David Farley · 2009 · road

David Farley's 2009 book. In December 1983 a priest in the hill town of Calcata told his congregation that the Holy Foreskin of Jesus, the town's pride and the reason pilgrims came, had been stolen. In 2006 Farley moved there to find out what happened - and ended up tracing a relic that half of medieval Europe claimed to own.

1. 1
   New York

   A travel writer with a standing interest in reliquaries reads a Slate piece about a relic that vanished from an Italian hill town in 1983, and decides the only way to find out what happened is to go and live there.

2. 2
   Calcata

   A medieval village on a volcanic outcrop forty-five minutes north of Rome, condemned as unsafe in the 1930s, abandoned, and then squatted by artists and hippies - which is how it came to be called Italy's oddest town.

3. 3
   Rome

   Where the relic starts: the earliest of them, held in the Sancta Sanctorum at the Lateran - and taken in the sack of 1527 by a German soldier who was captured on the road north and left it behind in a cell.

4. 4
   Aachen

   Charlemagne's capital, and the version of the story the Church liked least: that an angel gave the relic to Charlemagne at Jerusalem, and he gave it to the Pope - which Farley traces because the provenance is the whole argument.

5. 5
   Charroux

   One of at least eight French towns claiming a Holy Prepuce - Coulombs, Chartres, Metz, Conques, Langres, Fecamp, Le Puy - a proliferation that eventually embarrassed Rome into ruling on it.

6. 6
   Chartres

   Another claimant, and the point at which the book's real subject appears: not whether any of them was genuine, but what a relic does to a town that has one, and what happens to the town when it goes.

7. 7
   Santiago de Compostela

   The great pilgrimage city in the far north-west of Spain had one too - and Farley's point is that these were the currency of an age when saints were rock stars, pilgrims were groupies and monks were the road crew.

8. 8
   Antwerp

   The Low Countries claimant, and the last of the tour before the trail comes back to Italy - by which time the reader has worked out that nobody in fifteen hundred years has been able to count these things.

9. 9
   The Vatican

   A 1900 decree confined the Calcata relic to a single showing each New Year's Day, and threatened excommunication for anyone writing about it - and in 1983 it disappeared, which is why some of the town has always blamed Rome.

10. 10
    Calcata

    A year of asking winemakers, actors and a tight-lipped priest what became of it - and the answer Farley arrives at is less about the relic than about a village that lost the one thing that made anybody come.