Writing Historical Fiction: Little Ancient Latin Books
PART EIGHT IN THE HISTORICAL FICTION SERIES: VARSALONA
After our three-course lunch and digestive at the bar, Marisa received another call and informed us that we needed to go to the church, Chiesa Madre, immediately to meet the priest. We gathered our belongings and started the trek up to the old church set in the center of town.
arrived at the halfway point of the little one-way road that ran through the town and connected the high and low ends of Castronovo. The façade of the 11th-century church was misleadingly simple because once you entered the weathered red door, there was an enormous cathedral made of marble and gold.
Mass was ending, so we shuffled into a back pew and sat down for the last five minutes of prayer. When it was over, Zio Peppino directed us to another interior door that led to a waiting room to a small office. We looked around at the photos and decorations until Father Onofrio Scaglione entered wearing a polo shirt and jeans.
Father Onofrio explained the obstacles we would find trying to research records from over 100 years ago. Births, baptisms, deaths, marriages, and every other event and sacrament that had taken place at the town church were listed together in (somewhat) chronological order in small ancient handwriting in dilapidated little books. The papers were still handwritten in small books based on the date they occurred. Oh, and they were in Latin.
It was evident that we weren’t going to get anywhere today since Father Onofrio explained that his assistant was out and she would need to look for the older records in the archives. He told me that they would try to find what I was looking for but that he couldn’t make any promises. Then he reached into a drawer, pulled out an ancient record book, and told me that although this was a more recent version, it would give me an idea of what we were dealing with and looking through one by one, page by page. This was not promising.
