ABSTRACT
Camille PagliaI was born into an extremely religious Italian Catholic family, and for Italians, Catholicism is as much cultural as it is religious. Italian Catholicism is very analogous to Judaism in this respect. The material matters: not just the marble and bronze and plaster of religious statuary, but the masonry of the church building, even the concrete of its foundation—that is, the business of getting people's hands dirty. The sensory aspect to things, the multiple sensory aspect of the human body, is wonderfully dramatized in Italian food preparation. There is a kind of self-consciousness that Catholicism gives people, and also a sense of personal responsibility from childhood. The morning of the funeral, there’s a file that goes by the casket, and people kiss the corpse. Most people are horrified by that. The physical facts of death are accepted in Italian culture.
