The street was so bright that I was squinting through my sunglasses.  Our cassock-clad monk, Claudio, sporting a pair of stylish shades and an orange nylon backpack, had already led us through the impressive Basilica of S. Francesco and several other churches that morning, and now we stood in front of a rather plain stone building in a narrow alleyway.  He pulled out his key ring and unlocked the heavy wooden door to San Stefano.

Claudio opens the door to San Stefano

It took a long time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness enough to make out five arches in the cool interior of the chapel.  A few small rectangular windows were cut high into the stone.  The entire building would have fit inside a minor chapel of the Basilica.  But when Claudio began to chant the mass, his voice filling the space so that it took on shape and a unity bounded by the dark stone, I felt like I was truly experiencing a cathedral for the first time.

There are so many beautiful cathedrals in Italy, and they are covered in so much ornate and masterful art, that it is easy to forget that they are also—even primarily— meant to be a frame for the space inside.  When I was in Florence, I happened to wander in on an exhibit in a cathedral that talked about the interaction between music and architecture.  Unfortunately, it was all in Italian.  But listening to the sound of Claudio singing in the stone chapel made the connection between sound and space more clear to me than written words in any language could have done.  The music resonating in the stone chamber opened this space for me and made it into a single entity rather than a collection of potential viewpoints for the building around it.  No longer was the space empty between the building’s walls: The walls had turned from elaborate sculptures into sculptors of the sound that resonated between them.

This seemed to me a fitting metaphor for the structures of any cultural traditions—whether it’s language, customs, or alcoholic beverages—that define a group’s or individual’s outward identity.  Intricate and varied, beautiful or grotesque, culture forms a structure that resonates with the human voice.