“The Shrine” (“Il tabernacolo”)

Translated by Emanuela Pecchioli and Alexander Bertland

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “The Shrine” (“Il tabernacolo”), tr. Emanuela Pecchioli and Alexander Bertland. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2026.

“The Shrine” (“Il tabernacolo”) was first published in the literary magazine Il Marzocco in the issue of August 30, 1903. Pirandello then republished it in his miscellany collection from the next year, Whites and Blacks (Bianche e nere; Turin: Steglio, 1904), before finally adding it to his first Collection of Stories for a Year, Black Shawl (Scialle nero), published by Bemporad in Florence in 1922.

As the title suggests, “The Shrine” takes on religious themes and questions that were increasingly pressing in the early 1900s, as modernization and social transformation reshaped the official and popular traditions that had long tied village life to religious institutions and narratives. Here, Pirandello tells the story of Spatolino, a poor master mason whose fervent Catholic devotion has increasingly isolated him in a small town now dominated by anticlerical socialist political forces. Unexpectedly, the wealthy, impious notary Ciancarella asks him to build a roadside shrine containing an image of Christ at the Column, a representation of Christ bound to a pillar and being scourged before his crucifixion; and this request sets off a story that questions the status of faith. Spatolino himself suspects mockery or sacrilege, but finally accepts the commission, encouraged by his confessor. The work, however, becomes a trap due to forces beyond anyone’s control, as well as forces of human greed and prejudice: through a series of misfortunes, Spatolino is ultimately left ruined and spiritually shaken, seeing in his own condition as someone who has been scorned by his fellow citizens and the law, and perhaps abandoned even by God, a striking parallel to precisely Christ who is about to be crucified. The story is thus both a bitter social satire and a tragicomic examination of faith. Pirandello exposes the cruelty of class power, legal formalism, clerical opportunism, and social mores and stigma. At the same time, in a way that is clearly consonant with his own theory of tragicomic humor (umorismo), Pirandello also exposes the laughable ways in which we respond to real suffering and misfortune. At the end, Spatolino is both a madman who has abandoned recognizable social logic and also an understandable victim whose plight we can pity. Likewise, the religion that he has made his ideal in an increasingly hostile modern world might seem to be both a source of laughter and compassion.The Editors

I

Lying down next to his wife, who was already sleeping turned toward the small bed where their two children were lying, Spatolino first said his usual prayers, then wrapped his hands behind his neck, squinted his eyes, and - without caring about what he was doing - began to whistle, as he usually did every time a doubt or a thought gnawed inside him.[1]

“Fififì… fififì… fififì…”

It was not really a whistle, but rather a dull tootle, right at the lips, always with the same cadence.

At a certain point, his wife awoke:

“Ah! Are we back to that? What happened to you?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep. Good night.”

He settled back down, turned his shoulders toward his wife and snuggled up on his side, like her, to sleep. But sleeping was impossible!

“Fififì… fififì… fififì…”

His wife then stretched out an arm to hit him on the back with a closed fist.

“Hey, will you stop it? Careful or  you will wake  the kids!”

“You're right. Shut up! I'm going back to sleep.”

He really struggled to drive away from his mind that torturous thought that was thus  becoming a singing cricket inside of him, like always. But, just when he believed he had driven it away:

“Fififì… fififì… fififì…”

This time he did not even wait for his wife to hit him with a stronger punch than before; he leaped out of bed, exasperated.

“What are you doing? Where are you going?” the woman asked him.

And he:

“I am getting dressed again, damn it! I cannot sleep. I will sit here in front of the door, on the street. Fresh air! Fresh air!”

“Hey,” the wife continued “can you tell me what the hell happened to you?”

“What? That scoundrel” Spatolino then burst out, trying to speak in a low voice, “that crook, that enemy of God…”

“Who? Who?”

“Ciancarella.”

“The notary?”

“Him. He sent word to me that he wants me at the villa tomorrow.”

“So?”

“But what could he want from me, a man like him, can you tell me? Pig,  except that he was baptized! Pig, and that’s the least I can say! Fresh air! Fresh air!”

Saying this, he grabbed a chair, reopened the door, pulled it partially closed again behind him, and sat down in the sleepy little alley with his shoulders leaning on the wall of his small house.

An oil streetlamp nearby dozed, languid, diffusing its yellowish light onto the putrid water of a puddle, if it was water; down between the cobblestones, here bulging there bowed, all disjointed and worn-out.

From inside the shadowy hovels came an oily stench of stable and, from time to time, in the silence, the trampling of some beast tormented by flies. 

