28th October 2011

One national newspaper carries a weekend review, usually of a high flying, high spending, high worth individual describing a typical weekend.

Usually it is made clear during the article that the individual being interviewed owns a number of properties in city, country or seaside, to which they can repair depending on their mood, social or business requirements.

Despite having owned only a couple of properties over a lifetime I can understand how it might feel to have access to properties around the world or across Europe.

My family home has usually been a vicarage and now in retirement I have acquired access to a number of properties from the highlands of Scotland to the Ligurian coast where, within moments of arriving, I feel completely at home.

One such apartment is in Via Goito in Genova.

This elegant apartment is the Chaplaincy house for the Chiesa Anglicana in Genova, where in exchange for the accommodation, the Chaplain offers pastoral and liturgical support to the congregation which gathers for worship at 10 30 CET every Sunday.

This is a wonderful way for an impoverished and therefore low spending, low net worth, retired Church of England clergyman, to spend his weekend, breaking bread and saying his prayers, with a wonderful group of people from around the world.

The Church on Piazza Marsala is in the care of the Diocese of Europe, the previously, and in my view better named, Diocese of Fulham and Gibraltar. However the responsibility for the maintenance and restoration of the Church rests with a small congregation made up of English folk living in Genova plus other members of the wider Anglican diaspora.

The Church and its congregation are in some ways a wonderfully eccentric anomaly in Genova, as are the English, usually retired, clergy (I include myself in this of course) who offer upwards of a month at a time as Locum Chaplains.

Being equally enamoured of things Italian and things English marks the congregation out.

Peter who has taught English in Genova for years relishes the richness of his life in Italy and wonders why anyone would choose to live in England these days; Alexia born in Africa married to her Italian husband zipping about the City streets on her scooter; or Mary, originally from Ghana whose husband is an Alpini stationed in Afghanistan and who loves the sound of the cork popping from the Prosecco as refreshments are served after the Sunday Eucharista.

Most Sundays, Liz, an English teacher, married to her Italian husband with a Genovese daughter, Son in Law and Granddaughter, opens the Church and greets us as we enter with an Italian, ‘Buongiorno’, the service sheet which she has printed, already on the Altar.

Then, at the last minute, usually with her Italian Mother in Law on her arm, in rushes Flora the organist, always with too much to do and too little time, with her Italian greeting, a kiss on either cheek, she rushes across to switch on the organ and brief the violinists, Hanuka is Japanese and Ellena her colleague German, who will accompany the hymns.

The congregation can be from any where and everywhere. At my last service the nations represented included Ghana, Nigeria, other African Nations, Japan, India, Germany, England, the United States and Italy.

There are also Ecuadorean and Nigerian Congregations who use Holy Ghost as their place of meeting for worship.

On Easter Sunday 2011 we were struggling through the service with a handful of the regular congregation, when the doors burst open and a gang of twenty young people poured in, tall and handsome, they brought an energy with them.

I assumed they were Americans as they joined in and lifted the spirits of everyone present with their liveliness and loveliness, only to discover that they were in fact from the Netherlands and touring Italy for the Easter break.

Buongiorno indeed!

The Church was designed by the English Architect G E Street and is typical of his design work, a fine Victorian building built to a specification drawn up by Sir Montague Yeats Brown, British Consul at the time.

The Church was built to serve the English speaking community resident in Genova in the nineteenth century. There is also an English section in the great Staglieno Cemetery which provides the final resting place of a number of ex Pats not the least Oscar Wilde’s wife Constance.

Oscar Wilde visited Genova around 1880, where he wrote the sonnet, ‘Written in Holy Week at Genoa’, whose opening lines refer to a park near the present day Di Negro Metro Station.

James Smithson another Englishman has a memorial in the Church, a chemist and mineralogist, and both a European and an Internationalist he died in Genoa in 1879. He left his considerable fortune to America to found the Smithsonian Museum.

Today the building is showing signs of wear and tear and needs some refurbishment and the present Honorary British Consul Ms Denise Dardani is leading an initiative to start a Friends of the Chiesa Anglicana to raise funds for the refurbishment.