Oh, man, they're not kidding (cilicio)

With Easter coming on, you've got a chance to head up into the Sangre de Cristos and observe the penitants. I don't actually suggest you do that, but you could.

Catholics get all the fun.

Why don't they wear it around the neck. Real tight.

It's true, I see this in a whole new light than I did at age 14 in 1956, or when I was signed up for the convent in '59.

In my researching about one of my favorite subjects, piazzas, I honed in at one point on Bagno Vignoni, a town my hub and I passed in our driving around Tuscany. I got interested in it after that, when I was seriously checking out types of town squares and italian and subscribed to the magazine, Bell'Italia, in italian, which was at that time - it seemed to me - a fairly scholarly publication with fantastic architectural drawings re different periods re different sites. I still have several years worth of those, to me a great magazine. I'd read the articles with dictionary at hand, and grammar book at hand. Heh, their grammar from my pov was impeccable.

It was probably there, but maybe in some other source, that I found out about Catherine of Siena being (said to have been) taken there by her parents so she'd meet a nice nobleman, or something like that, get her out of her doldrums, as it were. She headed for the boiling water part of the pool.... I think Montaigne may have stopped there, and Lorenzo d'Medici, but I'm fuzzier on certainty re those two. If they did, they probably had differing motivations, alleviation of gout in Montaigne's case - I read his travels, but years ago now.