A cat that prowled along the wall halted, devious, wary.

Spatolino began to gaze up high, at the streak of sky, at the stars that shined brightly there, and gazing up he brought the hairs of his small, dry, and reddish beard to his mouth. 

Small in stature, although he had mixed soil and mortar since he was a kid, he had something noble in his appearance.

Suddenly, his clear eyes--pointed toward the sky-- filled with tears. He stirred himself on the chair; and, drying his sobs with the back of his hand, he whispered in the night’s silence:

“Help me, my Lord!”

II

Since in the village the Church faction had been defeated and the new party, that of the excommunicated, had invaded the polling places of city hall, Spatolino felt like he was in the middle of enemy territory.[2]

All his fellow workers, like sheep, decided to follow the new ringleaders; and, united now in an association, they dominated.

With the few other workers who had remained faithful to the Church, Spatolino had founded the Catholic Society for the Mutual Aid of the Unworthy Children of Our Lady of Sorrows.[3]

However, the fight was unequal, and the insults of enemies (and also of friends) and the rage of powerlessness had blinded Spatolino with anger.

He had insisted, as president of that catholic society, on promoting processions, illuminations, and fireworks on the anniversaries of the religious holidays that were once observed and favored by the ancient City Council; and amidst the whistles, shouts, and cackles of the enemy party, he had restored the payments for Saint Michael the Archangel, for Saint Francis of Paola, for Good Friday, for Corpus Christi, and basically for all the main holidays of the ecclesiastical calendar.[4]

In this way, the few assets that so far had allowed him to take on some contracts had become so scant  that he predicted the day was not far away when he would be reduced from being a foreman to a wretched day laborer.

For a while now his wife had ceased to have any respect or consideration for him: she had started to provide on her own for her needs and those of the children by washing, sewing for others, and doing any type of service.

As if he was being idle because he liked it! But  that damn association  was taking all the jobs. What did his wife expect? Did he have to renounce his faith, disavow God, and go to join the party of those people? He would rather have his hands cut off!

In the meantime, idleness was eating him up and made him day by day grow more agitated, obstinate, and embittered against everyone.

Ciancarella, the notary, had never sided with anyone; but he was notoriously an enemy of God, and he had made this his full time job after he had stopped practicing his other profession  of being a notary. One time, he had even dared to agitate the dogs against a holy clergyman, Don Lagàipa, who had gone to see him to intercede in favor of some poor relatives who were actually dying of hunger, while he, in the splendid villa that he had constructed just outside the town, lived like a prince with the wealth he had amassed who knows how, and had increased over many years of  loansharking.

All night long, sometimes seated, sometimes walking in the deserted little alley, Spatolino (luckily it was summer) meditated (fififì… fififì… fififì…) about that mysterious invitation from Ciancarella.

Then, knowing that Ciancarella usually got out of bed early and hearing his wife, who had already gotten up at dawn and was already busy around the house, he thought he could get going, leaving the old chair outside there, as no one would take it.

III

Ciancarella’s villa was completely surrounded by walls, like a fortress, and had its gate on the large provincial road.

The old notary looked like a big toad with shoes and clothes and was burdened by an enormous cyst on the back of his neck that forced him to always keep his big shaved head down and bent to one side. He lived there alone, with a servant; but he had many armed people from the countryside at his command, and two mastiffs that aroused fear just by the sight of them.

Spatolino rang the bell. Immediately, those two vicious beasts pounced on the bars of the gate, and they did not calm down even when the servant rushed to reassure Spatolino, who did not want to enter. It was necessary for the master, who was drinking his coffee in the small arbor of ivy on one side of the villa in the middle of the garden, to call them with a whistle.

“Ah, Spatolino! Good,” said Ciancarella “Sit there.”

He indicated to him one of the iron stools that were standing all around the small arbor.

However, Spatolino remained standing with his poor, rugged, and chalky hat between his hands.

“You are an unworthy child, aren’t you?”

“Yes sir, and I am proud of it: of our lady of sorrows. What orders do you have to give me?”

“Here they are,” said Ciancarella, but then, instead of continuing, he brought the cup to his lips and drew three sips of coffee. “A shrine” (and another sip).

“What are you saying?”

“I would like a shrine built by you” (one more sip).

