I am an American citizen, and I have always lived within the continental United States. I grew up learning about the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the Constitution. I can tell you about the checks and balances, our founding fathers, and the early drive to create the perfect little “city upon a hill.” One of the first things that I learned about America growing up is the idea of the separation of church and state. This concept is ingrained in the Constitution, as the document guarantees that there will be no state religion, and by the First Amendment, which guarantees that all citizens have the right to practice the religion of their choosing. While this idea has been challenged over the last 200 and some odd years in the Supreme Court, and while it is still certainly far from being perfect, I do think that the majority of civil servants try to leave religion out of policymaking. Yet, this separation is exactly why Florence can be such an eye-opening environment.
Italians are proud of their overwhelmingly Catholic heritage, and it shows in the architecture. There are chapels, basilicas, cathedrals, and churches scattered throughout the country. In Florence alone there is, of course, the famous Duomo, but also smaller churches dedicated to different orders: Franciscans have the Santa Croce and Dominicans have the Santa Maria Novella and San Marco churches. Within these walls, there are hundreds of paintings commissioned during the Renaissance that were expensive in their day and remain important today. In addition, on nearly every street corner is a plaque commemorating a scene in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a work which thoroughly explores the Catholic faith and its concepts of hell, purgatory, and heaven. Clearly, the city has spent plenty of public money on the practice of Catholicism.
While this seemed completely foreign to me at first, after spending nearly four months in Florence, it has become much clearer. To grow up learning about a country’s foundation is to understand that country’s current setup. The United States was founded as a religious safe haven from those who felt persecuted in Great Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Italy, on the other hand, has a much older history. It hosted the Romans, who, over several hundred years, gradually grew to accept and practice Christianity. The geographic peninsula wasn’t united as “Italy” until the 1860s, and up until then the only things uniting these people were the similar language that they spoke and the same faith that they all practiced. In the minds of many Italians, if they want to stay united, they must stay true to their Catholic roots.
It’s interesting to hear the Italians speak of how this Catholic basis for their country plays out into modern politics, particularly in light of recent policies on the legalization of divorce and the laws surrounding conscientious objectors to abortion. Yet, what I took away most from living in a Catholic country is that while Italy and the United States have very different histories and backgrounds, and while our citizens might look at problems differently than theirs do, no one way of running a country has seemed to solve all of the ills of society. And so, the Americans and the Italians must all keep trying to perfect their political and religious systems.
