Get me to a nunnery
Michael McMahon tempts the convent curfews in Rome
Ifirst started sleeping with nuns a little over a year ago. It is easy to get into the habit. Hotel rooms in Rome can be expensive; kipping in convents is cheap. Last month I stayed with the Presentation Sisters in Casa Il Rosario, at the heart of the Centro Storico and a short walk from the Foro Romano. I paid £46 a night for a single room with en suite facilities. It was comfortable, quiet and clean. Just around the corner, some friends were paying £135 three times as much — for pretty similar accommodation at the Hotel Forum, a cosily elegant four-star set-up that was once irony of ironies — a convent.
And what did they get for the £89-a-night difference? A television and a fridge stocked with booze. I missed neither. I didn’t go to Rome to watch CNN or Europorn, and I don’t like paying through the nose for what I pour down my throat. Mind, you never know when you’re going to be troubled by the shakes or the munchies, so I popped out to the corner shop and bought a full-sized bottle of Bell’s for the cost of a couple of mini-bar miniatures, and a party-sized bag of pretzels for the price of a palmful of refrigerated nuts. Just knowing they were there was enough. Well, almost.
To be fair, there were other minor differences too, but unless you are a collector of single-use shoe-shine kits, shower caps and shampoo sachets, you will have little to complain of in a convent; and when you are paying a third of the price of a hotel room, you would have to be pretty mean-minded to give voice to those complaints. The showerhead in my bathroom was a bit wobbly — but then so is the one we have at home. Thirty-eight inches is a bit short for a bath towel: the ends met exactly when I put it around my waist, and breathed in, hard. My breakfast wasn’t quite as grand as that offered at the Hotel Forum, but so what? Only Johnnie Foreigner eats cheese first thing in the morning, when the cheddar-fed gorge rises as readily to Dairylea as to dolcelatte. Beyond that, there are no nits to pick.
With my own maxi-bar set up on a window ledge or dressing table, I could be comfortable in almost any religious house offering accommodation. There are plenty to choose from in the middle of Rome. The Dominican Sisters of the Villa Rosa, not far from the Circo Maximo, charge £45 for a single, £80 for a double, and £105 for a room with three beds. (‘English spoken.’) The Lourdes Sisters charge £70 for a single without bath, but then they are right by the Spanish Steps. The Franciscan Sisters in the Borgo Santo Spirito offer special rates for children under 12 (£10 for a shared room) and students (£25, ditto). Adults are charged £40 each to share a room with two beds.
Accommodation at these prices represents astonishingly good value but, even so, there are those who wouldn’t cross the threshold of a convent even if the nuns paid them to stay. They fear that once that front door shuts behind them, the key would be turned by the malevolent reverend mother played by Geraldine McEwan in The Magdalene Sisters, who would show them to the room next door to a cell energetically occupied by the sex-crazed hunchback played by Vanessa Redgrave in The Devils.
People with such prejudices are never going to be persuaded to stay in a religious house, but if you are a waverer wondering whether it might not feel just a bit odd to be rubbing shoulders with unworldly celibates, let me set your mind at rest. You won’t be. One of the reasons that so much accommodation is available is that there aren’t enough nuns to go round. In the crisis of faith that has followed the Second Vatican Council, religious vocations have plummeted, and though there are still nuns today, the way things are going there might well be none tomorrow. In all the convents I have stayed in, I have only encountered them in ones or twos at the reception desk, where they have been helpful, or in huddles in the chapel, where they have been at prayer which visitors are neither required nor expected to attend. You don’t have to be a religious person to be a PG in a religious house.
You do, however, have to observe one rule religiously. At least you do in most of them. If there is a curfew, it is taken seriously. The earliest I have come across is ten o’clock; the latest, midnight. This is not the absolute disadvantage that it might seem, for it does mean that you aren’t going to be woken up by late-night revellers’ returns. But if you miss it, you will find yourself locked out and looking for a full-price hotel if you can afford it, or a park bench or shop doorway if you can’t.
That isn’t quite what happened to Ray, a young fellow I met when I was in Rome, but his story certainly illustrates the point. He told it to me on the last night of a convivium organised by the publishers of Chronicles, the American palaeoconservative magazine that ought to be better known this side of the Atlantic. After the farewell dinner, Ray and fellow student Lance invited me to join them for a nightcap at a pavement café around the corner. Italy had outlawed indoor smoking in public on the day of my arrival, and an unlit Antico Toscano was burning a hole in the breast pocket of my jacket.
We sat; we sipped; I lit it. They told me that their convent, like mine, had an 11 p.m. curfew, and on their second day Ray had gone out on the razzle, having arranged for Lance to let him in when he got back late. But Lance hadn’t been able to get the lock on the front door to work. When he had finally given up twisting, pulling and rattling, he had turned to see a very short and very angry nun in a white towelling dressing-gown who subjected him to a torrent of Italian reprimands before flinging a finger stairward and yelling ‘AVANTI!’ She then let Ray in, and offered him similar spiritual direction.
I chuckled as I puffed on my cigar. I envied them their youth, I told them, but when you get older you learn to pace yourself. I looked at my watch. It was 10:45. My convent was a ten-minute walk away, just across Trajan’s Forum, and I reckoned that a five-minute margin of error was more than reasonable, particularly as I could see the block I was making for across the narrow strip of ruins. Ray and Lance offered to walk me back, and we set off at a comfortable smoker’s pace. What I hadn’t realised was that the gates across the Forum are locked after dark. I would have to go round, not across. I began to walk faster, but soon realised that if I was going to make it before lockout I was going to have to do more than that. I wished my friends a hurried farewell, cast aside my dignity and my unfinished cigar, and ran. The church clocks were striking 11 as I pressed the buzzer on Il Rosario’s front door, but anyone else in the Via Sant’Agata dei Goti would have found it hard to hear them over my wheezes, splutters and gasps.
A list of convents offering accommodation in Rome, Assisi, Florence, San Gimigniano and Venice is published on the website of the American Catholic Church in Rome, www.santasusanna.org.
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