Shot in Reggio Calabria, Italy by Michael Frierson, of UNC-Greensboro.

If you ever travel to Reggio Calabria, you will of course want to see the world-famous Riace bronzes in the national museum downtown. But you will also want to travel uphill to the neighborhood Santo Spirito to the church of Padre Gaetano Catanoso. On the ground floor, just inside the courtyard, are two rooms — both of which he used, one of which he slept in and died in — preserved to honor the memory of the saint.

This video was shot and produced in Reggio by Michael Frierson, documentary film professor at UNC-Grreensboro

On this day two summers ago, I met my great Aunt Maria Portzia Catanoso, in a manner of speaking. She was my grandfather’s sister, the only member of his family to not emigrate to the United States in the early 1900s. She stayed behind in the village where she and her two brothers were born, Chorio. That remote mountain village is also the birthplace of their cousin, Gaetano Catanoso, who became a saint.

On June 18, 2006, I traveled up to the cemetery on a hot day with my cousin Daniela and my friend and translator Germaine. Daniela was leaving flowers on the above-ground grave of her mother, Pina, who had died the previous fall. I was stunned by what I saw. Catanosos on nearly every row of place, dating back years and years. Presumably all relatives in some form or fashion, but lives lost to me forever because of immigration divide. So much unknown history. My heart ached for this knowledge.

This cemetery, high on a hill in the Aspromonte, surrounded by fig trees and olive groves, is a fascinating and peaceful place. Land is too scarce and the soil too rocky to bury anyone. Instead, the departed are stacked in these vaults. I knew my great Aunt Maria was there somewhere, and I wandered the rows until at last I found her. I was years late, of course. She’s been gone for 50 years. But my Uncle Tony, in one of my favorite stories in my book, found his Aunt Maria in Chorio during World War II. It took remarkable luck to find her and meet her. But he doesn’t look at it that way. He calls it a miracle. The first miracle of a future saint.

Two years ago this time, I was on the front end of my Italian research for this book. I arrived in Rome on June 9 and spent three days there before heading south to Calabria for nearly a month. At the end of every day, I would record my thoughts and impressions in detailed journal entries. While I can see now what my book has become, two years ago, my sense of the story was nebulous at best. Periodically this summer, I’d like to share elements of those journals entries for whatever insight they might shed on the writing process.

June 9, 2006: Rome, Italy (following my first interview with a Vatican insider who began to explain the intricate and arcane rules and regulations of naming saints.)

“There are saints and there is the saint making process. The latter is best not observed too closely for fear of making practical and mundane and entirely bureaucratic a process the outside world would prefer to see as entirely mystical. The former, however, the saints, are real and vital and their influence is impossible to overestimate among the faithful.

“Yet if the process turns out not to be touched by grace, but driven by process, timing, new rules and an aggressive postulator, so be it. What’s true to the faithful is this: God chooses his saints and always has. They are there whether we know it or not. Here on earth, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints does the best it can to identify the saints, bring their stories to the world, and hope that the faithful are inspired to live similar lives. It’s what naming saints is all about.”