I am currently in the middle of a wonderful study abroad semester at the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy.  It is the oldest university in Europe, founded in 1088.

At the beginning of the semester, my art history professor gave our class some preliminary definitions regarding historical methodology—definitions of the words “past,” “history,” and “historiography.”  I did not anticipate them having much weight, but as it turns out, one of my professor’s observations struck me.

The past, he said, refers to all that has occurred before the present, to the container of all previous human activity.  History, however, “is instead the interpretation of the traces, the signs from the past—buildings, monuments, art, documents—that allow the historian subjectively to identify events and problems.”  In other words, “the signs of human activity through the centuries, isolated in themselves, do not transmit or tell us anything—they are objects deprived of meaning and are distinguishable only superficially.”

It was an interesting thought—the traces of past human activity, lacking historical interpretation, are meaningless.  That is to say, the Colosseum, lacking any contextual details about who built it or knowledge of when and why it was built, would be to us simply a large stone edifice, intriguing surely, but meaningless nonetheless.  Could this claim be true?

In Bologna, the traces of the distant human past are scattered about profusely.  The buildings announce their agedness, and structures from the 14th century stand next to some from the 18th which are next to some from the 20th.  With few exceptions, I do not know anything about any of them.  I wander around clueless, appreciating the beauty, but not inquiring about the stories.  This describes the better part of our experience of the world: we wander through all sorts of “human traces” with little to no consciousness of their histories or the contexts in which they came to exist.  We wander through a world of strange and mysterious signs that we do not know how to read and that, for the most part, we do not try to read.  Is it true that they mean nothing to us?

Obviously not—we experience them, and we make them mean something to us.

The Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi is an ancient church a block away from my apartment.  I first noticed its beautiful quadriportico one day when I was rushing down the sidewalk, late to an appointment.  Another day I walked by and saw the doors open, so I went in.  I found it a little creepy.  Yet another day I stood under its porticoes for a couple of hours talking to an Irish man I had met.  Eventually one Sunday night in February, I went to Mass there.  The pews were old and creaky, and somehow it was colder inside than outside.  I kept going to mass there; I started to develop a relationship with the place.

It was not until a couple of weeks later, when the priest dedicated his homily to the history of the church and to the order of the Servants of Mary who had built it, that I knew even the slightest details about the place.  I learned that the Servants of Mary was founded by 13th century Florentine saints who were canonized, not as individuals, but as a group of 7.  I learned that the Basilica was built in the 14th century to extend the order’s mission into the city of Bologna from its origins in Florence.  I learned that the quadriportico outside was meant to shelter weary pilgrims on their way to Rome when they could not find lodging in the city.

Learning about the church’s history did not make it mean something to me.  It already meant something to me: It was the old and dimly lit place where I had sat shivering at Mass for a couple of Sunday nights in February, and I liked it for that.  My understanding of it until then, however, was derived entirely from the way in which I had experienced the church myself.  But learning its context and its story pointed me somewhere else.  It allowed the church to transmit something to me, to tell me that it had a particular story entirely independent of how I had experienced it.

The church was layered in subjective significance; countless other humans—priests, pilgrims, parishioners, and random visitors—had experienced and interpreted that church in their own way.  But at the end of the day, there was the simple fact that the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi, apart from all these subjective layers of meaning, existed on its own, with its own story that was at once independent of these interpretations and entirely comprised of them.

These human signs that we encounter in the streets, wherever we are, are mysteries.  As signs tend to do, they signify things—truths, facts, objective stories.  They disclose things.  But they are also the objects of endlessly varied experiences and interpretations.  When we pass by them, we can write them off.  We can allow them to become ours superficially, objects of our experiences, and indeed there is some value in this.  But if we probe them and learn their stories, somehow they become less ours and more their own.  Even as they disclose facts, they hide more and more under mysteries.  They hide under layers of interpretations; they refuse to be grasped.  They remind us that the world is sacramental, that there is truth in reality, that we can experience it and study it, but that, so long as the interplay between the subject and the object continues, we cannot contain it.  We can only delve in.

Domenic Canonico is a junior PLS and Italian major from Stanford Hall.  Email him at dcanonic@nd.edu to discuss systemic injustice issues such as the absence of gelato in America.