When you’re from America’s Midwest, you tend to think of the religious devout as dour Puritans who’ve given up everything fun and exciting and are so bitter about it they want everyone else to jump in the same boat or die a slow, lingering death after writhing in pain in a pit filled with vipers.
That’s why I like the story of Brother Cesare Bonizzi and his band, Fratello Metallo.
An Italian Capuchin friar is gearing up to take the stage at the most important festival on the country’s heavy metal calendar in Bologna this weekend.
So, I’ll say what I always say when I’m looking at something in a market window in Italy: “Why don’t we have this?”
I can say it about lardo, of course, and also about a religious man who “twirls the end of the rope around his waist as he belts out heavy metal numbers.”
Ah, to be in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore sipping prosecco in the cool of an evening while listening to the ethereal voice of a holy man belting out odes to Bacchus and to Mary and to all the other touchstones that would unite us if we’d let them.
Read: Friar to open heavy metal concert