In July the famous Totò is remembered: his life in the Church

in the cemetery of Santa Maria delle Lacrime, connected to the nearby church of the same name, a small plaque was dedicated in honor of Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Angelo Ducas Comneno Porfirogenito Gagliardi de Curtis of Byzantium - Italian noble families love their titles and surnames don't they? - much better known as "Totò", the Italian answer to Charlie Chaplin and perhaps one of the greatest comic actors who have ever lived.

Adopted into a noble Neapolitan family as a young man, Totò gravitated towards the theater. In standard film stories, Totò is classified together with Chaplin, Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton as prototypes of "movie stars" of the early decades of the film industry. He also wrote a fair amount of poetry, and later in life, he also established himself as a dramatic actor with more serious roles.

When Totò died in 1967, three separate funerals had to be held to accommodate the large crowds who wanted to leave. At the third, which is held in the Basilica of Santa Maria della Santità in Naples, only 250.000 people filled the square and the external streets.

Produced by the Italian sculptor Ignazio Colagrossi and executed in bronze, the new image depicts the actor who peers into his grave wearing his bowler hat, along with several lines of his poetry. The ceremony was led by a local pastor, who offered a blessing of the sculpture.

The Italians who grew up in Totò's films - there were 97 of them during his prodigious career, before he died in 1967 - would probably be surprised that there was no memorial so far. For people outside the peninsula, this may simply seem like a development of local interest, characteristic but mostly irrelevant.

Yet, as always in Italy, there is more to history.

Here's the thing: Totò is buried in a Catholic cemetery and the new sculpture in his honor has been blessed by a Catholic priest. During his life, however, Totò had a controversial relationship with the Church, and was often excluded from ecclesiastical authorities as a public sinner.

The reason, as often happens, was his marriage situation.

In 1929, a young Totò met a woman named Liliana Castagnola, a well-known singer who kept company with who's who of Europe of the day. When Totò broke off the relationship in 1930, Castagnola killed himself in despair by ingesting an entire tube of sleeping pills. (Now she is really buried in the same crypt with Totò.)

Perhaps led by the shock of his death, Totò quickly began a relationship with another woman, Diana Bandini Lucchesini Rogliani, in 1931, who was 16 at the time. The two married in 1935, after giving birth to a daughter that Totò decided to call "Liliana" after his first love.

In 1936, Totò wanted to get out of marriage and obtained a civil annulment in Hungary, since at the time they were difficult to obtain in Italy. In 1939 an Italian court recognized the Hungarian divorce decree, effectively ending the marriage as far as the Italian state was concerned.

In 1952, Totò met an actress named Franca Faldini, who was only two years older than her daughter and who would become his partner for the rest of her life. Since the Catholic Church had never signed up to the dissolution of Totò's first marriage, the two were often referred to as "public concubines" and supported as examples of declining moral standards. (This, of course, was in a pre-Amoris Laetitia era, when there was no way of reconciliation for someone in such a situation.)

A popular rumor claimed that Totò and Faldini organized a "fake wedding" in Switzerland in 1954, although in 2016 he went to his grave denying it. Faldini insisted that she and Totò simply did not feel the need for a contract to cement their relationship.

The sense of exile from the Church was apparently painful for Totò, who, according to the story of his daughter, had a true Catholic faith. Two of his films describe him chatting with Sant'Antonio, and Liliana De Curtis claims to have actually carried on similar conversations with Anthony and other saints at home in private.

"He prayed at home because it was not easy for him to go to church with his family as he would have liked, with memory and seriousness," he said, referring in part to the crowd scene that his presence would create, but also to the fact that probably he would have been denied communion if he had presented himself.

According to De Curtis, Totò always carried a copy of the gospels and a wooden rosary wherever he went, and was actively interested in the care of needy neighbors - by the way, he often went to a nearby orphanage to bring toys to children during his last years. Upon his death, his body was laid with a bouquet of flowers and an image of his beloved Saint Anthony of Padua in his hands.

De Curtis said that during the 2000 Jubilee of Artists, he donated Totò's rosary to Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe of Naples, who celebrated a mass in memory of the actor and his family.

To summarize, we are talking about a pop star kept at a distance from the Church during his life, but who is now spending eternity in the embrace of the Church, accompanied by an image in his honor blessed by the Church.

Among other things, it is a reminder of the healing power of the time - which could perhaps invite some perspective as we contemplate our often heated reactions to today's controversies and perceived villains.