We can only imagine what life was like in the countryside at the beginning of the twentieth century. But no matter how hard we try, I don't think we'll ever really be able to get a clear idea of that asphyxiating and immobile era, with no possibility of redemption.
It was like this for many farmers in the Marche, the so-called sharecroppers, so poor that they couldn't even find the strength to leave and where then if there was no one to show you an alternative, you risked ending up even worse and often there is no end to the worst. For the Goretti couple from Corinaldo, Luigi and Assunta and their five children, including the firstborn Maria, a door had opened: to emigrate to the Agro Pontino, near Rome.
Strangely enough, no one pointed out to them that these areas, which had always been infested by malaria due to the low and marshy terrain, so different in shape and colour from the hills of the Marche, claimed many victims among both humans and animals. It was not uncommon to come across bodies lying on the ground along the roads and drainage channels, which no one bothered to exhume.
It seems that carriages passing through those parts were advised to close their windows even in summer; with the scorching heat and zero ventilation, we can imagine how tormenting the journey between Florence and Rome must have been, always one of the famous stops on the Grand Tour.
In the Eternal City, on the occasion of the feast of Saint John, in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the ground was sprinkled with flowers and caryophilla – cloves – which, when held in the mouth, were apparently used in an illusory manner to protect oneself from the bad air that infested the territories at the gates of the city.
The Anopheles mosquito struck in the summer, towards evening, and those who were bitten slowly died, with little hope of surviving.
So why move?
Yet, even the Serenelli family from Paterno di Ancona, a small town on the outskirts of the Adriatic city, had the idea of moving to the invasive Roman countryside, ending up living in a large farmhouse together with the Gorettis who in the meantime had lost Luigi, the forefather.
Maria was the eldest and had the task of looking after the house and her siblings. A task that was often entrusted to the eldest daughters.
I think of my grandfather in those same years, also the son of poor farmers from Paterno, born seven years before Alessandro, left fatherless early on, changed course and went to settle in Ancona, learned to bind books and opened a shop with his brother and finally became a printer. By dint of handling books he began to read them, by printing paper he began to produce flyers and newspapers, the era of the anarchist uprisings that raged along the coast from the Marche to Romagna brought him closer to politics. Those were the times when the greatest concentrations of wealth were counted among priests and nobles and for adverse and irreconcilable reasons despite having relatives in the Church he distanced himself to the point of becoming anticlerical and godless.
In the photo: the house where Maria Goretti lived in the Agro Pontino
Different destinies of people of equal economic conditions.
At this point the narrative strategy changes, equal and contrary forces come together and the diversity in the perspective vision of the story comes into play, which sees a little girl of just twelve years old being declared a saint for a brutal violence inflicted by her neighbor of just twenty years old, a certain Alessandro Serenelli, who because of her firm denial thought it best to hit her persistently and mortally with an awl. In short, she didn't agree.
– It reminds me of Turetta and his seventy-five blows inflicted on poor Giulia Cecchettin. This last year alone, more than one hundred women have been murdered by the man. The slaughter continues.-
As for poor Marietta, for years, in short, I understood her like this: it was convenient for the Church that she became Blessed so that attention would be focused on the Agro Romano and the reclamation attempts by the Duce, a character that initially as a socialist my grandfather knew very well, as well as his great gifts as a storyteller.
While his canonization was considered immediately after the war, as the arrival of the Americans had also brought about a greater tolerance of customs.
To make a long story short, I had never paid attention to Maria Goretti from Corinaldo, but then again I had never understood the leavenings of Saint Teresa of Avila, to tell the truth, while I was blissfully admiring Bernini's sculpture in the church of Santa Vittoria in Rome, not to mention the fasts of Catherine of Siena. Raised on bread and realism since childhood, I avoided, like many, the elusive theological conjectures, entrusting myself to the healthy practicality of daily life, putting aside holy myths and legends, so full of contradictions that they often resonate like real mysteries.
But with time the masks fall and mine rolled all at once, so that the gentleness and the ferocity at the same time of this story has led me off the track and I am still looking for it in the clearings around the tracks while I ask myself if it is when I lost it that I found myself again and if in everything there is not always recognizable, deep down, the germ of its opposite.
Horror has overcome indifference. I hear Maria's screams as she is torn open in her belly.
She who continues to deny herself while that madman continues to hit her. Where did he find that strength? A gaunt, bony, otherworldly little girl, an unprecedented synthesis for her years of eternity and mortality, spelling out syllables of terrifying grandeur: “God does not want.” What does a little girl know about God? And where is God in all this?
How many blows did the idiot give her before he stopped completely?
Much less would have been enough, perhaps, to save his life. It was enough. It was enough. It was enough. And he didn't do it.
“It is not death that makes martyrs,” says St. Augustine, “but their will to die.”
I don't know if he wanted to die, I know he couldn't do anything else. And so he did.
So small, yet so big.
The remains of Maria Goretti, exceptionally for the Jubilee 2025, will be hosted in the Diocesan Sanctuary of Corinaldo from January 27 to February 2. An opportunity not to be missed, in my opinion, for all those who believe in the greatness of this sweetest and infinite martyr.