“A shrine, Sir?”[5]

“Yes, on the large road, in front of the gate” (another sip, the last; he put down the cup and—without drying his lips—he stood up. A drop of coffee fell from a corner of his mouth among the bristly hairs of his beard, which had not been trimmed for several days).  “A shrine, I was saying, not very small because it needs to fit a full-size statue of Christ at the Column.[6] On the side walls there I want to allocate two beautiful, large paintings: on one side a Calvary, on the other side a Deposition. In summary, a comfortable small room on a one-meter-high base with a small iron gate on the front and the cross on top, clearly. Have you understood?”

Spatolino lowered his head several times with his eyes closed; then reopening his eyes and sighing, he said:

“Sir, you are joking, right?”

“Joking? Why?”

“I believe that you, Sir, want to joke. Forgive me. A shrine, Sir, to the Ecce Homo?”[7]

Ciancarella tried to raise his big, shaved head a little, held it with one hand and laughed in a peculiar, very curious way, as if he was moaning, because of that malady that burdened the back of his neck.

“So, what!” he said. “Am I not worthy of that, in your opinion?”

“No, Sir, I am sorry!” Spatolino hurried to deny, vexed and irritated. “Why, Sir, should you commit a sacrilege in this way for no reason? Allow me to beg and forgive me if I speak frankly. Who do you, Sir, want to fool? God, no; you cannot fool God; God sees everything and will not let himself be fooled by you, Sir. Men? But they also see and they know that you, Sir…”

“What do they know, idiot?” the old notary shouted at him, interrupting. “And what do you know about God, you, earthworm? What the priests told you about him! But God… Go, go, go, there’s no point discussing it with you now… Did you have breakfast?” 

“No, Sir.”

“Awful vice, my dear man! Should I give you breakfast, now, eh?”

“No, Sir. I will not have anything.”

“Ah,” Exclaimed Ciancarella with a yawn. “Ah! The priests, son, the priests have bewildered your brain. They go preaching, right? They say that I do not believe in God? But do you know why? Because I do not give them anything to eat.[8] Well, shut up: they will have something, when they come to consecrate our shrine. I want it to be a beautiful celebration, Spatolino. Why do you look at me in that way? Don’t you believe it? Or do you want to know how this idea came to me? In a dream, son! I had a dream the other night. Now I am certain that the priests will say that God touched my heart. Let them speak, I don’t care at all! So, do we have an agreement, eh? Speak… move… Are you stunned?”

“Yes, Sir,” confessed Spatolino, opening his arms.

Ciancarella, this time, grasped his head with both hands and laughed for a long time.    

“Well,” he then said. “You know how I operate. I do not want any kind of nuisance. I know you are a good worker, and you do things properly and honestly. You do everything, expenses and all the rest, without bothering me. When you finish, we will do the math. The shrine… have you understood how I want it?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“When will you get to work?”

“Tomorrow would work for me.”

“And when can it be finished?”

Spatolino thought for a while.

“Eh,” then he said, “if it needs to be so big, it will take at least…, I don’t know, one month.”

“That's good. Let’s go now together to see the place.”

The land on the other side of the large road belonged to Ciancarella as well. He left it uncultivated, abandoned. He had bought it to avoid having any annoyances there in front of his villa, and he let the shepherds bring their little flocks to graze, as if it were land without an owner. In order to build the shrine it was not necessary, therefore, to ask for anyone’s permission. Once the place was chosen, there, just in front of the gate, the old notary went back into the villa and Spatolino, left alone—fififì… fififì… fififì…— did not stop whistling anymore. Then, he got going. He walked and walked and, almost without realizing it, ended up in front of the door of Don Lagàipa, who was his confessor. He remembered, after having knocked, that the priest had been in bed, sick, for several days. He should not have disturbed him with that morning visit; but the situation was serious, and he entered.

IV

In the midst of the confusion of his two women, his servant and his niece, who did not know how to obey his orders, Don Lagàipa was standing in pants and shirtsleeves, in the middle of the room, cleaning the barrels of a shotgun.

His nose, ample and fleshy, perforated by the smallpox like a sponge, appeared to have become, after his illness, more copious. On one side and the other, diverging almost as if they feared his nose, his shiny, black eyes seemed to want to flee from his exhausted, yellow face.

 “They are ruining me, Spatolino, they are ruining me! The shop boy, a fool, came a little while ago to tell me that my  land in the country has become communal property. Indeed, everybody’s land. The socialists, see?[9] They steal my grapes when they are still unripe, and the prickly pears, everything! Yours is mine, you understand? Yours is mine! I will send him this gun. At their legs! I told him, aim at their legs. A treatment of lead, that is what they need! (Rosina, duck, duck, duck, I told you a little more vinegar and a clean washcloth.) What do you want to say to me, son?”

