade of that 18th century (I think) building, gazed out over the blue, blue sea, and felt peace. Today I thought, “I could be The Hermit of Grottammare.”
But I can’t think about Grottammare without thinking about the irrepressible cheerfulness of Marco, who leads a Benedict Option community of Catholic families in San Benedetto del Tronto, the small city just south of Grottammare. Here he is in The Benedict Option, the first time I met him:
As we drove through the hills above his city on the Adriatic, Marco pulled his jeep over on the side of a narrow country road, and led me over to a steeply plunging hillside. It was covered with olive trees. This was the Sermarini family olive grove. As a boy, Marco’s 91-year-old father helped his own father harvest olives from these trees. Marco was raised doing the same, and now he and his own children collect olives from these trees each year, and press oil for the family’s use.
This, I said to Marco, is stability. He shrugged.
2017, in his family’s olive grove
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but in the meantime, we have to fight for the good,” he said. “the possibility of saving the good things in the world is only this: a possibility. We have to take the chances we have to set a rock, and to keep this rock steady.”
We walked back to the jeep, climbed in, and drove on.
“Nothing we make here will be eternal, but we have to build them as if they will be eternal,” Marco continued. “That’s what God wants. If you promise yourself to a woman for a lifetime, that is a way of making the eternal present here in time.”
We have to go forward in confidence that the little things we do might, in time, grow into mighty works, he said. It is all up to God. All we can do is our very best to serve Him.
Sometimes Marco lies in bed at night, worrying that his efforts, and the efforts of his little Christian community, won’t amount to much in the face of so much opposition. He is anxious that the current will be too strong to resist, and will carry them over the falls as well.
“I know from the olive trees that some years we will have a big harvest, and other years we will take few, he said. “The monks, when they brought agriculture to this place, they taught our ancestors that there are times when we have to save seed. That’s why I think we have to walk on this road of St. Benedict, in this Benedict Option. This is a season for saving the seed. If we don’t save the seed now, we won’t have a harvest in the years to come.”
It was getting late in the afternoon. I was afraid I would miss my bus to the Rome airport. Shouldn’t we be going? I asked.
“Grande Rod, don’t worry!” my friend said. “You worry too much. You will make it!” And off we sped, down the winding road towards the sea.
As the sun went down in the west, we spoke once more about the challenge facing orthodox Christians in the West, and how daunting it seems. Marco left me with these unforgettable lines.
“In Italy, we have a saying: ‘When there is no horse, a donkey can do good work.’ I consider myself a little donkey,” he said. “There are so many purebred horses that run nowhere, but this old donkey is getting the job done. You and me, let’s go on doing this job like little donkeys. Don’t forget, it was a donkey that brought Jesus Christ into Jerusalem.”
Marco with donkeys on Italy’s Piano Grande di Castellucio
I crossed over the spine of Italy’s Sibylline Mountains with my good friend Marco Sermarini. Marco and I were both single men now. My wife was in the process of divorcing me; his had recently died of cancer. I was struggling with depression; Marco was overflowing with joy. There, splayed in front of us, was the breathtakingly beautiful plateau the Italians call the Piano Grande di Castelluccio. It was a lake of velvety green grass in the chalice of an extinct volcano, speckled with brightly colored wildflowers in pink, salmon, lilac, blue, gold, and seemingly every shade in between.
“To be in this place for only one hour, you will recover a sense of life that is based on the sense of wonder,” Marco said, as he motored down toward the bottom. “When I come here, Rod, for me, the clouds are enough. I sit at my window and I see the sky, the clouds, and I say, ‘How is it possible? This is magic.’
“G. K. Chesterton said, ‘If there is magic, then there is a magician,’” he continued. “So, if you want to keep yourself sane, you have to regard all of this as if it were a gift for you. If there is a gift, there is love. If there is love, there is the lover. If there is the lover, there is life. It’s simple. So, you can start every day with this idea.”
As Marco’s car climbed the far side of the Piano Grande, he still talked about Chesterton and how one needs to cultivate humility to see the world with wonder. “Chesterton said that from the mountaintop everything looks small. It’s better to stay in the valley, because from there you can only see great things.
“Ah! The coniglio!” he suddenly exclaimed, pointing to the tall clover on the shoulder of the mountain road. “The rabbit! Ah, bellissimo! A wild rabbit!”
This is how it is to be with Marco Sermarini, a practicing attorney who lives besotted with effortless joy, in a most unlawyerly wonderland. With him, the whole world stops in a flash to behold the appearance of a jackrabbit and to call it the most beautiful thing ever.
“While we are living, we have to remain alive,” Marco said. “In Italian, we say that middle-class ideals are the death of life. If you can’t control everything, you are unhappy, you are sad. If you try to control it all, you will be unhappy.”
He cut loose with merry laughter.
“You have to live—and that means giving up control!”
I sat quietly marveling at the happy genius of my friend, knowing that if I were ever to lose the sorrowful cataracts that blurred my vision in this unhappy time, I would have to work to see the world as clearly as my enchanted widowed friend Marco does.
Christian re-enchantment is not about imposing fanciful nostalgia onto the world, like coating a plain yellow cake with pastel fondant frosting. Instead, it is about learning how to perceive what already exists and reestablishing participatory contact with the really real. God has already enchanted the world; it is up to us to clear away the scales from our eyes, recognize what is there, and establish a relationship with it.
The mental framework through which you view the world determines what you see—and what you miss.
