A village in Emilia Romagna

An ordinary hilltop village in Emilia Romagna staging some extraordinary characters and a magic metal collar. Visit Sarsina in the hills behind Rimini.

It is an ordinary, rather inconspicuous town situated on a hill top in the Tosca-Emiliano Appenines. A collection of modern houses painted in a clashing mismatch of red, orange, salmon, yellow and mint green and surrounding an old unadorned brick church. We have parked in the main square in Sarsina – the worldly centre of the San Vicinio pilgrim route – to take a mundane walk through town.

From the shade of a shop front a uniformed parking ward observes all newcomers, but looks the other way and does not interfere when a couple of drivers swop places and parking license with an expression of great satisfaction and cunning. They have probably all gone to school together. We stroll from one end of Sarsina to the other in less than 15 minutes, and note the unfinished or crumbled Roman columns with late Byzantine capitals outside the cathedral. The contrast between ancient hand carved stones, massive Medieval brickwork and modern scaffolding sums up 2000 years of history in one look.

A black clad woman carrying a rosary slips into the church, where the reliques of San Vicinio are kept. San Vicinio was the first bishop of Sarsina, but he used a very different kind of rosary. The chapel exhibits a heavy iron collar which the saint wore around his neck and tied to a heavy stone in order to stay grounded and focused during penitence and prayer. To this day many people are so convinced of the power of this remedy that they come to Sarsina on pilgrimage and try on the collar to invoke the saint and his ability to cure especially psychic and spiritual ailments.

We didn’t see anyone locked up in the necklace, but outside a café on the other side of the square a group of small time sinners were playing card. They stopped to gape indecently, when we passed, although we can’t have been the first tourists ever wanting to see the House of Plautus, the most important Latin playwright born in Sarsina in 254 BC.  Annual Plautus Festivals commemorate the famous citizen, but I feel I have already encountered a number of his stock characters in their contemporary incarnation. Plautus’ plays were typically populated by the pompous soldier, the desperate parasite, the clever and comic servant and the lusty old man as universally recognizable archetypes.

The themes and structure of Plautus’ plays inspired Shakespeare to write ‘The Comedy of Errors’ dealing with the dichotomies of social relationships. Perhaps that is what a visit to Sarsina boils down to, so we move on without testing the truth of the Plautus quote saying: “No guest is so welcome in a friend’s house that he will not become a nuisance after three days.” He is probably right.

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