in Russia e ritorno 
Nemmeno lontanamente posso pensare di descrivere quello che ho visto in pochi giorni (ed è solo una minima parte della Grande Santa Russia): consiglio spassionatamente di farsi regalare da qualche benefattore un viaggio fin là per vedere di persona!
Provo lo stesso, però, a mettere giù qualche riga..
San Pietroburgo ? Più di cinque milioni di abitanti, attraversata da un fiume (Neva) che prima di sfociare nel Golfo di Finlandia si suddivide in una miriade channels, making the city a grid of one hundred seven hundred islands connected by bridges and culverts ..
capital of the tsars of Russia, a meeting point between East and West, guardian of glorious memories of priceless treasures (just think about what's in Hermitage only) should be the window on Europe but was also the starting point of the October Revolution and the Revolution of 1917.
For a poor priest used to the distances and space planning standards of the Po Valley, the impact has been breathtaking: 
in any of the streets of St. Petersburg there would be great Casale Cremasco including all farms
breathtaking ... including the impact with the atmosphere of Russian ubiquitous smell of kerosene, the exhausts of cars and battered anzianotte, in columns in such a chaotic traffic in Rome did not have to dream either.
Note this (among the many things that I remember) a single experience.
Suburbs anonymous and almost "normal", a rather dreary, cold morning, the church of one of only two Catholic parishes throughout the city, two Italian Franciscans to be followed by other activities out of town (which for them means a hundred plenty of miles out of town!).
The church is rather plain, but seem a church : I enter the door there is a concierge, along a corridor with several doors closed, however, I imagine, in the end will come in some aisle, but instead there is a flight of stairs and above, other scales and other ports .. that the outside is a church, inside a building!
concelebrated Mass in true church, fourth floor, a loft not so great: a few feet above me cruising the central vault is decorated with a simple flat cross of light bulbs. There are the original colors and solemn than any other church in the city, but only a gray uniform temperature, with some painted blue tube that pierces through the walls and smooth. There is the scent of incense but the smell stale and a bit 'unfriendly confined areas and old. There are marble and stucco plaster but smooth and uniform as raw wood floor. But the intensity with which I have experienced that celebration without equal. I can only imagine what happened inside and outside the walls (the brothers have given us some pictures from shudder) what it cost the Catholic and Orthodox Christians to regain their sacred space, made even more sacred by the blood shed in the persecution; what it costs today ...
Too many words: I am not a sociologist and I understand that I can not delve into these issues. But there I understood - more than anywhere else - what it really body broken and blood poured .
Moscow? Almost eleven million inhabitants, sixty theaters, four libraries, one hundred museums ... the hill from the Kremlin, the heart of the city, from which a very broad avenues radiating pointing in every direction in turn connected by a ring road, almost perfect circle composed of sixteen lanes in the center, fifteen subway lines and stops ... I do not know how many so-called skyscrapers Lenin, each of which (800 apartments) can hold all the people of St. Benedict ...
Everything in Moscow is so dilated that I can not find adequate words to describe what I can remember.
The silence on the other hand is the only way to taste the holy and Orthodox Russia, and that of the golden domes of the monasteries, icons, ancient and beautiful
kept in museums or iconostasis. Describe how to wonder, admiration and bewilderment it all together? (Ah, the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin ...!)
experience is disturbing, in size and magnificence of the past regime, sometimes jarring contrasts that pass before my eyes ... not for nothing that the reason most of us was whistled for the film "Comrade Don Camillo" and the joke reflected the most commonly used words and Peppone of his faced with the "point x of the program, the next is ..".
But it is a must try!
