Los Angeles, 31 March 2024 – Easter Sunday
In my previous post, I wrote about the sad end of the earliest paleochristian basilica in Roman-era Milan, the basilica vetus or – as it later came to be called – the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. It was torn down to make way for an even more splendid – and bigger – cathedral, today’s Duomo of Milan. What is important for my story today, the basilica’s baptistery, the baptistery of San Giovanni alle Fonti, was also torn down. All that remains of it are a few ruins buried under the Duomo’s floor.
One of the most famous people to be baptised in that baptistery was Saint Augustine of Hippo. He was baptised on Easter Sunday 386 C.E., at the age of 32, by Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan. It was Ambrose who had finally persuaded Augustine to become a Christian after a lifetime of resistance. Here, we have a fresco painting of that scene by Benozzo Gozzoli from 1464, to be found in the church of Sant’Agostino in San Gimignano.
It is actually the woman at the back who interests us. She is Saint Monica, Augustine’s mother. She was from Rome’s North African province, from a city which today is in Algeria. Christian from an early age, she was married off young to an older man who was violent and unfaithful. To make matters worse, she had to keep house with her mother-in-law, who was as dissolute as her son. But she bore all her trials and tribulations with Christian fortitude. She had three children who survived infancy, Augustine, Navigius, and Perpetua. She wanted them all to be good Christians, and tried to set them on the path of righteousness. But from an early age, Augustine caused her much anguish. He was wayward, lazy, loose in his morals – at the age of 17, he started living with a woman by whom he had a child but whom never married – and worst of all he joined a heretical sect of Christianity. At some point during all these trials and tribulations, she went to see her local bishop and poured out her heart to him. He consoled her with the words, “the child of those tears shall never perish.” Mark those words, dear readers, we will come back to them.
But Augustine had one thing going for him: he was intelligent. After studying in Carthage, he taught rhetoric there, then moved to Rome to set up a school of rhetoric, and then moved again to Milan when he was offered a professorship in rhetoric by the Imperial court. Monica, now widowed, followed him, pushing him to give up his “concubine” (which he did), get properly married with a woman from a good family (which he nearly did), and – last but not least – become a Christian (which, as we’ve seen, he did, thanks to Saint Ambrose). Having become a Christian, Augustine gave up teaching rhetoric and decided to return home. Monica of course accompanied him, but having finally achieved her aim and with nothing left to live for, she died in Ostia while they were waiting for the ship to take them across to North Africa. We see her death depicted here, in the same church in San Gimignano and by the same artist
Not surprisingly, given her history, Monica is the patron saint of difficult marriages, disappointing children, victims of adultery or unfaithfulness, and of lapsed Catholics (I wonder if my mother ever prayed to Saint Monica à propos of my lapsed status?). From the Middle Ages on, her cult grew and spread throughout Christendom. The story of her crying her eyes out over Augustine became part of the popular stories about her. In fact, one can still buy statues of her in tears; here is a modern example: yours, courtesy of the gift shop of the Norbertine sisters, for a mere $180.
-o0o-
In 1768, as part of its attempts to shore up its claims over the Pacific coast of North America, the Spanish government ordered an expedition to set out from Baja California and lay stake to all of the territories lying between San Diego and Monterey. The expedition set out from San Diego in July 1769 and reached Monterey in October. They actually failed to recognise Monterey (the bay had been previously described by a Spanish navigator sailing up the coast, but they couldn’t match his descriptions with what they were seeing) and kept marching northwards, which led the expedition to its most momentous discovery in November, the huge bay of San Francisco. Somewhat astonishingly, ships from various nations had sailed past the mouth of the bay in the past without ever noticing it – the fog which commonly envelops the area has been given as the reason. Its job done, the expedition marched back to San Diego. The Franciscans who accompanied the expedition used it to lay the groundwork for a string of 21 Missions which they built over the next several decades all the way from San Diego to Sonoma just north of San Francisco. Here’s a photo of the mission church in Santa Barbara.
But it’s not these large-scale events that interest me, it’s a small incident that happened in early August 1769 as the expedition force moved northward. On 2 August, the force arrived at the confluence of the Los Angeles river and the Arroyo Seco, very close to what is now downtown Los Angeles. The next day, the men moved on and camped a mere 4 km from where I’m writing this, at the Tongva village of Kuruvungna. The village was located close to a pair of springs which were sacred to the Tongvta people. The village has vanished, as have all the villages of the First Nations who lived in this part of California, but the springs still exist, now located in the grounds of the University High School on Texas Avenue in Los Angeles.
Juan Crespí, a Franciscan friar who was with the expedition, renamed the springs San Gregorio. But the new name didn’t stick. Someone in the following decades, someone with a poetic bent, saw in those two springs the eyes of Saint Monica with tears continuously welling out of them, and so they became known as the fuentes de las Lágrimas de Santa Mónica, the springs of the Tears of Saint Monica. From there, by a sort of geographical osmosis, the general area around the springs became known as Santa Mónica. So when, in 1839, the Mexican governor of Alta California gave a certain Francisco Sepúlveda II a grant of 33,000 acres of land for a rancho, a grant which included the springs, Señor Sepúlveda called his rancho San Vincente y Santa Mónica (the San Vincente part of the name presumably came from another location on the rancho).
Fast forward another thirty years, to 1872 – California was now a US State – and the Sepúlveda family sold half of the rancho’s lands to a Col. Robert Baker, a businessman with a finger in many pies. In turn, two years later, Col. Baker sold three-quarters of his part of the rancho to another businessman, John Percival Jones, who had made a fortune in silver mining out in Nevada. In 1875, the two agreed to create a new town on part of their land holdings. Again, by geographical osmosis, they decided to call the town Santa Monica (even though the springs are not part of the township). Thus started the town which is now part of the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles. My wife and I are on the bus from Santa Monica as I write this, having just visited the Cayton Children’s Museum with our grandson, where great fun was had by all. The bus is passing street after street of houses, which have all been built over the 33,000 acres of the rancho of Francisco Sepúlveda II. A lot of people have made a lot of money in real estate.
-o0o-
Over its lifetime, the town of Santa Monica has given its name to a variety of other things in the town. Perhaps the best known is the Santa Monica Pier, which has housed an amusement park out on the ocean’s edge since the 1920s.
But it has also given its name to Santa Monica Boulevard, and this is where I will stop these meanderings of mine.
Santa Monica Boulevard is the final, western end, of the mythical Route 66.
Who hasn’t thrilled at the idea of travelling along Route 66? I certainly have. I’ve told my wife that one of these days, once we’ve finished visiting our daughter in LA, we’ll roar off down Route 66 all the way to Chicago. I think we’ll have to do this trip in a Corvette, a red one if possible.
And of course we’ll be listening to Nat King Cole’s “Route 66” on the radio.
Although we’ll do the trip in the opposite direction to Nat King Cole’s lyrics: LA – San Bernadino – Barstow – Kingman – Winona – Flagstaff, Arizona – Gallup, New Mexico – Amarillo – Oklahoma City – Joplin, Missouri – Saint Louis – Chicago
“Get your kicks
On Route sixty-six”
the heart thrills 
