cathedral, many of which were carved into the lower halves of columns in the crypt. To this day not one person has noticed nor questioned this opposition to the Catholic faith. They still hold masses there regularly; these faithful haven’t yet realized they praise God upstairs and down below pagan creatures lurk on dark stones. A skull and bones represented one of these I have been told that this was normal, and used in the Catholic Church to represent death, but this is the only oddity that I’ve been able to justify.
When we came to the grotto of Saint Margaret our trip to Oppido, I realized that this grotto was a “church-grotto.”
We had just walked into another peculiar church. Similar frescoes waited behind bars still intact on the cold walls. There they stared back at us, as we marveled in their antiquity. The unusual circumstance cut our visit to a short; millions of gnats were using the frescoed walls as a refuge from the scorching August heat. The frescoes literally turned black in spots and as we stayed looking and shooing them away, we only found that our noses were engulfed with black critters, just then, we made our minds up to flee! Meanwhile, I walked out to have a look at the attached grotto while Rafaello fought the gnat clusters, struggling hard to lock the doors. I had this burning desire to fall on my knees and start digging into the soil with my bare hands— I had just wanted dig and dig, my curiosity was killing me. We could unravel more truth and discover what was underneath the first floor of that solitary structure. I stood in the cove of two rounded circular patterns; it was as if the ceiling itself possessed two huge bulging eyes. There was an entrance as a hole in the ground to the