Benedict XVI’s summer residence: an entire city mourns for its beloved visitor

The shop owner named his daughter after him. The priest wears his old vestments. The former mayor dedicated a plaque to him at the Town Hall and the inhabitants of this picturesque hillside village remember hearing him play the piano behind the walls of the building on cool summer evenings.

The Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is particularly loved in Castel Gandolfowhere he joined a long line of pontiffs who summered in the papal villa overlooking Lake Albano in the southern hills of Rome.

The death of Benedict XVI has deeply affected its inhabitants because many knew him personally and had already said an emotional farewell when he spoke his last words as pope from the balcony of the building overlooking the town square on February 28, 2013.

That evening, thousands packed Castel Gandolfo’s main square and cheered on Benedict XVI as the palace’s bronze-studded doors closed at 8 p.m., marking the official end of his pontificate.

Benedict XVI then began the first papal retreat in 600 years in the palace gardens, where he awaited the conclave that elected Pope Francis. He returned to the Vatican two months later to spend his last years in a converted monastery in the Vatican Gardens, where he died on Saturday, nearly ten years after that memorable night at Castel Gandolfo.

“It was really awful to see the big door close that night,” said Stefano Carosi, who runs the café in the main square, a few meters from the building’s entrance. “He made us understand that this pope would no longer be with us … that he had abandoned us,” he said.

The palace

It was Pope Urban VIII who had the palace built at the north end of the city in 1624 so that popes could escape the sweltering Roman summers. In subsequent pontificates it was extended until reaching the current size, greater than that of the Vatican City.

In addition to the large gardens and the swimming pool that St. John Paul II installed, the palace has a farm that supplies the Vatican with dairy products, eggs, honey and other fresh products, as well as an observatory that has a first-rate collection of meteorites. .

In the decade following the resignation of Benedict XVI, Castel Gandolfo had to adapt its modus vivendi and its seasonal rhythms to a new pope who chose not to spend his holidays here.

Francis spent every summer of his pontificate in Vatican City, starving Castel Gandolfo’s gift shops, restaurants and hotels of the visitors who flocked to the city every summer Sunday for papal blessings at noon and then stayed to enjoy themselves . the field.

Francis has tried to remedy this by opening the palace and its immaculate gardens to the public as an extension of the Vatican Museums, where visitors can see the papal bedroom, the vestments and ancient uniforms of the papal court.

Francis’ absence

But despite having this tourist opportunity all year round, the absence of a pope continues to irritate a community that for centuries has maintained a privileged relationship with the popes, above all with Benedict XVI for his evident love for the city and his decision to spend his here. last moments as pope.

“When he arrived here (at the beginning of summer) he seemed very tired, but it was only after the two months spent in Castel Gandolfo that he got his strength back,” said mayor Maurizio Colacchi, whose two terms spanned almost the entire eight-year of Benedict’s pontificate.

“It was evident that the air, the environment, the tranquillity, the serenity did him a lot of good,” he added.

Colacchi recalled visits by heads of state that turned the high street into the center of the media universe for a day, as did Benedict’s lowest-profile but most frequent visitor: his late brother, the Rev. Georg Ratzinger, who often spent weeks visiting the pope in the summer.

In one of his many meetings with the pope, Colacchi granted Georg honorary citizenship. In another, Colacchi uncovered a plaque on the facade of the town hall with a quote that Benedetto once uttered to express his love for the city. “Here I have everything: mountains, lake and I can also see the sea, and the good people”, reads the plaque.

“We got to know it very well, in the sense that we were lucky enough to appreciate it more directly than anyone else, because everything is smaller here,” says Patriza Gasperini, whose family has owned Gasperini Souvenirs for three generations, a shop located next to the entrance to the building.

He remembered how Benedicto greeted neighbors in the main square when he returned from his walks in the gardens, without bodyguards, or when he played works by his beloved Mozart in the evenings and was faintly heard from passers-by in the main square.

“He was very, very good,” said Gasperini, whose shop still sells Benedict’s religious memorabilia and who he named his daughter Benedetta, born a few months after his election in 2005.

Benedict was remembered with prayers during various moments of Tuesday morning mass at the parish church in the main square, where a large photo of him with a black crepe on the frame was placed next to the altar.

The parish priest, the Reverend Tadeusz Rozmus, wore a white tunic that Benedict had worn during a mass celebrated for the faithful of Castel Gandolfo in his church and then left as a gift.

“The popes who have come here have not come as guests,” Rozmus said after the mass. “This was his home.”

Source: Associated Press