Daughter of Ashes by Ilaria Tuti

Author:Ilaria Tuti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

26

Today

ONCE AGAIN THE CRYPT of the basilica opened up for Massimo, but now it wasn’t Teresa Battaglia standing by his side.

Elena squeezed his hand.

“This is unreal!”

She had tried to keep her voice down to a murmur, but it came out sounding more like a squeak, so much so that the watchman turned around to look. He sat down near the entrance to the crypt and shifted his attention back to his phone. After all, there was nothing much for him to keep an eye on, as the visitors weren’t planning to touch the mosaic floor this time.

Dressed in a white cotton dress that grazed her ankles, Elena shivered, her feet nearly on top of each other.

“Are you cold?”

“It’s not the cold.”

There was something about the way she said it. It was love—love for the past, for the people who had dwelt in it and sung in praise of their god, for the tiles placed there by hardworking hands, and for every trace of color that had remained stubbornly attached to its square of plaster over the course of so many centuries. Massimo encouraged her to step forward.

“It’s all yours.”

Elena lifted her hands in the air.

“Can you feel that wind? An underground current. To keep the relics well-preserved.”

“I don’t really know anything about it, I’m afraid. I don’t have much to say, other than how pretty it is.”

Elena turned around.

“That’s because no one’s ever explained it to you.”

“Why don’t you have a go?”

Elena was standing under a spotlight, her cinnamon-colored hair like a golden veil cascading to her waist.

She stretched out her arm.

“That way lies the Orient, the rising sun. The first light of dawn would filter through the windows and fall upon the faithful. Imagine their awe, the potency of that ritual, the water inside the ellipsoidal baptismal font glittering in the light.”

The font was nothing but a pile of rocks now.

Elena took a few steps forward.

“But the real treasure, Massimo, lies beneath our feet. A path of initiation whose full meaning remains a mystery to this day.”

“A path of initiation?”

“Every figure you see here relates to all the others, and together they compose a majestic vision. These mosaics are in part an iconographic representation of the Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic text written in the Coptic language, and dating back to the third century. The followers of the Gnostic faith were dissident Christians who probably came here from Alexandria to evade the censorship of the Church Fathers. The four volumes of the Pistis Sophia were later understood to form part of a much more extensive Gnostic library, after the discovery in 1945 of the thirteen codices of Nag Hammadi found buried in a jar by two shepherd brothers.”

“What did the codices contain?”

“Revelations. The words Jesus Christ left behind for his apostles in the eleven years he spent with them after his resurrection.”

“After his resurrection? That’s a little alarming.”

“It alarmed orthodox Christians, too. By the fourth century, Christianity had become a religio licita, made legal through edicts issued by Galerius and Constantine.

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