Next time you buy bus tickets from your local edicola take a look around you. Among the assortment of DVDs, magazine freebies and football-related paraphernalia you will spot this year’s calendars.Among the many featuring scantily clad minor female celebrities you may also notice one with 12 dishy young priests staring back out at you. “Dishy?” enquires Piero Pazzi, the Venetian behind the calendars, looking genuinely bemused.
“Have you seen December’s entry?” he asks, adding that he thinks December’s priest has a not necessarily alluring animal-like quality to him.
His point is that the priests’ looks have very little to do with it. The calendar is a guide to the Vatican, he states. That’s why it contains information in four languages about the Vatican that “you don’t find in normal guides”. And that’s why the priests are all young too. “Their youth is a sign of continuity,” he says. “They represent a bridge to the future, it’s a way of saying that this profession is still very much alive.”
Pazzi (the name is real) started his Calendario Romano in 2003. The year before, he launched a calendar of Venetian gondoliers, which was a success and is still going strong. The 2007 Calendario Romano is doing well and is set to sell 46,000 copies this year. It can be bought in Rome, Venice and online, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, Italians rarely buy it. Pazzi’s most impassioned clients are “Spaniards, Americans and Protestants”, as well as a significant number of female ministers from Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
Despite its name, the Calendario Romano priests are not all from Rome, nor do they necessarily reside in the eternal city. “They are Roman in the sense that they are all Roman Catholic,” Pazzi explains. However, many of the photos were taken in Rome and the Vatican, and the others not much further afield, in Palermo and Seville. And yes, the priests are all really priests. Another surprise is how Pazzi goes about assembling his line-up of 12 hunky churchmen. Occasionally he will get a response to his online casting call for priests who want to be photographed. But for the most part the photos are all spontaneous, random and off-the-cuff.
So he doesn’t ask the priest if he can put his photo in a calendar? “I asked the ones looking directly at the camera if I could shoot them, but I didn’t tell them what for.” I mumble something about model release forms and am told that the priests are “anonymous” and that Pazzi knows “nothing about them and is not invading their privacy in any way”. Forms are only necessary “if you publish names or personal information”, which the calendar doesn’t. That sounds plausible but you’d think if the priests found out they might want a share of the profits (to give to charity, of course).
Yet so far no-one has got in touch. In fact Pazzi recounts how he recently met up with one of the Spanish priests featured in the 2007 calendar after a local Spanish newspaper ran an article about it. Pazzi gave the young clergyman a bunch of calendars as a thank you. What did the priest say about the calendar? “Not a lot, but his mother was very happy about it!” he grins.
The church has been a little less happy about the project. “Back in 2003 there was a lot of controversy surrounding the calendar in the media,” recalls Pazzi. “People thought the Vatican was behind the calendar but the Church made it clear it was a private initiative. It is not as if I’m criticising the Church,” he adds.
At first it is hard to understand Pazzi’s exact motivation for making the calendar. He says he is a Catholic but doesn’t practice much; he says “Rome is the cornerstone of civilisation”; he studied architecture, is specialised in ancient jewellery and is not a trained photographer. He plainly states that the calendars are a commercial enterprise (“journalists always ask me if I give the money to charity, but why can’t this be my own personal project?”), but judging by his faintly dishevelled appearance money is clearly not the driving force either. Yet after a while, it becomes clear that Pazzi’s calendars (last year he also published calendars of Venice in the snow and of angel sculptures) have a loftier objective, but one that you wouldn’t expect at all.
He makes the calendars so that he can support his work promoting the preservation and safeguarding of Venice’s heritage. To this end he has published a tome called Venezia da salvare-Volume I in which he has assembled images of Venetian facades, statues and buildings that have been left literally to go to ruin. “This is how this sculpture of a crucifixion in S. Paolo looked in 1973, 1982 and 2005,” he explains. By 2005 the sculpture is almost unrecognisable due to pollution and grime. Pazzi has also spent the last few months photographing and recording baroque ex-votos in silver featuring the Venetian navy. He discovered them at a sanctuary in Croatia.
In the meantime the Calendario Romano has really taken off. Rizzoli has just signed an exclusive contract with Pazzi to distribute its own version of the calendar (using his photos) in North America. Sales are going up too. All the better for Pazzi, who says he could fill another hundred volumes with his hometown’s neglected and abandoned artistic treasures. His detractors might be interested to know that the profits of his church-themed calendar seem to be going to a good cause after all.
http://www.calendarioromano.org/