Whatever the Church's universal calendar may say, all red-blooded Italian-Americans (like Rocco Palmo and yours truly) know that today is the Feast of San Rocco.

Paul McCreesh has a wonderful recording, Music for San Rocco (Deutsche Grammophon/Archiv) which I faithfully play on the feast. It is a re-creation of a 1608 liturgical celebration for the Saint, with music composed by Giovanni Gabrieli.

The recording was made in the Great Hall of the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice. The "scuola" was one of the six major Venetian confraternities, dedicated to the spiritual and temporal well-being of the members. (For the Medieval antecedents of the confraternities, one may consult Augustine Thompson O.P.'s marvelous book, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes 1125-1325.)

The building which houses the Scuola di San Rocco has another claim to fame. It was decorated by the great Venetian painter, Tintoretto, and contains many of his greatest paintings. When I saw them in 1981 (after they had been restored), I thought: here is the art of Michelangelo without the anguish.

Recently, I was introduced to Henry James' assessment of the painter in his Italian Hours:

Tintoretto's great merit, to my mind, was his unequalled distinctness of vision. When once he had conceived the germ of a scene it defined itself to his imagination with an intensity, an amplitude, an individuality of expression, which makes one's observation of his pictures seem less an operation of the mind than a kind of supplementary experience of life.

You get from Tintoretto's work the impression that he felt, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human life very much as Shakespeare felt it poetically -- with a heart that never ceased to beat a passionate accompaniment to every stroke of his brush.

Buona festa a tutti!