In December 1983, a priest in the Italian hill town of Calcata shared shocking news with his congregation: The pride of their town, the foreskin of Jesus, had been stolen. Some postulated that it had been stolen by Satanists. Some said the priest himself was to blame. Some even pointed their fingers at the Vatican. In 2006, writer David Farley moved to Calcata, determined to find the missing foreskin, or at least find out the truth behind its disappearance. In the resulting book, “An Irreverent Curiosity,” published by Avery/Penguin, Farley recounts how the relic passed from Charlemagne to the papacy to a marauding sixteenth-century German soldier before finally ending up in Calcata, where miracles occurred that made the sleepy town a major pilgrimage destination. Over the centuries, as Catholic theology evolved, the relic came to be viewed as something of an embarrassment, culminating in a 1900 Church decree that allowed the parish to display it only on New Year's Day.

This talk, based on Farley’s book An Irreverent Curiosity, interweaves this history with the curious landscape of Calcata, a beautiful and untouched medieval village set atop four-hundred-fifty-foot cliffs, which now, due to the inscrutable machinations of Italian bureaucracy, is a veritable counterculture coven. Farley’s talk will blend history, travel, and perhaps the oddest story in Christian lore.

David Farley is the author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town, which was adapted into a documentary by the National Geographic Channel; Underground Worlds: A Guide to Spectacular Subterranean Places, and co-editor of Travelers' Tales Prague and the Czech Republic: True Stories. He writes for the Guardian, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, and National Geographic, among other publications.