Spatolino did not know any more where to begin. As soon as the name Ciancarella left his mouth, a fury of bad words followed. At the hint of the construction of the shrine, he saw Don Lagàipa astonished.

“A shrine?”

“Yes, Sir, for the Ecce Homo. I would like to know from your Reverence if I should do it.”

“You ask me? Stupid old donkey, how did you respond to him?”

Spatolino repeated what he had said to Ciancarella and added more, what he had not said, emboldened by the praises of the combative priest.

“Very well! And him? Dog face!”

“He says he had a dream.”

“Swindler! Do not believe him! Swindler! If God had really talked to him in his dreams, God would instead have suggested that he offer a little help to those poor Lattugas whom he does not want to recognize as relatives just because they are devout and loyal to us, while he protects the Montoros, you see?[10] Those atheistic socialists to whom he will leave all of his wealth. Enough. What do you want from me? Build the shrine. If you do not build it, someone else will. In any case, for us, it will always be beneficial that such a sinner show signs of wanting somehow to reconcile with God. Swindler! Dog face!”

Back home, Spatolino designed shrines all day long. Towards evening he went to get the materials, two manual laborers, a boy who could make mortar. The day after, at dawn, he began to work.

V

People who passed along the large, dusty road, whether on foot or on horseback or on wagons, stopped to ask Spatolino what he was making.

“A shrine.”

“Who ordered it?”

And Spatolino, somber, pointed his finger to the sky:

“The Ecce Homo.”

He made no other answer the whole time that the construction went on. People laughed or shrugged their shoulders.

“Right here?” someone, however, asked him while looking toward the gate of the villa.

No one thought that the notary could have ordered that shrine; everybody, instead, ignorant of the fact that piece of land actually belonged to Ciancarella, and being aware of Spatolino’s religious fanaticism, thought that he, either by the authority of the bishop or by a vote of the Catholic Association, was building the shrine there to spite the old loan shark. And they laughed at it.

In the meantime, as if God were really offended by that construction, all manner of misfortune  fell on Spatolino during his work. Indeed, four days of digging were needed before finding the place for the base of the foundation; then there were arguments up there at the quarry over the stone, arguments about the mortar, arguments with the furnace operator; and finally, while putting up the supporting beam to build the arch, the supporting beam fell and it was a miracle that it did not kill the boy who was making the mortar.

At the end, the bomb. Ciancarella, precisely on the day that Spatolino had to show him the fully completed shrine, suffered a stroke, one of those serious ones, and within three hours, he was dead.

No one, then, could get out of Spatolino's head the idea that the notary’s sudden death was the punishment of a scorned God. However, he did not believe, at first, that this divine scorn would likewise necessarily spill over to him, who—even if unwillingly—had volunteered himself to build that damned construction.

He believed it when, going to the Montoros, the notary’s heirs, to receive payment for his work, he heard them respond that they did not know anything about it and they were unwilling to recognize that debt, without the proof of any documentation.

“What!” exclaimed Spatolino. “And the shrine, well, who did I do it for?”

“For the Ecce Homo.”

“Was it my idea?”

“Oh, come on now,” they told him to get rid of him. “We would believe it to show a lack of respect for the memory of our uncle to presume even for a moment that he could have really given you a task so opposed to his way of thinking and feeling. There is no proof of anything. So, what do you want from us? Keep the shrine; and if that doesn’t work for you, file a case at court.”

But right away, why not? Spatolino filed a case at court. Could he possibly lose the case? Could the judges possibly seriously believe that he had built a shrine because it was his idea? And there was the servant as a witness, specifically Ciancarella’s servant who had come to call for Spatolino on his master’s instructions; and there was Don Lagàipa to whom he had gone for advice that same day; there was also his wife to whom he had spoken about it, and the manual laborers who had worked with him for all that time. How could he lose?

He lost, he lost, yes sir. He lost because Ciancarella’s servant, now in the service of the Montoros, testified that yes, he had called on Spatolino at the instruction of his master, blessed soul, but certainly not because his master, blessed soul, had in mind giving Spatolino the job of building that shrine there, but rather because he had heard from the gardener, now dead (what a coincidence), that it was Spatolino who had the intention of building a shrine precisely there, opposite the gate; and his master had wanted to warn him that the land on the other side of the large road was his and therefore he had to be careful not to build some sort of minchioneria there.[11] He added that in fact one day, having told his master, blessed soul, that Spatolino, despite the prohibition, was digging there with three manual laborers, the master, blessed soul, had answered him: “Let him dig, don’t you know that he is crazy? Maybe he is looking for treasure to finish the church of Saint Catherine!”[12] The testimony of Don Lagàipa was totally useless, as he was notoriously the inspiration for many other crazy acts done by Spatolino. What else? The manual laborers themselves testified that they had never seen Ciancarella and that the daily wage had always been given to them by the foreman.