From another passage in that book:
If this still sounds too abstract or historical, let’s return to earth by visiting the Italian coast of the Adriatic Sea. That’s the home of my friend Marco Sermarini, mentioned earlier, the lawyer, family man, and lay Catholic leader who moves through the world in what seems like a state of perpetual enchantment. The fifty-eight-year-old, with a gray mustache and salt-and-pepper hair, is thoroughly grounded in everyday life; there’s nothing squirrelly or hippie-dippie about him. But Marco, who has been a good friend for almost a decade, has an uncanny ability to make you feel happy to be alive. It’s because the beauty of the world is always fresh to him, as if seen through innocent eyes that perceive the goodness of God in all things.
Almost six decades of living in San Benedetto del Tronto, the small seaside city that he calls home, have not dimmed his delight in the place. It is easy to see why Marco is sent into paroxysms of delight by the wildflower-spangled plain of Castelluccio, in the mountains, where you first met him as he was driving me back from a meeting with the monks of Norcia. But it is harder to see where he gets his joy from his hometown, a nondescript modern city that’s a far cry from the picture-postcard villages of the Amalfi Coast.
Yet love it he does. To be with Marco toodling around this plain old workaday town is a bit like being with a kid turned loose at Disney World. He’s always on the lookout for something special. Marco has told me that he learned the secret of living in a world of wonder from his mother, who taught him how not only to look at the world but to really see it.
“I was a very calm child,” he recalled. “I spent a lot of time looking out the windows, trying to see beautiful things. My mother, she taught me many things. Sometimes she would say to me, ‘Marco, look at the sea, look at the colors. The different colors, the shades of the blue you can see.’ If you have someone who teaches you how to see what you are seeing, and to be aware of what you are seeing, everything in life is easier” in terms of living with enchantment.
He added that you can’t simply sit back and expect enchantment to seize you. While it is true that you can’t make enchantment happen, it is also true that you have to work to keep your eyes sharp by reminding yourself daily that all things are a gift from God. We don’t think enough about how wonder filled the world is.
Quoting his beloved Chesterton, Marco said, “Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see the startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes.”
A couple of years back, Marco lost his wife, Federica, to cancer. [Note: Read Marco’s eulogy to Federica here. — RD] This was a terrible blow. Federica was not only the great love of his life, but she was also so beloved in their city for her good works that he has seen people unknown to the Sermarini family praying at Federica’s grave, asking for her intercession. Yet this pain does not seem to have changed Marco, who remains irrepressibly joyful.
Federica Sermarini (d. 2021)
My friend tells me that his strong Catholic faith teaches him that his wife’s passing must have happened for a reason, though it is beyond his understanding. Before she died, Federica promised her husband to prepare their home together in heaven, waiting for his arrival.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a situation where we’re all wearing long white cassocks,” Marco says. “I think there will be my real wife, in flesh and bones, and my children, and my people, and my place—I’m sure of this. It has to be this way, because Jesus Christ said that we have to believe in the resurrection of the flesh, not only of an abstract idea of the resurrection. So, if you believe these things, there is meaning to all things.”
“So your idea of life in heaven is a reproduction of the life you have here in earth, in San Benedetto del Tronto?” I ask.
“Yes—but perfected!”
Marco’s joy in this life, despite suffering and loss, comes from accepting the world around him as a gift and compelling himself to see it all through the eyes of faith, hope, and love. Both of these enchant his everyday life by teaching him how to see more deeply into the nature of things. And they inspire him to work to sanctify his scrappy city by the sea through works of charity for the community. The life of this middle-aged lawyer is so filled with wonder because he lives and dances on the border between this world and the next.
“We are heading to a place where everything will be perfect,” he tells me. “I know most people who hear this will think I’m completely crazy, but I think it is this way, and not in another way.”
So, Marco.
I got out of bed, went to the kitchen, and made a lunch of good Italian pasta with fresh olive oil. I’m going to look at paintings within the hour, accompanying a friend. And I’ll do my best to see the world as Marco does. What a gift God gave that man. What a gift God gave me in his friendship. And look, folks, what a gift God has given you that you can know, through my writing, that such joie de vivre can encountered in real life. If you are traveling in Italy this summer, try to get over to San Benedetto del Tronto, which is out of the way, yes, but so worth it, just to spend time with Marco and the Tipi Loschi. You may well come away wanting to recreate what they have in their close-knit, cheerfully Chestertonian Christian community. If nothing else, you’ll spend time with some of the best people in the world.
UPDATE: I misspelled Grottammare in the first version. Corrected now.
“...me in an isolated life, with just my books, my icons, and a dog”
Dante knew he’d bequeathed the world something special in his Divine Comedy, yet I imagine that was cold comfort as staggered the steepness of another man’s stair and the saltiness of his bread.
You, too, are an exiled writer sharing something special with the rest of the world, a rare combination of professional journalism and personal vulnerability, the world’s third most interesting neighbor leaning over the fence to share news and views almost daily. We here are grateful for that and can’t see you as a hermit. You enjoy people and their stories too much.
For me personally, this is one of my favorite posts of yours ever. Thank you.
“...me in an isolated life, with just my books, my icons, and a dog”
Dante knew he’d bequeathed the world something special in his Divine Comedy, yet I imagine that was cold comfort as staggered the steepness of another man’s stair and the saltiness of his bread.
You, too, are an exiled writer sharing something special with the rest of the world, a rare combination of professional journalism and personal vulnerability, the world’s third most interesting neighbor leaning over the fence to share news and views almost daily. We here are grateful for that and can’t see you as a hermit. You enjoy people and their stories too much.