Sphenisciphobia

(from my Let's Go blog)

I understand now why people are afraid of nuns.

When the lady at the San Gimignano tourist office told me about the convent's dorms, I got my fingers ready to give this find a coveted Let's Go thumbs-up. It took me three visits to actually find a nun at the desk, and a little while longer for her to understand my rote-memorized Italian for "may I have a look around?" Eventually, she waved me upstairs, and I got to see a bit of convent life.

I found a long hallway of empty, sparse dorm rooms adorned with surprisingly tasteful Virgins. Not bad, not bad. I took a different staircase down and emerged in another hall of dorms - these clearly inhabited by persons of the cloth. Outside was a gorgeous stone courtyard with a huge old well, still in operation. I suspected that I had ventured out of bounds, but the place was empty. So I had a poke around.

Now, I am a big fan of trespassing. Sure, sometimes you get yelled at. But sometimes you make a great find. This time, I'd found a fully operational 12th-century Italian convent.

There was a chapel, of course. I bumped my head on the ceiling going in - 12th-century nuns were short - and discovered the entrance to the cloister. The convent is on the edge of San Gimignano, a mountaintop city, and to my amazement, the cloister had a postcard-perfect view of the city center's towers.

Just then the sky rumbled. And before you could say "one Mississippi" a lightning bolt had brightened the dark sky. And as every grade schooler knows, that means the storm is here. I ducked back into the convent by another door, just as a burst of sharp rain came tumbling out of the sky. At this point, I had no idea where in the apparently immense convent I was, but that wasn't going to stop me from continuing my exploration. Thunder shook the walls. A line of elderly nuns passed by in habits, probably to go sing "My Favorite Things" with the Reverend Mother, but that wasn't going to stop me either. Then one of them noticed me.

So, turns out trespassing is less fun when you can't speak the language. Normally, when an enormous old nun asks me what I'm doing, I smile and make up some convincing story, probably flashing one of my several persuasive ID cards for good measure. It worked on the monk at Westminster Abbey who put me on the list for Darwin's birthday party last year. But this nun? This nun questioned me in Italian. And I could respond with nothing better than, "Huh?"

And then I am being dragged - literally dragged, by the arm - through the convent by a very large, very angry nun shouting at me in rapid Italian. I catch words like "privato" and "vietato" but am at a loss to respond, and it doesn't seem like a great time to pull out the press pass. She yanks me all the way to the front gate. With a good shove, I am thrown out of the convent and into the rain.

I meant no offense. Nun: taken.

Read more: http://www.letsgo.com/article/2644-sphenisciphobia#ixzz17VGv02ws