Spatolino ran away from the tribunal hall like a mad man; not really because of the loss of his small assets, thrown away on the construction of that shrine; not so much because of the trial expenses that furthermore he was condemned to pay; but mainly because of the collapse of his faith in divine justice.

“But so then,” he kept saying, “so then is there no longer a God?”

Instigated by Don Lagàipa, he appealed. It was the final downfall. The day that he received news that in the appeals court he had also lost, Spatolino did not speak: with the last money he had left in the pocket, he bought a meter and half of red cotton wool, three old bags, and went back home.

“Make me a tunic!” he told his wife throwing the three bags on her lap.

His wife looked at him as if she had not understood.

“What do you want to do?”

“I told you: make me a tunic… No? I will make it myself.”

In no time at all, he broke down two bags and sewed them together on the long side; he made a slit on the front of the top bag; with the third bag he made the sleeves, and he sewed them around two holes cut in the first bag whose opening he sewed up slightly on either side so that some space was left for the neck. He folded it into a small bundle, took the red cotton wool, and, without saying goodbye to anyone, he left.

About one hour later, across the entire village spread the news that Spatolino, deranged, had taken the place of the statue of Christ at the column, there, in the new shrine, on the large road, in front of Ciancarella’s villa.

“What do you mean ‘he had taken the place of the statue’? What does it mean?”

“Oh yes, him, as Christ, there inside the shrine!”

“Are you being serious?”

“For real!”

And all the people ran to see him inside the shrine, behind the gate, packed in that tunic with the grocer’s logo still printed there, the red cotton wool on his shoulders like a cloak, a crown of thorns on his head and a stick in his hand.

He kept his head down, bent on one side, with his eyes toward the ground. He did not lose his composure at all either on account of the laughter or the whistles or the frenzied screams of the crowd that grew little by little. More than one brat threw some peels at him; many, right under his nose, hurled very cruel insults at him: he, solid, immobile, was like a real statue. He only blinked from time to time.

Nothing was enough to move him, neither the prayers—before and after the curses—of his wife, who had arrived with the other women of the neighborhood, nor the crying of his children. It took the intervention of two guards who, to put an end to that uproar, forced open the little gate of the shrine and placed Spatolino under arrest.

“Leave me alone! Who is more Christ than me?” Spatolino, wiggling out, began to shout. “Don’t you see how they make fun of me and insult me? Who is more Christ than me? Leave me alone! This is my home! I built it myself, with my money and my hands! I sweated my blood here! Leave me alone, Jews!”[13]

But those Jews did not want to leave him alone until nighttime.

“Go home!” the delegate ordered him. “Go home and behave yourself, be careful!”

“Yes, Mr. Pilate,”[14] Spatolino answered him, bowing.

And quietly, he went back to the shrine. Again, there, he dressed as Christ; he spent the entire night there and did not move any more.

They tempted him with hunger; they tempted him with fear, with scorn; in vain. Finally, they left him alone, as a poor madman who was not hurting anyone.[15]

VI

Now there are people who bring him the oil for his lamp; there are people who bring him food and drink; some village women, little by little, begin to call him a saint and go to plead with him to pray for them and their family; another woman brought him a new tunic, less rough, and asked him in return for three numbers to play in the lottery.

The cart drivers who pass by at night on the large road are used to that little lamp that burns in the shrine, and they are happy to see it from afar. They stop there in front of it for quite a while to chat with the poor Christ who smiles benevolently at some of their gags; then they leave. The sound of the carts fades little by little into silence; and the poor Christ falls asleep again or gets down to do his business behind the wall, without thinking any longer in that moment that he is dressed as Christ, with his tunic made from a bag and his cloak of red cotton wool.

Often, however, some crickets, attracted by the lamp, hop on him and wake him with a start. Then, he goes back to praying; but the situation is not uncommon that as he prays, another cricket, the old singing cricket, wakes up again within him. Spatolino removes from his forehead the crown of thorns to which he is already accustomed and—scratching there where the thorns have left a mark—with his eyes distracted, he begins again to whistle:

“Fififì… fififì… fififì…”